Quotes About Inclusion

You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other. I do not have to be you to recognize that our wars are the same. What we must do is commit ourselves to some future that can include each other and to work toward that future with the particular strengths of our individual identities. And in order for us to do this, we must allow each other our differences at the same time as we recognize our sameness.

When we define ourselves, when I define myself, the place in which I am like you and the place in which I am not like you, I'm not excluding you from the joining - I'm broadening the joining.

It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.

Too often, we pour the energy needed for recognizing and exploring difference into pretending those differences are insurmountable barriers, or that they do not exist at all.

Any world which did not have a place for me loving women was not a world in which I wanted to live, nor one which I could fight for.

When you read the words of Langston Hughes you are reading the words of a Black Gay man. When you read the words of Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Angelina Weld Grimké, poets of the Harlem Renaissance, you are reading the words of Black Lesbians. When you listen to the life-affirming voices of Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, you are hearing Black Lesbian women. When you see the plays and read the words of Lorraine Hansberry, you are reading the words of a women who loved women deeply.

Much of the gay white movement seeks to be included in the american dream and is angered when they do not receive the standard white male privileges, misnamed as "american democracy". Often, white gay men are working not to change the system. This is one the reasons why the gay male movement is as white as it is. Black gay men recognize, again by the facts of survival, that being Black, they are not going to be included in the same way.

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

Being women together was not enough. We were different. Being gay-girls together was not enough.We were different. Being black together was not enough. We were different. Being black women together was not enough. We were different. Being black dykes together was not enough. We were different.

You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other. I do not have to be you to recognize that our wars are the same. What we must do is commit ourselves to some future that can include each other and to work towards that future with the particular strengths of our individual identities. And in order to do this, we must allow each other our differences at the same time as we recognize our sameness.

The move to render the presence of lesbians and gay men invisible in the intricate fabric of Black existence and survival is a move which contributes to fragmentation and weakness in the Black community.

You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other.

it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence.

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

Some of our finest writers, organizers, artists, and scholars in the 60s as well as today, have been lesbian and gay, and history will bear me out.

I have always wanted to be both man and woman, to incorporate the strongest and richest parts of my mother and father within/into me - to share valleys and mountains upon my body the way the earth does in hills and peaks.

When we define ourselves, when I define myself, the place in which I am like you and the place in which I am not like you, I'm not excluding you from the joining—I'm broadening the joining.

dealing with the role of difference within the lives of american women: difference of race, sexuality, class, and age. The absence of these considerations weakens any feminist discussion of the personal and the political. It is a particular academic arrogance to assume any discussion of feminist theory without examining our many differences, and without a significant input from poor women, Black and Third World women, and lesbians.

when we look at our differences and not allow ourselves to be divided, when we own them and are not divided by them, that is when we will be able to move on.

within those differences, we can join together to effect a future the world has not yet conceived, let alone seen.

You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other. I do not have to be you to recognize that our wars are the same. What we must do is commit ourselves to some future that can include each other and to work toward that future with the particular strengths of our individual identities. And in order to do this, we must allow each other our differences at the same time as we recognize our sameness.

The need for unity is often misnamed as a need for homogeneity

remember thinking for a while that I was the only Black lesbian living in the Village

The above forms of human blindness [racism, sexism, heterosexism, homophobia] stem from the same root - an inability to recognize the notion of difference as a dynamic human force, one which is enriching rather than threatening to the defined self, when there are shared goals.