The Black Woman An Anthology Quotes

Standing on a street corner in Manhattan two days after Diallo's murder, having just come from a meeting of concerned citizens to plan an organized response, I was so filled with frustration and sorrow that I turned to the woman beside me waiting for the light to change and asked 'What do you think about the cops shooting that man forty-one-times?' She looked startled, confused--could she not feel the palpable rage, pain, and fear that pulsed through the black veins of this city and other cities across the nation? 'I don't know. I have to wait until all the facts are in. I'm sure they had a reason,' she finally responded. Perhaps she saw the disgust and disappointment on my face. Stepping off the curb as the light turned green, she added, 'I mean, he must have done something.

The poetry reading promoted an anthology celebrating the varied voices of the United States. The evening's readers represented several races and ethnicities, a kind of attention to inclusivity I admired. But a few days before my flight, I found out that I was the roster's only woman. I brought this to the attention of the event coordinators, and they said it was too late to correct the lack of gender equity. As a concession, they said that I and the other readers should make a point of reading others' poems to that end. When I joined the seven male readers at the venue, the organizers reminded us of our time limit and suggested I read first. I read my poem from the anthology, as well as one poem each by two other women: a wry, pointed poem by Jane Mead and a focused, hopeful poem by Audre Lorde. I kept to the specified time limit. Then I sat down. Like an obedient girl. The men at the podium, every one, read over their times. They read their own poems from the anthology. Then they read others. Not others as in other people's - women's - poems, which was the idea conveyed to me. No. These men read other poems of their own. I'd flown to New York to read a single poem of my own and watch men drown out my voice and the voices of all the other women in the book.

Women have become the largest oppressed group in a dominant, aggressive, male capitalistic culture. The next largest oppressed group is the product of their wombs, the children, who are ever pressed into service and labor for the maintenance of a male-dominated class society.

The female births both male and female. The Adam and Eve myth turns that reality on its head. The female now issues from the male. Hence we know how terrified the male had become of animal reality to establish such a perversion of the truth.

From the pyramids to the cities, we are stuck with these monuments and great surpluses built on man's fearful need to be God.

It is a noble thing, the rearing of warriors for the revolution. I can find no fault with the idea. I do, however, find fault with the notion that dumping pills is the way to do it. You don't prepare yourself for the raising of super-people by making yourself vulnerable - chance fertilization, chance support, chance tomorrow - nor by being celibate until you stumble across the right stock to breed with. You prepare yourself by being healthy and confident, by having options that give you confidence, by getting yourself together, by being together enough to attract a together cat whose notions of fatherhood rise above the Disney caliber of man-in-the-world-and-woman-in-the-home, by being committed to the new consciousness, by being intellectually and spiritually and financially self-sufficient to do the thing right. You prepare yourself by being in control of yourself. The pill gives the woman, as well as the man, some control. Simple as that.

So if one take a creative, imaginative, loving, serious attitude toward life everything one does will reflect one attitude hence when one cooks this attitude will be served at the table. and it will be good.

You got to have an eye, ear, and nose for pork if you're going to stay clean

We are involved in a struggle for liberation: liberation from the exploitive and dehumanizing system of racism, from the manipulative control of a corporate society; liberation from the constrictive norms of 'mainstream' culture, from the synthetic myths that encourage us to fashion ourselves rashly from the without (reaction), instead of the within (creation).

Her strength stunned him, left him breathless. This tiny terror of a woman, as sleek and lethal as a jaguar, had subdued him.

The rarely anthologized poem, here excerpted, is important for three reasons: One, in it, Gwendolyn does not stand as the poet but responds as a woman in a community, as drylongso herself, the everyday black person. Or so it would seem. Two, the poet does not decorate her diction but uses rather ordinary speech, the language of the everyday. Three, Gwendolyn addresses a crucial social issue that is still, unfortunately, at a critical point—black fratricide. “The Boy Died in My Alley” resonates today. Even more so than it did at the time it was written. Gwendolyn was a poet who spoke on matters timely and timeless.

We're so turned around about Western models, we don't even know how to raise the correct questions. But raise them we must if we are to fashion a natural sense of self, if we are to develop harmonious relationships with each other. What are we talking about when we speak of revolution if not a free society made up of whole individuals?

Classifications and categorizations of groups of people by other groups have always been for the benefit of the group who is doing the classifying and to the detriment of the classified group.