[Kobi]

Audre Lorde once described herself as a "black-lesbian feminist mother lover poet." Born to parents from the West Indies, Audre Lorde grew up in New York City. She wrote and occasionally published poetry and was active in the 1960s movements for civil rights, feminism, and against the Vietnam War. She was a critic of what she saw as feminism's blindness to racial differences and fear of lesbians being involved.

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• The energies I gain from my work help me neutralize those implanted forces of negativity and self-destructiveness that is White America's way of making sure I keep whatever is powerful and creative within me unavailable, ineffective, and non-threatening.

• What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heelprint upon another woman's face? What woman's terms of oppression have become precious and necessary to her as a ticket into the fold of the righteous, away from the cold winds of self-scrutiny?

• We welcome all women who can meet us, face to face, beyond objectification and beyond guilt.

• Every woman I have ever known has made a lasting impression on my soul.

• Every woman I have ever loved has left her print upon me, where I loved some invaluable piece of myself apart from me -- so different that I had to stretch and grow in order to recognize her. And in that growing, we came to separation, that place where work begins.

• I write for those women who do not speak, for those who do not have a voice because they were so terrified, because we are taught to respect fear more than ourselves. We've been taught that silence would save us, but it won't.

• For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.

• But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women.

• Part of the lesbian consciousness is an absolute recognition of the erotic within our lives and, taking that a step further, dealing with the erotic not only in sexual terms.

• We tend to think of the erotic as an easy, tantalizing sexual arousal. I speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way.

• My Black woman's anger is a molten pond at the core of me, my most fiercely guarded secret. Your silence will not protect you!

• Black women are programmed to define ourselves within this male attention and to compete with each other for it rather than to recognize and move upon our common interests.

• As I have said elsewhere, it is not the destiny of black America to repeat white America's mistakes. But we will, if we mistake the trappings of success in a sick society for the signs of a meaningful life. If black men continue to do so, defining 'femininity' in its archaic European terms, this augurs ill for our survival as a people, let alone our survival as individuals. Freedom and future for blacks do not mean absorbing the dominant white male disease.

• As black people, we cannot begin our dialogue by denying the oppressive nature of male privilege. And if black males choose to assume that privilege, for whatever reason, raping, brutalizing, and killing women, then we cannot ignore black male oppression. One oppression does not justify another.