Quotes about Empowerment

Black men are not so passive that they must have Black women speak for them. Even my fourteen-year-old son knows that. Black men themselves must examine and articulate their own desires and positions and stand by the conclusions thereof. No point is served by a Black male professional who merely whines at the absence of his viewpoint in Black women's work. Oppressors always expect the oppressed to extend to them the understanding so lacking in themselves.

No woman is responsible for altering the psyche of her oppressor, even when that psyche is embodied in another woman.

But the erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation, nor succumb to the belief that sensation is enough.

You always learn from observing. You have to pick things up nonverbally because people will never tell you what you're supposed to know. You have to get it for yourself: whatever it is that you need in order to survive. You become strong by doing the things you need to be strong for. This is the way genuine learning takes place.

in touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept the powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.

To acknowledge privilege is the first step in making it available for wider use.

You become strong by doing the things you need to be strong for.

I realize that if wait until I am no longer afraid to act, write, speak, be, I'll be sending messages on a Ouija board, cryptic complaints from the other side.

it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence.

This jugular vein psychology is based on the fallacy that your assertion or affirmation of self is an attack upon my self—or that my defining myself will somehow prevent or retard your self-definition. The supposition that one sex needs the other's acquiescence in order to exist prevents both from moving together as self-defined persons towards a common goal.

The language by which we have been taught to dismiss ourselves and our feelings as suspect is the same language we use to dismiss and suspect each other.

But as Adrienne Rich pointed out in a recent talk, white feminists have educated themselves about such an enormous amount over the past ten years, how come you haven't also educated yourselves about Black women and the differences between us — white and Black — when it is key to our survival as a movement?