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

What other creature in the world besides the Black woman has had to build the knowledge of so much hatred into her survival and keep going?

I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.

We share a common interest, survival, and it cannot be pursued in isolation from others simply because their differences make us uncomfortable.

For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.

But pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.

The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us — the poet — whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.

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.

The oppression of women knows no ethnic nor racial boundaries, true, but that does not mean it is identical within those differences.

I work for a time when women with women, women with men, men with men, all share the work of a world that does not barter bread or self for obedience, nor beauty, nor love.