Within patriarchy woman has no legitimate voice. Her voice is either constructed in complicity or resistance. If the choice is not radical then we speak only what the patriarchal culture would have us say. If we do not speak as liberators we collapse under the weight of this effort to speak within patriarchal confines or lose ourselves without dying.
bell hooks, from
Remembered Rapture: The Writer At Work (via
revolutionnow)
I was not speaking of a marginality one wished to lose, to give up, or surrender
as part of moving into the center, but rather as a site one stays in, clings to even,
because it nourishes one capacity to resist. It offers the possibility of radical
perspectives from which to see and create, to imagine alternatives, new worlds
I grew up in the midst of poverty but every black kid that I knew could read and write. We have to talk about the fact that we cannot educate for critical consciousness if we have a group of people who cannot access Fanon, Cabral, or Audre Lorde because they can’t read or write. How did Malcolm X radicalize his consciousness? He did it through books. If you deprive working-class and poor black people of access to reading and writing, you are making them that much farther removed from being a class that can engage in revolutionary resistance.
