Bell Hooks Quotes

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

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.

Black women, historically, have been doubly victimized by the twin immoralities of Jim Crow and Jane Crow. ... Black women, faced with these dual barriers, have often found that sex bias is more formidable than racial bias.

The most unprotected person in America is the black woman.

When you're a black woman, you seldom get to do what you just want to do; you always do what you have to do.

I suggest that Black feminist thought consists of specialised knowledge created by African-American women which clarifies a standpoint of and for Black women. In other words, Black feminist thought encompasses theoretical interpretations of Black women's reality by those who live it.

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.

Black women have historically had the most to lose and have therefore been the fiercest fighters for justice.

Feminism as a theoretical enterprise is approached differently by Black women depending on where we are. There are more reformist Black women who tend to use the phrase "Black feminism".

Perhaps...I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am a woman, because I am Black, because I am a lesbian, because I am myself--a Black woman warrior poet doing my work--come to ask you, are you doing yours?

Jesse Jackson's living depends on the maintenance of an African-American victim culture

Being Black and poor is, I think, radically different from being anything else and poor. Poor, to most Blacks, is a state of mind. Those who accept it are poor; those who struggle are middle class.

James Baldwin is one of the greatest, North American writers of the second half of the Twentieth Century. A prolific writer and a brilliant social critic, he foreshadowed the destructive trends happening now in the whole Western world and beyond, while always maintaining a sense of humanistic hope and dignity. He explored palpable, yet unspoken, intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies and the inevitable, if unnameable, tensions with personal identity, assumptions, uncertainties, yearning, and questing.

I sometimes wish I were African American because people don't bash them afterward. It's the hardest to be a woman.

I was born black and female.

Being a black woman, I've often felt I've been judged by my sex and my race, and I have always known that it shouldn't hamper me.

If you are a black woman, you get two history months in a row.

I am a Black Feminist. I mean I recognize that my power as well as my primary oppressions come as a result of my blackness as well as my womaness, and therefore my struggles on both of these fronts are inseparable.

We cannot be liberated as women in a society built on class oppression or gender oppression or religious oppression.

There's no idea in the world that is not contained by black life. I could write forever about the black experience in America.

Feminism isn't whatever you want it to be.

I know what every colored woman in this country is doing... Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I’m going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world.

Work for black women has been an important and valued dimension of Afrocentric definitions of black motherhood.

When the civil rights battle was won, all the Jews and hippies and artists were middle class white people and all the blacks were still poor. Materially, not much changed.

One of the greatest gifts of Black feminism to ourselves has been to make it a little easier simply to be Black and female.