Black Feminist Quotes

• 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

  Struggle, Mean, Feminist

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• If any female feels she need anything beyond herself to legitimate and validate her existence, she is already giving away her power to be self-defining, her agency.

  Bell Hooks

  Self, Agency, Giving

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• When we drop fear, we can draw nearer to people, we can draw nearer to the earth, we can draw nearer to all the heavenly creatures that surround us.

  Bell Hooks

  Happiness, Success, Perseverance

  "Bell hooks talks to John Perry Barlow". www.lionsroar.com. September 1, 1995.

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• Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.

  Audre Lorde

  Caring, Compassion, Self

  Audre Lorde (2017). “A Burst of Light: And Other Essays”, p.130, Courier Dover Publications

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• Challenging power structures from the inside, working the cracks within the system, however, requires learning to speak multiple languages of power convincingly.

  Patricia Hill Collins

  Challenges, Cracks, Brilliant

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• 

  If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.

  Florynce Kennedy

  Sex, Pregnancy, Men

  Quoted in Ms., Mar. 1973

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• I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black: it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect.

  June Jordan

  Life, Happiness, Success

  1978 Address to Black Writers Conference, Howard University. Collected as 'Where Is the Love?' in Moving Towards Home (1989).

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• 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

  Reality, Feminist, African American

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• The potential significance of Black feminist thought goes far beyond demonstrating that African-American women can be theorists. Like Black feminist practice, which it reflects and which it seeks to foster, Black feminist thought can create a collective identity among African-American women about the dimensions of a Black women's standpoint. Through the process of rearticulating, Black feminist thought can offer African-American women a different view of ourselves and our worlds

  Patricia Hill Collins

  Practice, Our World, Views

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• ... not all black women have silently acquiesced in sexism and misogyny within the African-American community. Indeed, many writers, activists, and other women have voiced their opposition and paid the price: they have been ostracized and branded as either man- haters or pawns of white feminists, two of the more predictable modes of disciplining and discrediting black feminists.

  Kimberle Williams Crenshaw

  Men, Two, White

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• I stand here as a black lesbian feminist, having been invited to comment within the only panel at this conference where the input of black feminists and lesbians is represented. What this says about the vision of this conference is sad, in a country where racism, sexism and homophobia are inseparable. . . .

  Audre Lorde

  Country, Heterosexuality Is, Racism

  Audre Lorde (2012). “Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches”, p.110, Crossing Press

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• Womanists is what black feminists used to call themselves. Very much so. They were not the same thing. And also the relationship with men. Historically, black women have always sheltered their men because they were out there, and they were the ones that were most likely to be killed.

  Toni Morrison

  Men, Feminist, Black

  Interview with Christopher Bollen, www.interviewmagazine.com. May 1, 2012.

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• I just like to have words that describe things correctly. Now to me, 'black feminist' does not do that. I need a word that is organic, that really comes out of the culture, that really expresses the spirit that we see in black women. And it's just... womanish.

  Alice Walker

  Feminist, Black, Doe

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