Phoebe Robinson Quotes

When someone lives as a minority, they experience the world differently than those of us who live in the majority. We may occupy the same physical space, but we don't occupy the same psychic space.

I think if you say that art and politics, or religion and politics, mustn't mix, don't mix, that is itself a political statement. Even if you are writing a 19th-century novel where the money comes from a plantation in the Caribbean and you don't talk about that, that itself is a political thing.

While everyone's experience of oppression is different and complicated and often overlapping, I really believe that if you have privilege, you need to learn as much as you can about the world beyond yourself.

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'm black. I'm gay. I'm culturally Christian. I am a walking target on so many levels, and it is horrifying and a cross that very, very many of us who look like me have to bear.

I don't know a single black girl who's carefree because it ain't easy being a girl of color, period. God, I wish we were carefree.

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

Basically, the system works to my disadvantage for no other reason than that I am a person of color, and I am telling stories about people of color.

Intersectionality is an analytic sensibility, a way of thinking about identity and its relationship to power. Originally articulated on behalf of black women, the term brought to light the invisibility of many constituents within groups that claim them as members but often fail to represent them.

I'm not a fan of identity politics.

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!

It was an ongoing struggle to say no, I don't want to be a part of the perpetuation of this stereotype.

Whether I realize it or not, I have benefitted from my skin color and my gender - and those of a different gender or sexuality or skin color have suffered because of it.

There's always been a quiet conversation and joke that if you're not hard, if you're not from impoverished neighborhoods, if you're not certain constructs of a black stereotype, then you not black.

I'm all for philosophical debates about race, but if you look at history, you see that the status quo has power when it's unchallenged. So these conversations about inequality are crucial.

Race affects everything that I do, and everything that I create speaks to intersectionality.

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.

Different identity groups hold specific levels of power over others when their battles play out in the media. To wit: Black beats white. Gay beats white. Black beats gay.

As a woman of color, I've come to rely on straight white men telling me my experience of the world has nothing to do with my gender, race or class. (Unless something good happens to me, in which case they tell me my gender, race and/or class is exactly why that thing happened).

I'd be lying if I did not say that being a woman of colour is something I am always mindful or aware of.

As a person of color, I feel like I'm socialized to feel like a remnant of poverty or something primitive, and I don't feel like that at all. I can be myself and be me.

Sometimes people of color walk into these spaces that are dominated by the dominant culture, and we have to be better, not make as much trouble.

Intersectionality draws attention to invisibilities that exist in feminism, in anti-racism, in class politics, so, obviously, it takes a lot of work to consistently challenge ourselves to be attentive to aspects of power that we don't ourselves experience.

I'm not a big fan of identity politics and sort of picking one thing and defining yourself with it.

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?