Black Feminist Quotes

Through Miss Behave I am attempting to reclaim my voice one word at a time and live my truth to the best of my ability ~ Malebo Sephodi

And, where white women are slapped down for daring to be sexual, women of color are slapped down for daring to be anything else: Over the course of her career, Nicki Minaj has spoken about abortion rights, the need for female musicians to write their own work, the difficulty of being an assertive woman in a business setting, and the obstacles black women face in being recognized as creative forces. She is the best-selling female rapper of all time, and her success had done a tremendous amount to awaken critical and commercial interest in female voices within a genre that was largely seen (fairly or unfairly) as a man's game before she showed up. Nicki Minaj has done everything in her power to frame herself as a thoughtful black feminist voice, up to and including staging public readings of Maya Angelou poems. And yet, approximately 89 percent of Nicki Minaj's press coverage, outside of the feminist blogosphere, tends to focus on: her butt. ~ Sady Doyle

Misbehaviour does not require a cape, shades or a bazooka. It is in decisions we make that challenge the notions adopted to keep us well behaved ~ Malebo Sephodi

Knowing that something is wrong without actively trying to fix it is worse than ignorant neutrality. ~ Anna Malaika Nti-Asare

A black feminist perspective has no use for ranking oppressions, but instead demonstrates the simultaneity of oppressions as they affect Third World women's lives". ~ Barbara Smith

I am a Black Feminist. I mean I recognize that my power as well as my primary oppressions come as a result of my blackness as well as my womaness, and therefore my struggles on both of these fronts are inseparable. ~ Audre Lorde

I suggest that Black feminist thought consists of specialised knowledge created by African-American women which clarifies a standpoint of and for Black women. In other words, Black feminist thought encompasses theoretical interpretations of Black women's reality by those who live it. ~ Patricia Hill Collins

Look into any man's heart you please, and you will always find, in every one, at least one black spot which he has to keep concealed. ~ Henrik Ibsen

We've gone through the names - Negro, African American, African, Black. For me that's an indication of a people still trying to find their identity. Who determines what is black? ~ Spike Lee

Nothing says 'classy' like posting bond for your girlfriend so you can escort her to a black-tie dinner. ~ Linda Morris

Peasant families were close-knit. However, as the Black Death swept through village after village, it became difficult for young peasants to find spouses. The fragmentation of families by illness, coupled with new economic mobility, led many young men to move to the city.

"In England, many noblemen encouraged this migration by converting their land to raising livestock rather than farming, evicting their tenants and closing down entire villages ...

"...Sometimes a village was abandoned because the surrounding soils were depleted and ceased to yield good crops. In other locations, the decline in populations caused by the Black Death lowered food prices and made farming unprofitable.

"But whatever the reason, once a village was abandoned, most of its peasants headed for the city to try to make their living. And as migration increased and the cities grew in size and importance, many noblemen decided to move their too ... however, in the city, nobles discovered that their relationship with the lower classes had changed. Men had opportunities for advancement regardless of social class; the manorial system did not exist in urban centers of growth and progress. ~ Patricia D. Netzley

In politics it commonly takes a superior woman to overcome the handicap of traditional prejudice. ~ Bertha Knight Landes

I would love for everyone to be a feminist, but I have to respect people's choices. If you don't want to be a feminist and don't want to claim feminism, that's entirely your right. ~ Roxane Gay

Unlike some mainland black groups, Tasmanian Aborigines now have no traditional tribal culture left. It was taken from them with great violence and great rapidity. ~ Richard Flanagan

Jazz music hashaunted America for seventy years.It has tempted us out of our lily-white reserve with its black promise of untrammeled joy. ~ John Clellon Holmes

The vision of the left, full of envy and resentment, takes its worst toll on those at the bottom - whether black or white - who find in that paranoid vision an excuse for counterproductive and ultimately self-destructive attitudes and behavior. ~ Thomas Sowell

I'm not at all against white people adopting black children, because we're all human beings who need to give love and be nurtured in safety, but I do think it's better to be adopted by blacks. ~ Kola Boof

A lot of people refuse to do things because they don't want to go naked, don't want to go without guarantee. But that's what's got to happen. You go naked until you die ~ Nikki Giovanni

today i am going to move
and leave nothing behind.
which is to say, i am going
to unwind like porcelain stars.
which is to say, i will be my own miracle.
which is to say, this day will be endless.
which is to say, i have given up
on black and white. ~ Alison Malee

"Black culture" is ready for whatever. I sense some momentum and excitement around black artists (especially in comedy, which is where most of my own art resides), really pushing the bounds of what has generally been expected as black. I don't think it's a revolution so much as an exposure of what has always been there, and now that the production and distribution means are more accessible, people can more easily find each other. ~ Baratunde Thurston

MY BLACK ME

My father fed me
Invisible Man,
Native Son,
No Longer at Ease,
Black Man's Burden,
and the more I read,
the madder I got,
and I already
had reason
to scream,
but my father
kept me dreaming
of what words
I might bring
to the world. ~ Nikki Grimes

Mostly, they were ashamed of us. Our floppy straw hats and threadbare clothes. Our heavy accents. Every sing oh righ? Our cracked, callused palms. Our deeply lined faces black from years of picking peaches and staking grape plants in the sun. They longed for real fathers with briefcases who went to work in a suit and tie and only mowed the grass on Sundays. They wanted different and better mothers who did not look so worn out. Can't you put on a little lipstick? They dreaded rainy days in the country when we came to pick them up after school in our battered old farm trucks. They never invited over friends to our crowded homes in J-town. We live like beggars. They would not be seen with us at the temple on the Emperor's birthday. They would not celebrate the annual Freeing of the Insects with us at the end of summer in the park. They refused to join hands and dance with us in the streets on the Festival of the Autumnal Equinox. They laughed at us
whenever we insisted that they bow to us first thing in the morning and with each passing day they seemed to slip further and further from our grasp. ~ Julie Otsuka

If anything has made men more effeminate in the past half-century, it's been the running feminist critique of masculinity. ~ Jack Donovan

What if Eminem was black? would he have sold five mil.
Or would he be 1 out of 5 million rappers with no deal? ~ Fredro Starr

There had been no moments when she could differentiate and say: Then, at such a moment, I love him; and again, Then, at such another, I loved him not. The stress had been constant. her love for him had been a straight black line drawn right through her life. It had hurt her, it had damaged her, it had diminished her, but she had been unable to curve away from it. ~ Vita Sackville-West

As Amanda Litman... has written, 'Instead of resisting (anger) or avoiding it, let your fury push you to action. Embrace your anger and put it to work. ~ Rebecca Traister

She thought that she had been seeking a light distraction. But when she heard the clang of metal on metal and saw Arin scraping a shaft of steel across the anvil with one set of tools and beating at it with another, Kestrel knew she had come to the wrong place.
"Yes?" he said, keeping his back to her. His workshirt was soaked through with sweat. His hands were sooty. He left the blade of the sword to cool on the anvil and moved to place another, shorter length of metal on the fire, which lined his profile with unsteady light.
She willed her voice to be her own. "I thought we could play a game."
His dark brows drew together.
"Of Bite and Sting," Kestrel said. More firmly, she added, "You implied you know how to play."
He used tongs to stoke the fire. "I did."
"You implied that you could beat me."
"I implied that there was no reason a Valorian would want to play with a Herrani."
"No, you worded things carefully so that what you said could be interpreted that way. But that isn't what you meant."
He faced her then, arms folded across his chest. "I have no time for games." The tips of his fingers had black rings of charcoal dust buried under the nail and into the cuticle. "I have work to do."
"Not if I say you don't."
He turned away. "I like to finish what I start."
She meant to leave. She meant to leave him to the noise and heat. She meant to say nothing more. Instead, Kestrel found herself issuing a challenge. "You are ~ Marie Rutkoski

Choices of right or wrong are not presented to you in black and white. If they were, I'm sure most people would choose white. ~ Bethany McLean

This is Sailor Supergirl," George says. "She knows all about black holes. ~ Huntley Fitzpatrick

Forgiveness. It's one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself, to forgive. Forgive everybody. You are relieved of carrying that burden of resentment. You really are lighter. You feel lighter. You just drop that. ~ Maya Angelou

Something happened and I confirmed it. Or I did not write it. There is no seems. I did not say the attack was anti-white. I describe the attackers as a mob of black people as part of a pattern of such attacks. ~ Colin Flaherty

Night goes away, a black bull
body heavy with mourning and fear and mystery
it has been bellowing horribly, monstrously,
in genuine fear of all the dead;
and day arrives, a young child
who wants trust, and love, and jokes,
a child who somewhere
far away, in secret places
where what ends meets what is starting,
has been playing a moment
on some meadow or other
of light and darkness
with the bull who is running away ... ~ Juan Ramon Jimenez

My mother's dying soaked down through the carpet, through the wood. When it was done with the bedroom, it took over our house, and then it moved on to me. It soaked through my hair and skin and bone, through my skull and deep into my brain. Now it's staining everything, leaking the blackest black into the rest of the world. ~ Emily X.R. Pan

The Desire To Paint"

Unhappy perhaps is the man, but happy the artist, who is torn with this desire.
I burn to paint a certain woman who has appeared to me so rarely, and so swiftly fled away, like some beautiful, regrettable thing the traveller must leave behind him in the night. It is already long since I saw her.

She is beautiful, and more than beautiful: she is overpowering. The colour black preponderates in her; all that she inspires is nocturnal and profound.

Her eyes are two caverns where mystery vaguely stirs and gleams; her glance illuminates like a ray of light; it is an explosion in the darkness.

I would compare her to a black sun if one could conceive of a dark star overthrowing light and happiness.

But it is the moon that she makes one dream of most readily; the moon, who has without doubt touched her with her own influence; not the white moon of the idylls, who resembles a cold bride, but the sinister and intoxicating moon suspended in the depths of a stormy night, among the driven clouds; not the discreet peaceful moon who visits the dreams of pure men, but the moon torn from the sky, conquered and revolted, that the witches of Thessaly hardly constrain to dance upon the terrified grass.

Her small brow is the habitation of a tenacious will and the love of prey. And below this inquiet face, whose mobile nostrils breathe in the unknown and the impossible, glitters, with an unspeakable grace, t ~ Charles Baudelaire

And don't forget: Elvendork! It's unisex! - James Potter ~ J.K. Rowling

For what is done or learned by one class of women becomes, by virtue of their common womanhood, the property of all women. ~ Elizabeth Blackwell

But what has happened is that emotional evolution has not caught up with our economics. We are still haunted by the outdated myth that women need men. ~ Maggie Young

Those Garveyites I knew could never understand why I liked them but would never follow them, and I pitied them too much to tell them that they could never achieve their goal, that Africa was owned by the imperial powers of Europe, that their lives were alien to the mores of the natives of Africa, that they were people of the West and would for ever be so until they either merged with the West or perished. ~ Richard Wright

Now the moon of the Aztecs is at the zenith, and all the world lies still. Full and white, the white of bones, the white of a skull; blistering the center of the sky well with its throbbing, not touching it on any side. Now the patio is a piebald place of black and white, burning in the downward-teeming light. Not a leaf moves, not a petal falls, in this fierce amalgam. ("The Moon Of Montezuma") ~ Cornell Woolrich

I have low self-esteem and I always have. Guys always cheated on me with women who were European-looking. You know, the long-hair type. Really beautiful women that left me thinking, 'How I can I compete with that?' Being a regular black girl wasn't good enough. ~ Lil' Kim

Just as I got to the door, Dolf opened it, read my shirt, and promptly burst out laughing. "You have got to tell me where you get those."
Smirking, I shook my head. "It's a well-guarded secret."
Today I wore a black shirt with white writing: Be careful when you follow the masses…. Sometimes the M is silent. "Masses" was in light blue, as was the letter M, to draw attention to the play on words. I'd been known to follow an ass or two in my day. Those days were over now. ~ M.A. Church

I had read them and congratulated myself for being black, as if I had chosen to be, because black women were feminists before there was a name for it. ~ Carleen Brice

In mid-September Soufan talked to an al-Qaeda prisoner named Ramzi Binalshibh, who was chained naked to the floor in a CIA black prison at the Bagram air base outside Kabul. He said he was starting to obtain "valuable actionable intelligence" before CIA officers ordered him to stop talking forty-five minutes later. On September 17, they flew their prisoner to a second black site in Morocco, then on to Poland; under extreme duress he described plots to crash airplanes into Heathrow Airport and Canary Wharf in London. He was also diagnosed as a schizophrenic. ~ Tim Weiner

He heard an eery, dry whispering whose source and distance he could not at once determine. Sometimes it seemed at his very ear, and then it ebbed away as if sinking into profound subterranean vaults. But the sound, though variable in this manner, never ceased entirely; and it seemed to shape itself into words that the listener almost understood: words that were fraught with the hopeless sorrow of a dead man who had sinned long ago, and had repented his sin through black sepulchral ages. ~ Clark Ashton Smith

You have to understand that not everything in the world is black and white. ~ Cat Clarke

I've dated interracially a lot. I grew up in Harlem, so I've dated Latins, Dominican, Guyanese, Cuban, black, white. ~ Mekhi Phifer

It's fair to say that white America wouldn't have elected an African-American president without the integrating effect of black music - from Louis Armstrong to hip-hop - and black drama and fiction, commercial as much as 'serious.' ~ Joe Haldeman

You can get it in any color, as long as it is black ~ Henry Ford

There are bands that I got into when I was 15, when I was mad at my dad and just wanted to be different. I don't think I'd give those bands half a chance now. But I hold some kind of nostalgia for them that I won't let go. Bands like Minor Threat and Black Flag. ~ Pete Wentz

I wouldn't want to be labelled unless it was something much broader and inclusive such as an ecological artist or a visionary artist, but there's a constraint in the definition of a feminist artist, you're an artist and you're a feminist. ~ Carolee Schneemann

Darkness has been and shall ever be. Long after the substances that fuel heat and light have burned away - giving out at the end of a brief, fragile course - an everlasting night shall reign. Imlod Nir considered this as he watched the last tendrils of smoke from the evening's fire stream lazily into the night air. They mingled with black leaves under a low, moonlit canopy before melding into the consuming void. ~ John William

Black women have always found that in the social order of things we're the least likely to be believed
by anyone. ~ Joycelyn Elders