Audre Lorde

no matter how difficult it may be to look at the realities of our lives, it is there that we will find the strength to change them. And to suppress any truth is to give it power beyond endurance.

How does a system bent upon our ultimate destruction make the unacceptable gradually tolerable? Observe closely, look around, read the Black press

Our dead line our dreams, their deaths becoming more and more commonplace.

We are members of an international community of people of Color, and must see our struggles as connected within that light.

How is the systematic erosion of freedoms gradually accomplished? What kind of gradual erosion of our status as United States citizens will Black people be persuaded first to ignore and then to accept?

No one will free us but ourselves, here nor there. So our survivals are not separate, even though the terms under which we struggle differ.

Our parents are examples of survival as a living pursuit, and no matter how different from them we may now find ourselves, we have built their example into our definitions of self—which is why we can be here, naming ourselves.

We examine these similarities so that we can more effectively devise mutually supportive strategies for action, at the same time as we remain acutely aware of our differences. Like the volcano, which is one form of extreme earth-change, in any revolutionary process there is a period of intensification and a period of explosion.

Learning to recognize and label my angers, and to put them where they belonged in some effective way, became crucial

Eventually institutional racism becomes a question of power and privilege rather than merely color, which then serves as a subterfuge.