Class, race, sexuality, gender--and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other--need to be excavated from ...the inside.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What we have to do ... is to find a way to celebrate our diversity and debate our differences without fracturing our communities.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We are rarely able to interact only with folks like ourselves, who think as we do. No matter how much some of us deny this reality... and long for the safety and familiarity of sameness, inclusive ways of knowing and living offer us the only true way to emancipate ourselves from the divisions that limit our minds and imaginations.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Most young black females learn to be suspicious and critical of feminist thinking long before they have any clear understanding of... its theory and politics.... Without rigorously engaging feminist thought, they insist that racial separatism works best. This attitude is dangerous. It not only erases the reality of common female experience as a basis for academic study; it also constructs a framework in which differences cannot be examined comparatively.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... often the empowering strategies we use in the arena of love and friendship are immediately dropped when we come into the arena... of politicized difference--when in fact some of those strategies are useful and necessary.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal... lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function... of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people. As... members of such an economy, we have all been programmed to respond to the human differences between us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference in one of three ways: ignore it, and if that is not possible, copy it if we think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate. But we have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals. As a result, those differences have been misnamed and misused in the service of separation and confusion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Never to despise in myself what I have been taught to despise. Nor to despise the other.... Not to despise the it. To make this relation with the it: to know that I am it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are of course people who are more important than others in that they have more importance in the world but this is not essen...tial and it ceases to be. I have no sense of difference in this respect because every human being comprises the combination form.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »