Cree Summer Quotes

Sometimes, you feel like, 'Am I going to be upset about this as a black person or as a woman first? Or am I gonna be both?' Because some things inherently affect black women; some things affect you as a woman and not a black person; and some things just affect you as a black person.

When I think about women of color and their place politically in the world and culture... they've had two layers of just garbage to overcome. To me, a black woman is a woman-woman.

Only a straight white person would have no concept of what visibility is. They've never contended with anything but visibility.

I know how difficult it is to be not just a woman, but a black woman, and I know how much we get attacked and our voices aren't heard. I experience it every single day.

The great thing about being a standard-issue, straight white person is you have so much time. Gay people, people of color, we have less time! We have to be a living Learning Annex to everybody. We don't have time to master hobbies like skipping rocks along lakes.

I know how hard it is to be a woman, especially a black woman.

Feminism isn't simply about being a woman in a position of power. It's battling systemic inequities; it's a social justice movement that believes sexism, racism and classism exist and interconnect, and that they should be consistently challenged.

As a black woman, I have no particular interest in maintaining the status quo. Why would I? The status quo is harmful; the status quo is significantly racist and sexist and a whole bunch of other things that I think need to change.

I can't explain exactly why it lives within me for so long and passionately. But race matters to me; racial equality matters to me, as does gender. There is something about these kinds of social injustices that go to the deep of me.

Not only are whites kicking us; they are telling us how to react to being kicked.

As a woman, as a Jew, as a lesbian, as a labor leader in a time of great anti-union animus, I know that other people project their biases on me. But it is nothing like the experience of our African-American brothers and sisters, especially black and brown men and boys.

I'm not only a person of color, I'm also a woman. And I'm not only a woman, I'm also a woman from the Third World. All those elements put together means I have a lot to do.

I always think - when I get mad, and people say, 'Don't be the angry black woman' - it's like, well, why not? There's so much to be angry about.

I feel like, as a person of color, I've always been kind of doing the work against the tide.

There's a lot of ways that white women undermine women of color, and black women in particular.

I have never felt the grips of patriarchy and its need to erase black women and our labor... so strongly until the creation of Black Lives Matter.

Because I was assigned female at birth and I am light-skinned, white, I think people hear my message more than they hear it from someone who was assigned male at birth and is a person of colour.

While white women and men of color also experience discrimination, all too often their experiences are taken as the only point of departure for all conversations about discrimination. Being front and center in conversations about racism or sexism is a complicated privilege that is often hard to see.

... black women have always found that in the social order of things we're the least likely to be believed--by anyone.

We African Americans have now spent the major part of the 20th Century battling racism.

Being the person I am, you know, the size I am, being a woman, being a black woman, there's not a lot of roles for us.

Everything about us black people is complicated, us being here, being a minority, being a woman, all those things are complicated.

I feel the feminist movement has excluded black women. You cannot talk about being black and a woman within traditional feminist dialogue.

It is bad enough to be white and poor; it is worse still to be black, or brown, and female, and young, and poor. Simply said, race makes class hurt more.

Being born, especially being born a person of color, is a political act in itself.