Sister Outsider

self-and-identity

• As a forty-nine-year-old Black lesbian feminist socialist mother of two, I usually find myself a part of some group defined as other, deviant, inferior, or just plain wrong.

  SOL-RC-094

• Have you read my work, and the work of other Black women, for what it could give you? Or did you hunt through only to find words that would legitimize your chapter?

  SO-RC-052

trauma-and-survival

• Anger is useful to help clarify our differences, but strength bred by anger alone is a blind force which cannot create the future. It can only demolish the past.

  SOL-RC-126

• Suffering is the nightmare reliving of unscrutinized and unmetabolized pain. When I live through pain without recognizing it, I rob myself of the power that can come from using that pain.

  SOL-RC-142

grief

• All mothers see their daughters leaving. Black mothers see it happening as a sacrifice through the veil of hatred hung like sheets of lava in the pathway before their daughters.

  SOL-RC-131

erotic-as-power

• The strongest lesson I can teach my son is how to be who he wishes to be for himself — to move to that voice from within himself, rather than raucous voices from outside.

  SOL-RC-062