Audre Lorde said something to me that has continued even now to inform me. She made it very clear that none of us comes with our consciousness fully developed; it is a constant work that we have to be ever vigilant about. I’m counseling myself these days around patience. I’m counseling myself around understanding that we come to issues not only from different sites of experience but with different levels of consciousness, so as not to be so quick, not to be so judgmental, not to be so rapid around closing a door, around writing someone off.

—Essex Hemphill, Living the Word/Looking for Home

(via Learning Everyday…)

There are pleasures to be had from books beyond being lightly entertained. There is the pleasure of being challenged; the pleasure of feeling one’s range and capacities expanding; the pleasure of entering into an unfamiliar world, and being lead into empathy with a consciousness very different from one’s own; the pleasure of knowing what others have already thought it worth knowing, and entering a larger conversation.

—Rebecca Mead on the pleasures of reading to impress yourself

(via KEW)

…the Black male consciousness must be raised to the realization that sexism and woman-hating are critically dysfunctional to his liberation as a Black man because they arise out of the same constellation that engenders racism and homophobia. Until that consciousness is developed, Black men will view sexism and the destruction of Black women as tangential to Black liberation rather than as central to that struggle.

–Audre Lorde, “Sexism: An American Disease in Blackface,” Sister Outsider, p. 64

(via the dopest ethiopienne)

Friend: So how do you think you’ve changed since high school?
Me: Well I became aware of oppressive power structures and how we are complicit in them and now seek to dismantle them.
Friend: …
Me: I also think I got hotter

—the dopest ethiopienne

Highly accurate. 

 

To live in diaspora is to be haunted by histories that sit uncomfortably out of joint, ambivalently ahead of their time and yet behind it too. It is to feel a small tingle on the skin at the back of your neck and know that something is not quite right about where you are now, but to know also that you cannot leave. To be un-homed is a process. To be unhomely is a state of diasporic consciousness.

–Lily Cho, The Turn to Diaspora

(via KEW)

I’m grateful for being here, for being able to think, for being able to see, for being able to taste, for appreciating love – for knowing that it exists in a world so rife with vulgarity, with brutality and violence, and yet love exists. I’m grateful to know that it exists.

–Maya Angelou

(via Circassian Beauty)

But what we should know from the situation of gay people of all colours and black people of all sexual preferences is that simply being a victim does not radicalize your consciousness. If that was the case, we would all be fighting the revolution right now together and the fact is we’re not because people want their particular form of victimhood to end with caring about what the implications of that are for other people…We have to move past the idea that our sexual preferences will radicalize our consciousness. Essentialized identity, whether it is race or sex, sexuality, etc. and the notion that just being the victim of something will enlighten you is also the big lie now.

— bell hooks, Interview with bell hooks about Night-Vision

(via queering the game of life)

Consciousness is knowledge, recognition, foresight; common experience and perception; sensibility, alertness, mindfulness. It stirs the senses, the blood; it exposes and suggests; it will objectify, enrage, direct. There are no positive formulas for a thing so complex. We have guidelines only to help us with its growth. This means that after we are done with our books, they must be put aside; and the search for method will depend on observations, correct analyses, creativity and seizing the time.

–G. Jackson, Blood in my Eye (1972:43)

(via KEW)

When an individual Black woman’s consciousness concerning how she understands her everyday life undergoes change, she can become empowered. Such consciousness may stimulate her to embark on a path of personal freedom, even if it exists initially primarily in her own mind. If she is lucky enough to meet others who are undergoing similar journeys, she and they can change the world around them.

–Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought

(via KEW)

I’m very concerned that there are not more Black women deeply committed to anti-capitalist politics. But one would have to understand the role that gender oppression plays in encouraging young Black females to think that they don’t need to study about capitalism. That they don’t need to read men who were my teachers like Walter Rodney, and Nkrumah, and Amilcar Cabral.

I think that as a girl who grew up in a patriarchal, working-class, Black, southern household there was a convergence of those issues of class and gender. I was acutely aware of my class, and I was acutely aware of the limitations imposed on me by gender. I wouldn’t be the committed worker for freedom that I am today had I not begun to oppose that gendered notion of learning that suggests that politics is the realm of males and that political thinking about anti-racist struggle and colonialism is for men.

I’m very much in favor of the kind of education for critical consciousness that says: Let’s not look at these thing separately. Let’s look at how they converge so that when we begin to take a stand against them, we can take that kind of strategic stance that allows us to be self-determining as a people struggling in a revolutionary way on all fronts.

–bell hooks

(via knowledge equals black power)