Jessica Williams 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.

Women of color have always been kind of boxed in by the idea that the more you talk about the misogyny of your own community, the more you make that community look bad.

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

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

No other group in America has so had their identity socialized out of existence as have black women... When black people are talked about the focus tends to be on black men; and when women are talked about the focus tends to be on white women.

We live in a world that does not recognize virtually anyone outside of the white male or the beautiful white woman who has to be an object of desire and affection.

I always feel like I'm warring with my womanhood and wanting the world to be better, and with my blackness - which is the opposite of whiteness.

In every generation and in every intellectual sphere and in every political moment, there have been African American women who have articulated the need to think and talk about race through a lens that looks at gender or think and talk about feminism through a lens that looks at race.

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.

Controlling women as the means of reproduction is made even more necessary by any race or caste or class system. It just comes together, it's just like life. And therefore it's not even practical to be a feminist without being anti-racist or against classism. It just doesn't work.

But what of black women?... I most sincerely doubt if any other race of women could have brought its fineness up through so devilish a fire.

Black women are programmed to define ourselves within this male attention and to compete with each other for it rather than to recognize and move upon our common interests.

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

I'm the result of upbringing, class, race, gender, social prejudices, and economics. So I'm a victim again. A result.

I can't discriminate? Oh, that's ripe, coming from a straight white man. What's the matter, baby doesn't feel like he belongs? Well why don't you try a place that was set up just for you? Like the world!

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 merged those two words, black and feminist, because I was surrounded by black women who were very tough and and who always assumed they had to work and rear children and manage homes.

Nobody calls on black women to find out what they're thinking about because we're always part of somebody else's agenda.

With what moral authority can they [the U. S.] speak of human rights — the rulers of a nation in which the millionaire and beggar coexist; the Indian is exterminated; the black man is discriminated against; the woman is prostituted; and the great masses of Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Latin Americans are scorned, exploited, and humiliated?

The first decade of the twentieth century was not a great time to be born black and poor and female in St. Louis, Missouri, but Vivian Baxter was born black and poor, to black and poor parents. Later she would grow up and be called beautiful. As a grown woman she would be known as the butter-colored lady with the blowback hair.

Only a woman can tell you what it's like to be a woman in a society where men are in charge. When you have one demographic that controls the livelihood of minorities, then you're always going to have abuses of power. So this goes way beyond Hollywood.

I love how when I say the world is still run by men, and sometimes I say the world is still run by white men, people gasp as if that's news. That's not news. That's obvious.

When feminism does not explicitly oppose racism, and when anti-racism does not incorporate opposition to patriarchy, race and gender politics often end up being antagonistic to each other, and both interests lose.

We live in a society that has a long history of not valuing people of color or women.