Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Crossing Press Feminist Series)

In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.

How do you deal with things you believe, live them not as theory, not even as emotion, but right on the line of action and effect and change?

This internal requirement toward excellence which we learn from the erotic must not be misconstrued as demanding the impossible from ourselves nor from others. Such a demand incapacitates everyone in the process.

So the question arises in my mind, Mary, do you ever really read the work of Black women? Did you ever read my words, or did you merely finger through them for quotations which you thought might valuably support an already conceived idea concerning some old and distorted connection between us? This is not a rhetorical question.

Revolution is not a one-time event. It is becoming always vigilant for the smallest opportunity to make a genuine change in established, outgrown responses;

This position reflects acute fright or a faulty reasoning, for once again it ascribes false power to difference.

Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.

In a society where the good is defined in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, there must always be some group of people who, through systematized oppression, can be made to feel surplus, to occupy the place of the dehumanized inferior.

Insight must illuminate the particulars of our lives: who labors to make the bread we waste, or the energy it takes to make nuclear poisons which will not biodegrade for one thousand years; or who goes blind assembling the microtransistors in our inexpensive calculators?