The confirmation of Clarence Thomas, one of the most conservative voices to be added to the [Supreme] Court in recent memory, carr...ies a sobering message for the African- American community.... As he begins to make his mark upon the lives of African Americans, we must acknowledge that his successful nomination is due in no small measure to the support he received from black Americans.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... not all black women have silently acquiesced in sexism and misogyny within the African-American community. Indeed, many writer...s, 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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am a colored woman or a Negro woman. Either one is OK. People dislike those words now. Today these use this term African America...n. It wouldn't occur to me to use that. I prefer to think of myself as an American, that's all!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A central tenet of modern feminist thought has been the assertion that "all women are oppressed." This assertion implies that wome...n share a common lot, that factors like class, race, religion, sexual preference, etc. do not create a diversity of experience that determines the extent to which sexism will be an oppressive force in the lives of individual women.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
So in Jamaica it is the aim of everybody to talk English, act English and look English. And that last specification is where the g...reatest difficulties arise. It is not so difficult to put a coat of European culture over African culture, but it is next to impossible to lay a European face over an African face in the same generation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...I have ... been guilty of watching Westerns without acknowledging that Native Americans have gone through the same madness as A...frican Americans. Isn't it extraordinary that sometimes the most offended have not seen others being offended?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A poet can read. A poet can write. A poet is African in Africa, or Irish in Ireland, or French on the left bank of Paris, or white... in Wisconsin. A poet writes in her own language. A poet writes of her own people, her own history, her own vision, her own room, her own house where she sits at her own table quietly placing one word after another word until she builds a line and a movement and an image and a meaning that somersaults all of these into the singing, the absolutely individual voice of the poet: at liberty. A poet is somebody free. A poet is someone at home. How should there be Black poets in America?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...I am an abolitionist for the sake of my own race--Contact with the African degenerates our white race--I find the association w...ith them injurious to my child--keenly as I watch to prevent it & his faithful nurse to help me ... She is a good woman & so are many of them--Still the race is a degraded one ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The true novel wrestles on the edge of understanding, lying about on all sides desperately, for every sort of experience, pressing... into use every flash of intuition or correspondence, trying to fuse together the crudest of materials, and the humblest, which the higher arts can't include. But it is precisely here, where the writer fights with the raw, the intractable, that poetry is born. Poetry, that is, of the novel: appropriate to it. The Story of an African Farm is a poetic novel; and when one has done with the "plot" and the characters, that is what remains: an endeavor, a kind of hunger, that passionate desire for growth and understanding, which is the deepest pulse of human beings.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Afro-American experience is the only real culture that America has. Basically, every American tries to walk, talk, dress and b...ehave like African Americans.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »