Barbara Smith Quotes

If what I read doesn't reflect my life - whether I'm gay or Latino or on welfare - doesn't that really mean that my life is not valuable?

I think the bottom of the totem pole is African-American women, or women of colour. I think they get the least opportunities in Hollywood.

I was born in 1947, and my generation, like its predecessors, was taught that since our achievements received little notice or credit from white America, we were not to discuss our faults, lapses, or uncertainties in public.

We are not generally included in that narrative - people of color - definitely, women of color don't normally fit that narrative that has been built around the whole image and the whole story of the Silicon Valley.

As a black and as a woman, I didn't think that I would really want to live in any of the eras before this, because I would inevitably be worse off. I would have spent more time struggling just to prove I was human than doing my work.

I learned early that I had to work harder than the white kids and harder than the boys.

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.

The indigenous peoples never had, and still do not have, the place that they should have occupied in the progress and benefits of science and technology, although they represented an important basis for this development.

Fault lines run along color lines in American public life, and the women's movement is no exception. Over the years, feminism has become more inclusive but there is still hard work to be done to include LGBT women and communities of color.

The caste systems of sex and race are interdependent and can only be uprooted together.

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.

A Negro woman has the same kind of problems as other women, but she can't take the same things for granted.

I am a candidate for the Presidency of the United States. I make that statement proudly in the full knowledge that, as a Black person and as a female person, I do not have a chance of actually gaining that office in this election year.

Politicians have forced us into parallel societies by denying for so long that we existed and pretending for so long that we were going home.

If this country is a melting pot, then either the Afro-American didn't get in the pot or he didn't get melted down.

Race, class, and gender in our heritage, in our history as people of America, have intermingled and interpenetrated in dazzling, complex, destructive, and empowering ways. Figuring these ways out constitutes a major preoccupation of the discipline of history.

I'm interested in people who are dwelling outside the mainstream. And very often, those people happen to be woman of color.

The times when black women have been successful in confronting and overcoming the structural and institutional sexism and racism that persists in our society have been when we are thoughtful and strategic about speaking up. It's when we've done what it takes to introduce and implement our ideas and our plans to make things better.

Especially for blacks, but also for many Hispanics, Native Americans, and Asian-Americans, group identity is now shaped more by a liberal politics in which past victimization is deferred to, and for which redress is sought with preferential treatment, than by a unified culture.

Black women's intersectional experiences of racism and sexism have been a central but forgotten dynamic in the unfolding of feminist and antiracist agendas.

I have different privileges because I am a man, and I have to acknowledge that and realize that another person of color who is also a woman is having a different experience than I am.

I think as soon as you're a woman, or any minority doing something, you automatically become a representative for it, and I think a lot of brilliant women's interviews are being wasted on talking about what it's like being a woman.

I am Hindu, upper-caste, male, and able-bodied. So everything is on my side. That gives me the extra cushion that Swara Bhaskar won't get.

Especially for young POC, when we enter majority-white spaces, we feel the need to assimilate, to blend in, to prove ourselves. I don't think we discuss it enough.

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.