Carol Leifer Quotes

Multiculturalism isn't about culture, it's about power.

I'm not a fan of identity politics.

The challenge facing America in the next century will be the shaping, at long last, of a truly common public culture, one responsive to the long silenced cultures of color.

My wife is vegan and has been for a few years.

I was ahead of the gender curve, but I wasn't ahead of the intersectionality curve, and I get it now. It's important to me.

I wholeheartedly believe that we can't organize just as women. There has to be specific messaging and an issue prioritization based on identity groups. Because when you ask a black woman what her top priority issues are versus a white woman versus a Muslim woman versus an undocumented woman, you're going to get... different answers.

I think the trick is to understand that universal isn't defined by a singular way of being. We don't have to somehow accept universal as being middle class, or white, or whatever it may be.

I like being vegan, I think it's good for my health.

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?

People keep telling me about the white race and the black race - and it really doesn't make sense. I played Miami, met a fellow two shades darker than me - and his name was Ginsberg! Took my place in two sit-in demonstrations - nobody knew the difference. The he tried for a third lunch counter and blew the whole bit ... asked for blintzes.

I nearly always find, when I ask a vegetarian if he is a socialist, or a socialist if he is a vegetarian, that the answer is in the affirmative.

Isn't it a characteristic of the age we live in that it has made everyone in a way a migrant and a member of a minority?

I love all those great 'f' words - feminism, folk music.

I hold flesh-food to be unsuited to our species. We err in copying the lower animal world if we are superior to it.

My refusing to eat flesh occasioned an inconveniency, and I was frequently chid for my singularity.

My original goal in the '90s, after I found feminism and I was the first generation in my family to go to college, was to spread this information that feminism was still very much alive, and that you can't believe the media telling you that it doesn't need to exist and that it doesn't exist.

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.

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.

It makes it very hard to say what you believe in and not be attacked for it. And it's not fair; I'm Korean, but I'm not supposed to talk about my experience and my life? It's unaccepting.

The gay movement has realized its agenda, so they've gotta transfer that energy somewhere and transgenders is the next.

For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.

Most vegetarians I ever see looked enough like their food to be classed as cannibals.

Had middle class black women begun a movement in which they had labeled themselves "oppressed," no one would have taken them seriously.

Dare to look at the intersectionalities.

There are a lot of people that form movements around particular commitments, like gay rights. It is important, but it does not link easily to, say, economic rights, and it often looks like it's opposed to them. The attempt to bring these together has yet to be done in a truly effective way, and I think it can be.