Quotes About Diversity

I think we have to own the fears that we have of each other, and then, in some practical way, some daily way, figure out how to see people differently than the way we were brought up to.

All womens not alike, Tobias, she say. Believe it or not. Oh, I believe it, he say. Just can't prove it to the world.

When I offered the word Womanism many years ago, it was to give us a tool to use, as feminist women of color, in times like these. These are the moments we can see clearly, and must honor devotedly, our singular path as women of color in the United States. We are not white women and this truth has been ground into us for centuries, often in brutal ways.

When Toni Morrison said she writes the kind of books she wants to read, she was acknowledging the fact that in a society in which "accepted literature" is so often sexist and racist and otherwise irrelevant or offensive to so many lives, she must do the work of two. She must be her own model as well as the artist attending, creating, learning from, realizing the model, which is to say, herself.

Shug Avery sat up in bed a little today. I wash and comb out her hair. She got the nottiest, shortest, kinkiest hair I ever saw, and I loves every strand of it.

She saw poetry where other writers merely saw failure to cope with English.

What is always needed in the appreciation of art, or life, is the larger perspective. Connections made, or at least attempted, where none existed before, the straining to encompass in one's glance at the varied world the common thread, the unifying theme through immense diversity, a fearlessness of growth, of search, of looking, that enlarges the private and the public world. And yet, in our particular society, it is the narrowed and narrowing view of life that often wins

I believe that the truth of any subject only comes when all sides of the story are put together.

Let him hear me. If [god] ever listened to poor colored women, the world would be a different place.

The world is changing, I said. It is no longer a world just for boys and men.

Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender" -Alice Walker

I recognized myself in Jane Eyre. It amazes me how many white people can't read themselves in black characters. I didn't feel any separation between me and Jane. We were tight.

They think, after the biggest of the white folks no longer on the earth, the only way to stop making somebody the serpent is for everybody to accept everybody else as a child of God, or one mother's children, no matter what they look like or how they act.

I believe that the truth about any subject only comes when all sides of the story are put together, and all their different meanings make one new one. Each writer writes the missing parts to the other writer's story. And the whole story is what I'm after.

Shug! I say. God wrote the bible, white folks had nothing to do with it. How come he look just like them, then? she say. Only bigger? And a heap more hair. How come the bible just like everything else they make, all about them doing one thing and another, and all the colored folks doing is gitting cursed? I never thought bout that.

White folks is a miracle of affliction, say Sofia.

They had the look of people deliberately distancing themselves from the center of things, as their own cultures defined it. Seeking the edge, the fringe. But also, paradoxically, the heart.

Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.

When I found out I thought God was white, and a man, I lost interest.

In 2005, The Color Purple became a phenomenally successful Broadway musical, playing to packed houses every night for over a year. In the process it transformed the "Great White Way" into a place where people of all colors, orientations and identities gathered to experience the show and to celebrate "God" as Life and Love, Perseverance, Hope, Creativity and Joy.

Look like to me only a fool would want you to talk in a way that feel peculiar to your mind.

so you just think all the people from the bible were white too. But really white white people lived somewhere else during those times. That's why the bible says that Jesus Christ had hair like lamb's wool. Lamb's wool is not straight, Celie. It isn't even curly.

She got a whole bunch of elephants and turtles everywhere. Some big, some little, some in the fountain, some up under the trees. Turtles and elephants. And all over her house. Curtains got elephants, bedspreads got turtles.

Shug! I say. God wrote the bible, white folks had nothing to do with it. How come he look just like them, then? she say. Only bigger? And a heap more hair. How come the bible just like everything else they make, all about them doing one thing and another, and all the colored folks doing is gitting cursed? (Walker 2000: 166)