Quotes About Community

Staples sees in Ntozake Shange's play For Colored Girls a collective appetite for black male blood. Yet it is my female children and my black sisters who lie bleeding all around me, victims of the appetites of our brothers.

And if Black men choose to assume that privilege for whatever reason- raping, brutalizing and killing Black women- then ignoring these acts of Black male oppression within our communities can only serve our destroyers. One oppression does not justify another.

Self-preservation starts very early in West Indian families.

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.

Because of the continuous battle against racial erasure that Black women and Black men share, some Black women still refuse to recognize that we are also oppressed as women, and that sexual hostility against Black women is practiced not only by the white racist society, but implemented within our Black communities as well. It is a disease striking the heart of Black nationhood, and silence will not make it disappear.

Om tegen de weersomstandigheden bestand te zijn moesten we steen worden, en nu stoten we ons bont en blauw aan de dichtstbijzijnde ander.

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.

I think that if we begin to think of families in a wider context, groups of people relating to each other in a give-and-take manner, then our definitions of families will broaden so that we have groups of people, sustain groups, support groups, in whatever period of life, whatever time, whatever place, right, that come together and remain

This kind of action is a prevalent error among oppressed peoples. It is based upon the false notion that there is only a limited and particular amount of freedom that must be divided up between us, with the largest and juiciest pieces of liberty hging as spoils to the victor or the stronger. So instead of joining together to fight for more, we quarrel between ourselves for a larger slice of the one pie.

language so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives.

One thing has always kept me going– and it's not really courage or bravery, unless that's what courage or bravery is made of– is a sense that there are so many ways in which I'm vulnerable and cannot help but be vulnerable, I'm not going to be more vulnerable by putting weapons of silence in my enemies' hands. Being an open lesbian in the Black community is not easy, although being closeted is even harder.

The generation gap is an important social tool for any repressive society. If the younger members of a community view the older members as contemptible or suspect or excess, they will never be able to join hands and examine the living memory of the community, nor ask the all important question, Why? This gives rise to a historical amnesia that keeps us working to invent the wheel every time we have to go to the store for bread.

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.

Zami. A Carriacou name for women who work together as friends and lovers.

Nobody wrote stories about us, but still people always asked my mother for directions in a crowd.

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

The distortion of relationship which says "I disagree with you, so I must destroy you" leaves us as Black people with basically uncreative victories, defeated in any common struggle. This jugular vein psychology is based on the fallacy that your assertion or affirmation of self is an attack upon my self — or that my defining myself will somehow prevent or retard your self-definition.

For it is through the coming together of self-actualized individuals, female and male, that any real advances can be made. The old sexual power relationships based on a dominant/subordinate model between unequals have not served us as a people, nor as individuals.

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 to 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.

I just want to come and sit on your front porch and drink mint juleps.

Everybody in recovery smokes. If you don't like smoking, don't even bother trying to get sober. Just stay drunk.

If you're gay and live in New York and don't go to gym, eventually they come for you.

People believe in god because they can't think to be alone.

See, alcoholism is exactly like bubble gum. You know when you blow a bubble and it bursts, some of the gum sticks to you chin? What's the only thing that gets the bubble gum off your chin? Bubble gum. You have to take the bubble gum out of your mouth and press it against the gum on your chin and it'll pick it up. Only an alcoholic can treat another alcoholic. Only other alcoholics can get you sober.