Welcome to Litsy!

I read a few pages and I‘m already in love with it 🥰👏

This book is just 190 pages, but it‘s powerful, and beautifully written. Black women have been telling us to look at the whole picture. We must do it through the lens of Black Feminism. White Feminism has failed us, time and time again. The author breaks down liberation and decolonization, giving us a new way to think about and apply, what she calls ‘Sensuous Knowledge‘. Highly recommended. Link to her website: https://msafropolitan.com/

When it comes to beauty, we need to detach our ideas of beauty from heteronormativity, patriarchy, and racism and redefine beauty from a woman-centered point of view. We need to explore beauty from an active rather than a passive position of womanhood—as subjects and not objects, as directors of the orchestra rather than the instruments to be played. The orchestra might look similar, but the song will sound different.

At some point in life the world‘s beauty becomes enough. You don‘t need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough. No record of it needs to be kept and you don‘t need someone to share it with or tell it to. When that happens—that letting go—you let go because you can. The world will always be there—while you sleep it will be there—when you wake it will be there as well. So you can sleep and there is reason to awake. —Tony Morrison

Rivers start out as tiny streams at mountaintops. As the streams trickle down, they are met by other small streams and tributaries, together growing larger, and larger until their mutual flow becomes a river. The more the river widens, the more power it has to circumvent the barriers in its way. In this sense, rivers show us that there is high power in collective action. Yet once a river reaches the ocean, it streams separate again, reminding ⬇️

Resistance against racism and sexism is like bench-pressing weights. If you lift only with your right hand, the left weight will collapse on you and vice versa. We need to resist sexism together with those black men who oppose it, and racism with white women who oppose it. Without a sense of political sisterhood, the fight against patriarchy is moot.Acid rain may not kill every single tree in the world, but it is a threat to every single tree on⬇️

If I spend my life despising you because of your race, or class, or religion, I become your slave. If you spend yours hating me for similar reasons, it is because you are my slave.I own your energy, your fear, your intellect.I determine where you live, how you live, what your work is, your definition of excellence, and I set limits to your ability to love. I will have shaped your life. That is the gift of your hatred; you are mine. —Toni Morrison

We have such collective terror, fury, and rage, as well as sorrow and many other emotions, because of the destructions of men.Whether it is rape, domestic violence, molestation, sexual harassment, or “just” the casual sexism and the quotidian abuse of power that surrounds us or that affects people whom we love, we all have borne witness to the recklessly raw, cold, and violent side of masculinity. We have all glimpse, if not been forced to stare⬇️

Everywhere around the globe, women still except and protect patriarchy in myriad ways— by executing traditions that harm women‘s bodies or carrying out unpaid labor within the domestic space or by taking men‘s family names or through worshiping male gods or by supporting imperialism or through heedlessly raising entitled boys who continue to oppress future generations of women. These are only some of the ways that women are patriarchal, and it ⬇️

A revolution means to turn something on its head. There are many ways to turn something on its head, but the method that prevents a “re-turn” is to change what is actually inside the head. The feminist cause continues to be neglected, diminished, and co-opted in the conversations about decolonization, but one thing is still as sure as when Sankara said it, “The revolution cannot triumph without the emancipation of women.”