Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.
Interpretation
To truly understand the fight against dehumanization, one must engage deeply and personally in the struggle.
Audre Lorde emphasizes the importance of personal experience and emotional investment in the fight against dehumanization. She suggests that without living through the realities of oppression and connecting with those affected, it is easy to forget the ongoing nature of this struggle, which requires both courage and compassion.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a panel on social justice to emphasize the importance of empathy.
The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.
There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.
There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.
I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.
I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.
There's always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself - whether it's Black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc. - because that's the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else.
If you will protest courageously, and yet with dignity and Christian love, when the history books are written in future generations, the historians will have to pause and say, "There lived a great people-a black people-who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization.
I trust myself. I trust my instincts. I know what I'm gonna do, what I can do, what I can't do. I've been through a lot, and I could go through more, but I hope I don't have to. But if I did, I'd be able to do it. I'm not going to enjoy dying, but there's not much prep for that.
Charles de Foucauld, the found of the Little Brothers of Jesus, wrote a single sentence that's ahad a profound impact on my life. He said, "The one thing we owe absolutely to God is never to be afraid of anything." Never to be afraid of anything, even death, which, after all, is but that final breakthrough into the open, waiting, outstretched arms of Abba.
Two or three things I know for sure, and one is that I'd rather go naked than wear the coat the world has made for me.
That happened to me, but I'm so much more than that girl that was kidnapped.
It is one thing to open job opportunities. It is another to train people to fill them, or to persuade American enterprise to seek Negro as well as white applicants.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.