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Any Black Person Who Clings To The Misguided Notion That White People Represent The Embodiment Of All That Is Evil And Black People All That Is Good Remains Wedded To The Very Logic Of Western Metaphysical Dualism That Is The Heart Of Racist Binary Thinking. Such Thinking Is Not Liberatory. Like The Racist Educational Ideology It Mirrors And Imitates, It Invites A Closing Of The Mind.

-Bell Hooks

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Any Black Person Who

Bell Hooks

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Any Black Person Who Clings To The Misguided Notion That White People Represent The Embodiment Of All That Is Evil And Black People All That Is Good Remains Wedded To The Very Logic Of Western Metaphysical Dualism That Is The Heart Of Racist Binary Thinking. Such Thinking Is Not Liberatory. Like The Racist Educational Ideology It Mirrors And Imitates, It Invites A Closing Of The Mind.

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Intimate Relationships

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Love Relationship

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What's So Amazing About This Historical Moment Is That It Is Bringing Class To The Fore And We Have To Think About The Nature Of Work And Hierarchy.

Love Is An Action, Never Simply A Feeling.

True Resistance Begins With People Confronting Pain... And Wanting To Do Something To Change It.

If I Were Really Asked To Define Myself, I Wouldn’t Start With Race; I Wouldn’t Start With Blackness; I Wouldn’t Start With Gender; I Wouldn’t Start With Feminism. I Would Start With Stripping Down To What Fundamentally Informs My Life, Which Is That I’m A Seeker On The Path. I Think Of Feminism, And I Think Of Anti-racist Struggles As Part Of It. But Where I Stand Spiritually Is, Steadfastly, On A Path About Love.

Imagine Living In A World Where There Is No Domination, Where Females And Males Are Not Alike Or Even Always Equal, But Where A Vision Of Mutuality Is The Ethos Shaping Our Interaction.

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Like Many White Liberals, Ken Sees The Whiteness Of His Social Life As More An Accident Of Circumstance Than A Choice. He Would Welcome Greater Diversity In The Neighbourhood. However, He Does Not Consciously Do Enough Work Either In His Social Life Or In The Larger Community To Make That Diversity Possible.

I Feel That I Have Many Real Students Whom I Have Not Met. Many Are In Cloisters And They Never Get Out. Others Are In Prison. But In Many Cases They Practice The Teachings Much Better Than Those Who Meet Me Every Day.

Even The Most Subjected Person Has Moments Of Rage And Resentment So Intense That They Respond, They Act Against. There Is An Inner Uprising That Leads To Rebellion, However Short- Lived. It May Be Only Momentary But It Takes Place. That Space Within Oneself Where Resistance Is Possible Remains.

We Have To Look At The Substance Of Something Rather Than The Shadow.

If Any Female Feels She Need Anything Beyond Herself To Legitimate And Validate Her Existence, She Is Already Giving Away Her Power To Be Self-defining, Her Agency.

It Is Poetry That Changes Everything.

I Entered The Classroom With The Conviction That It Was Crucial For Me And Every Other Student To Be An Active Participant, Not A Passive Consumer...education As The Practice Of Freedom.... Education That Connects The Will To Know With The Will To Become. Learning Is A Place Where Paradise Can Be Created.

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Popular Escapist Fiction Enchants Adult Readers Without Challenging Them To Be Educated For Critical Consciousness.

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The Challenge These Days, Is To Be Somewhere, To Belong To Some Particular Place, Invest Oneself In It, Draw Strength And Courage From It, To Dwell In A Community.

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In Our Young Minds Houses Belonged To Women Were Their Special Domain, Not As Property, But As Places Where All That Truly Mattered In Life Took Place - The Warmth And Comfort Of Shelter, The Feeding Of Our Bodies, The Nurturing Of Our Souls. There We Learned Dignity, Integrity Of Being; There We Learned To Have Faith. The Folks Who Made This Life Possible, Who Were Our Primary Guides And Teachers, Were Black Women.

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I Think Stress Is Anything Going On In Our Lives That Impinges On Our Capacity To Have Optimum Well Being.

Sadly, Anarchy Has Gotten Such A Bad Name. We Don't Really See Much Evidence Of It Because People Associate It With Reckless Abandon.

The Crisis Facing Men Is Not The Crisis Of Masculinity, It Is The Crisis Of Patriarchal Masculinity. Until We Make This Distinction Clear, Men Will Continue To Fear That Any Critique Of Patriarchy Represents A Threat.

To The Extent That We Live In A Postmodern World And It Shapes The Concrete Circumstances Of Our Daily Lives, I Would Say Postmodernism Affects My Work Or Influences My Work.

Feminism Is A Movement To End Sexism, Sexist Exploitation, And Oppression.

The Time Has Come To Tell The Truth. Again. There Is No Love Without Justice. Men And Women Who Cannot Be Just Deny Themselves And Everyone They Choose To Be Intimate With The Freedom To Know Mutual Love. If We Remain Unable To Imagine A World Where Love Can Be Recognized As A Unifying Principle That Can Lead Us To Seek And Use Power Wisely, Then We Will Remain Wedded To A Culture Of Domination That Requires Us To Choose Power Over Love.

The Notion That Black Folks Have Nothing To Learn From Scholarship That May Reflect Racial Or Racist Biases Is Dangerous. It Promotes Closed-mindedness And A Narrow Understanding Of Knowledge To Hold That "race" Is Such An Overwhelming Concept That It Negates The Validity Of Any Insights Contained In A Work That May Have Some Racist Or Sexist Aspects.

The Moment We Choose To Love We Begin To Move Against Domination, Against Oppression. The Moment We Choose To Love We Begin To Move Towards Freedom, To Act In Ways That Liberate Ourselves And Others.

Schools For Love Do Not Exist. Everyone Assumes That We Will Know How To Love Instinctively. Despite Overwhelming Evidence To The Contrary, We Still Accept That The Family Is The Primary School For Love. Those Of Us Who Do Not Learn How To Love Among Family Are Expected To Experience Love In Romantic Relationships. However This Love Often Eludes Us.

Couples Who Rarely Or Never Have Sex Can Know Lifelong Love.

Wars Make People Rich - And They Make A Lot Of People Poor, And They Take A Lot Of People's Lives Away From Them.

When We Choose To Love, We Choose To Move Against Fear, Against Alienation And Separation. The Choice To Love Is A Choice To Connect, To Find Ourselves In The Other.

I Think Inequality Is In Our Minds. I Think This Is What We Learn Through Practice... The Bridge Of Illusion Must Be Shattered In Order For A Real Bridge To Be Constructed. One Of The Things We Learn Is That Inequality Is An Illusion.

When Women And Men Understand That Working To Eradicate Patriarchal Domination Is A Struggle Rooted In The Longing To Make A World Where Everyone Can Live Fully And Freely, Then We Know Our Work To Be A Gesture Of Love. Let Us Draw Upon That Love To Heighten Our Awareness, Deepen Our Compassion, Intensify Our Courage And Strengthen Our Commitment.

Feminist Politics Aims To End Domination, To Free Us To Be Who We Are - To Live Lives Where We Love Justice, Where We Can Live In Peace. Feminism Is For Everybody.

Beloved Community Is Formed Not By The Eradication Of Difference But By Its Affirmation, By Each Of Us Claiming The Identities And Cultural Legacies That Shape Who We Are And How We Live In The World.

Beloved Community

To Be Changed By Ideas Was Pure Pleasure. But To Learn Ideas That Ran Counter To Values And Beliefs Learned At Home Was To Place Oneself At Risk, To Enter The Danger Zone. Home Was The Place Where I Was Forced To Conform To Someone Else’s Image Of Who And What I Should Be. School Was The Place Where I Could Forget That Self And, Through Ideas, Reinvent Myself.

None Of Us Should Be Ashamed To Speak Of Our Class Power Or Lack Of It. Overcoming Fear, Even The Fear Of Being Immodest, And Acting Courageously To Bring Issues Of Class- Especially Radical Standpoints – Into The Discourse Of Blackness Is A Gesture Of Militant Defiance, One That Runs Counter To Bourgeois Insistence That We Think Of “money” In Particular And Class In General As Private Matters.

Without Justice There Can Be No Love.

To Begin By Always Thinking Of Love As An Action Rather Than A Feeling Is One Way In Which Anyone Using The Word In This Manner Automatically Assumes Accountability And Responsibility.

Yesterday I Was Thinking About The Whole Idea Of Genius And Creative People, And The Notion That If You Create Some Magical Art, Somehow That Exempts You From Having To Pay Attention To The Small Things.

Being Oppressed Means The Absence Of Choices

Readers Forget That One Can Critique Yet Still Admire.

Part Of The Racialized Sexism Wants Everyone To Think That A 15-year Old Mexican Is Not A Girl, She’s A Woman. We Know She’s A Girl. We Can Never Emphasize This Enough, Because This Is The Fate Of Colored Girls Globally Right Now: The Denial Of Their Girlhood, The Denial Of Their Childhood, And The Constant State Of Risk And Danger They Are Living In.

Given The Way Universities Work To Reinforce And Perpetuate The Status Quo, The Way Knowledge Is Offered As Commodity, Women's Studies Can Easily Become The Place Where Revolutionary Feminist Thought And Feminist Activism Are Submerged Or Made Secondary To The Goals Of Academic Careerism

The Most Basic Activism We Can Have In Our Lives Is To Live Consciously In A Nation Living In Fantasies. Living Consciously Is Living With A Core Of Healthy Self-esteem. You Will Face Reality, You Will Not Delude Yourself.

What We Do Is More Important Than What We Say Or What We Say We Believe.

Any Black Person Who Clings To The Misguided Notion That White People Represent The Embodiment Of All That Is Evil And Black People All That Is Good Remains Wedded To The Very Logic Of Western Metaphysical Dualism That Is The Heart Of Racist Binary Thinking. Such Thinking Is Not Liberatory. Like The Racist Educational Ideology It Mirrors And Imitates, It Invites A Closing Of The Mind.

In An Ideal World We Would All Learn In Childhood To Love Ourselves. We Would Grow, Being Secure In Our Worth And Value, Spreading Love Wherever We Went, Letting Our Light Shine. If We Did Not Learn Self-love In Our Youth, There Is Still Hope. The Light Of Love Is Always In Us, No Matter How Cold The Flame. It Is Always Present, Waiting For The Spark To Ignite, Waiting For The Heart To Awaken And Call Us Back To The First Memory Of Being The Life Force Inside A Dark Place Waiting To Be Born - Waiting To See The Light.

Contrary To What We May Have Been Taught To Think, Unnecessary And Unchosen Suffering Wounds Us But Need Not Scar Us For Life. It Does Mark Us. What We Allow The Mark Of Our Suffering To Become Is In Our Own Hands.

All Our Silences In The Face Of Racist Assault Are Acts Of Complicity.

People With Healthy Self-esteem Do Not Need To Create Pretend Identities.

Within A Capitalist Consumer Society, The Cult Of Personality Has The Power To Subsume Ideas, To Make The Person, The Personality Into The Product And Not The Work Itself.

Cult Of Personality

While It Has Become “cool” For White Folks To Hang Out With Black People And Express Pleasure In Black Culture, Most White People Do Not Feel That This Pleasure Should Be Linked To Unlearning Racism.

Radical Militant Feminist Believes That Women Of Color And Black Women In Particular Have Written The Cutting Edge Theory And Really Were The Individuals Who Exploded Feminist Theory Into The Directions That Has Made It More Powerful. So I See Us As The Leaders Not Just Of Black People And Black Women In Terms Of Feminism But In Terms Of The Movement As A Whole.

My Focus Has Always Been On The Work - That Work Being Critical Thinking And Writing. I Am Always Doing That. That's Where I Am, Wherever I Am. Critical Thinking And Writing As My Heartbeat.

I Grew Up In The Midst Of Poverty But Every Black Kid That I Knew Could Read And Write. We Have To Talk About The Fact That We Cannot Educate For Critical Consciousness If We Have A Group Of People Who Cannot Access Fanon, Cabral, Or Audre Lorde Because They Can’t Read Or Write. How Did Malcolm X Radicalize His Consciousness? He Did It Through Books. If You Deprive Working-class And Poor Black People Of Access To Reading And Writing, You Are Making Them That Much Farther Removed From Being A Class That Can Engage In Revolutionary Resistance.

Professors Rarely Speak Of The Place Of Eros Or The Erotic In Our Classrooms. Trained In The Philosophical Context Of Western Metaphysical Dualism, Many Of Us Have Accepted The Notion That There Is A Split Between The Body And The Mind. Believing This, Individuals Enter The Classroom To Teach As Though Only The Mind Is Present, And Not The Body.

As More People Of Color Raise Our Consciousness And Refuse To Be Pitted Against One Another, The Forces Of Neo-colonial White Supremacist Domination Must Work Harder To Divide And Conquer.

Dare To Look At The Intersectionalities.

Intersectionality

If We Are Ever To Construct A Feminist Movement That Is Not Based On The Premise That Men And Women Are Always At War With One Another, Then We Must Be Willing To Acknowledge The Appropriateness Of Complex Critical Responses To Writing By Men Even If It Is Sexist. Clearly Women Can Learn From Writers Whose Work Is Sexist, Even Be Inspired By It, Because Sexism May Be Simply One Dimension Of That Work. Concurrently Fiercely Critiquing The Sexism Does Not Mean That One Does Not Value The Work.

Had Middle Class Black Women Begun A Movement In Which They Had Labeled Themselves "oppressed," No One Would Have Taken Them Seriously.

African American

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