~Clyde W. Ford, The Hero with an African Face, Mythic Wisdom of Traditional Africa. (link)
Sister KnowKnew
(link)“…but when you work in this field, you have to be yourself authentically. I don’t want to be anything but an African-American, that’s who I am. And when I talk to you about the issue I have to talk to you as an African-American.
It’s not that I am interested only in African-Americans, but I have to tell you about my life experience as an African-American. It’s not a matter of color, it’s the life experience. And I think it’s very difficult for people of a different life experience not to try to fit me into their pattern of the way they think; they see everything from the way which they are.
That’s why you never hear me say, ‘regardless of race creed and color’. I want to be considered with full regard for my race my creed and my color.”
~Dorothy Height, RIPP
It’s not that I am interested only in African-Americans, but I have to tell you about my life experience as an African-American. It’s not a matter of color, it’s the life experience. And I think it’s very difficult for people of a different life experience not to try to fit me into their pattern of the way they think; they see everything from the way which they are.
That’s why you never hear me say, ‘regardless of race creed and color’. I want to be considered with full regard for my race my creed and my color.”
~Dorothy Height, RIPP
A Picture Speaks 172,000 Words (click for hi-rez)
Dedee Bazil, they will call you Defilee when you and I march with the Haitian soldiers of the revolution, urging them to keep moving. They will call you mad after your brothers are massacred and grief makes you wild. They will call you sane again when you collect the torn pieces of the body of the black Emperor Dessalines who made the flag of the land he called Ayiti, as the original Taino inhabitants had named it. Dedee Bazile, they will obey you when you demand that Dessalines be buried. I call you Defilee Danto Sister.
~Nalo Hopkinson, The Salt Roads
ripp manny daveiga
~Nalo Hopkinson, The Salt Roads
ripp manny daveiga
With Love and Seriousness
Surely, he thought, he and his sister had some ancestor, some lithe young man with onyx skin and legs as straight as canae stalks, who had a name that was real. A name given to him at birth with love and seriousness. A name that was not a joke, nor a disguise, nor a brand name. But who this lithe young man was, and where his cane-stalk legs carried him from or to coun never be known. No. Nor his name. His own parents, in some mood of perverseness or resignation, had agreed to abide by a anaming done to them by somebody who couldn’t have cared less. Agreed to take and pass on to all their issue this heavy name scrawled in perfect thoughtlessness by a drunken Yankee in the Union Army. A literal slip of the pen handed to his father on a piece of paper and which he handed on to his only son and his son likewise handed on to his…
-Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
-Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
Livicated to Diane Nash fm Mission Main Kwaanza
won’t you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my one hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.
~Lucille Clifton
~Lucille Clifton
Natural Illusion
"Individualism, competition, and materialism provide criteria for self-definitiion as a natural consequence of a world view in which a fintie and limited focus orients us toward such disorder that we fight one another to sustain an illusion."
~Linda James Myers
lookout
~Linda James Myers
lookout
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)