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I get so tired of people acting like, you know, black men and women never help each other, never support each other.
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No other group in America has so had their identity socialized out of existence as have black women... When black people are talked about the focus tends to be on black men; and when women are talked about the focus tends to be on white women.
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In general, the mass media tell us that black people are not loving, that our lives are so fraught with violence and aggression that we have no time to love.
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Class is more than money. Class is also about knowledge.
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I have created a life style that supports contemplation, service to words.
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I think the number one thing Black women and all Black people should be paying attention to is our health.
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I've written 18 books, mostly dealing with issues of social justice, ending racism, feminism, and cultural criticism.
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Using pseudonyms was such a part of the early feminist movement. We didn't want to have this star system. We wanted attention on the ideas, not the persona of the writer.
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Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books.
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For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?
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I can be standing in Barneys with my coat and purse and my selections, and some white woman will say, 'Can you get this in my size?' What she sees is a black woman, and her service button goes off.
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I think the Women's movement has had a major impact on everybody's lives in our nation and in the world as a whole.
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Any society based on domination supports and condones violence.
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I have always been a flirt. My mother says whe I was a child, I used to stand outside the house and just smile at everyone who walked by. Like, 'Please take me with you!'
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The political core of any movement for freedom in the society has to have the political imperative to protect free speech.
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All over the world, young males and females, schooled in the art of patriarchal thinking, are building an identity on a foundation that sees the will to do violence as the essential way to assert being.
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What had begun as a movement to free all black people from racist oppression became a movement with its primary goal the establishment of black male patriarchy.
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I don't think you can hate anything that you know intimately. There is no fine line separating love from hate because there's a deep chasm separating love from hate.
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The institutionalization of Black Studies, Feminist Studies, all of these things, led to a sense that the struggle was over for a lot of people and that one did not have to continue the personal consciousness-raising and changing of one's viewpoint.
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I think I was always obsessed with esthetics.
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Every terrorist regime in the world uses isolation to break people's spirits.
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Some people act as though art that is for a mass audience is not good art, and I think this has been a very negative thing. I know that I have wanted very much to write books that are accessible to the widest audience possible.
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The people I love, I'm committed to loving for the rest of my life.
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I told my parents when I was 12 I'd be a writer.