You Will Never Be Able To Defend

In Order To Perpetuate Itself, Every Oppression Must Corrupt Or Distort Those Various Sources Of Power Within The Culture Of The Oppressed That Can Provide Energy For Change.

Difference Is That Raw And Powerful Connection From Which Our Personal Power Is Forged... We Have Been Taught To Either Ignore Our Differences Or To View Them As Causes For Separation And Suspicion Rather Than As Forces For Change. Without Community, There Is No Liberation, Only The Most Vulnerable And Temporary Armistice Between An Individual And Her Oppression... Survival Is Learning To Take Our Difference And Make Them Strengths.

What Woman Here Is So Enamored Of Her Own Oppression That She Cannot See Her Heel Print Upon Another Woman's Face?

Tell Them About How You're Never Really A Whole Person If You Remain Silent, Because There's Always That One Little Piece Inside You That Wants To Be Spoken Out, And If You Keep Ignoring It, It Gets Madder And Madder And Hotter And Hotter, And If You Don't Speak It Out One Day It Will Just Up And Punch You In The Mouth From The Inside.

And This Is A Grave Responsibility, Projected From Within Each Of Us, Not To Settle For The Convenient, The Shoddy, The Conventionally Expected, Nor The Merely Safe.