Intersectionality Quotes

“What keeps a poor child in Appalachia poor is not what keeps a poor child in Chicago poor—even if from a distance, the outcomes look the same. And what keeps an able-bodied black woman poor is not what keeps a disabled white man poor, even if the outcomes look the same.”
― Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race

“I don't want to be included. Instead, I want to question who created the standard in the first place. After a lifetime of embodying difference, I have no desire to be equal. I want to deconstruct the structural power of a system that marked me out as different. I don't wish to be assimilated into the status quo. I want to be liberated from all the negative assumptions that my characteristics bring. The same onus is not on me to change. Instead it's the world around me..”
― Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race

“A black woman making art is a disruptive act. Every story that I tell as a woman is a political act, even if I want to tell a 'silly love story.' The fact it exists through my gaze is radical.”
― Ava DuVernay

“I fear that, although white feminism is palatable to those in power, when it has won, things will look very much the same. Injustice will thrive, but there will be more women in charge of it. Feminism is not about equality, and certainly not about silently slipping into a world of work created by and for men. Feminism, at its best, is a movement that works to liberate all people who have been economically, socially and culturally marginalized by an ideological system that has been deigned for them to fail. That means disabled people, black people, trans people, women and non-binary people, LGB people and working-class people. The idea of campaigning for equality must be complicated if we are to untangle the situation we're in. Feminism will have won when we have ended poverty. It will have won when women are no longer expected to work two jobs (the care and emotional labour for their families as well as their day jobs) by default.”
― Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race

“When I look at people talking about intersectionality, what I see is the human being magnifying a biological attribute, and then putting them aside, putting them in a corner as victims of oppression....I most certainly don't see myself as a victim.”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali

“I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean--in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.

For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“Include and project the voices of underrepresented people in the spaces where their access is limited. Go love, and build, and restore, and speak, and engage, and create. Go be better and do better.”
― Kevin A. Patterson, Love's Not Color Blind: Race and Representation in Polyamorous and Other Alternative Communities

“Folks who believe that abortion is permissible in the case of rape, but not permissible in the case of accidental pregnancy from consensual sex, are not actually condemning abortion; rather the moral axis here is the sexual behavior----the blameworthiness----of the pregnant person.”
― June Eric-Udorie, Can We All Be Feminists?: New Writing from Brit Bennett, Nicole Dennis-Benn, and 15 Others on Intersectionality, Identity, and the Way Forward for Feminism

“We must pay attention to gender, but it is difficult to pay attention to gender all by itself…It emerges differently in women’s lives because it hooks onto other markers such as race, class, sexual orientation and age.”
― Sari Knopp Biklen, School Work: Gender and the Cultural Construction of Teaching

“When weight loss is conflated with veganism, it falls into dangerous area of body shaming and misogyny. Mainstream media loves to make women feel inferior when it comes to their bodies and unfortunately veganism has recently become another weapon and this sexist war on our society. Thin white women are used to sell veganism as a quick fix to a more desirable body at the expense of anyone who doesn't fit the cookie cutter idea of female perfection. In addition, these images and messages work to oppress women of colour and people living with disabilities. Selling veganism as anything other than caring for animals often leads to oppression, plain and simple. We need to resist this approach to promoting veganism by drawing the fight back to animals. Every single time.”
― Sean o'callaghan, Fat, Gay Vegan - Eat, Drink and Live Like You Give a Sh!t

“As a community, we should seek to create an environment that is inclusive of varying perspectives. Flat out, it makes us stronger. Diversity of thoughts and experiences opens us up to new ideas or to approaching old ideas in new ways.”
― Kevin A. Patterson, Love's Not Color Blind: Race and Representation in Polyamorous and Other Alternative Communities

“A sex worker who is living precariously or in poverty, who is at risk of criminalization or police violence, or who is being exploited by a manager or lacks negotiating power is not likely to be particularly 'sex positive' at work. These factors are structural, not a function of the worker's state of enlightenment.”
― Molly Smith, Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights

“Given greater freedom about where to send their children, parents of a kind would flock together and so prevent a healthy intermingling of children from decidedly different backgrounds.”
― Milton Friedman

“I don't trust the everyday: it is a mask, a sham. It gives the illusion of permanence, of an unshatterable calm, a placid surface; and yet underneath the pot is slowly coming to a boil.”
― Rebecca Walker, Black White and Jewish

“Inclusivity has to be seen as a benefit to the community. The lack of diversity has to be seen as a detriment to that community.”
― Kevin A. Patterson, Love's Not Color Blind: Race and Representation in Polyamorous and Other Alternative Communities

“The thing that makes systemic oppression so difficult to discuss is that when you do, you have to acknowledge your role in it. Often this means having to admit that you're part of the problem. It's not a comfortable experience when you learn that you further or benefit from the oppression of others.”
― Kevin A. Patterson, Love's Not Color Blind: Race and Representation in Polyamorous and Other Alternative Communities

“I would subject myself a black man's harassment a thousand times over rather than watch his face hit the pavement with a police officer's weight on his back. That's not justice. That is a betrayal.”
― Morgan Jerkins, This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America

“...we all live our lives with multiple identities intersecting with one another, creating a mix of privileges and challenges that all people carry with us. Race, gender, economic background, religion, immigration status, family acceptance, and so much more create a complex matrix that sometimes erects obstacles but other times ensures support in overcoming barriers put in your way.”
― Sarah McBride, Tomorrow Will Be Different: Love, Loss, and the Fight for Trans Equality

“Beyond the obvious demands - an end to sexual violence, an end to the wage gap - feminism must be class-conscious, and aware of the limiting culture of the gender binary. It needs to recognise that disabled people aren't inherently defective, but rather that non-disabled people have failed at creating a physical world that serves all. Feminism must demand affordable, decent, secure housing, and a universal basic income. It should demand pay for full-time mothers and free childcare for working mothers. It should recognise that we live in a world in which women are constantly harangued into being lusted after, but punishes sex workers for using that situation to make a living. Feminism needs to thoroughly recognise that sexuality is fluid, and we need to dream of a world where people are not violently policed for transgressing rigid gender roles. Feminism needs to demand a world in which racist history is acknowledged and accounted for, in which reparations are distributed, in which race is completely deconstructed.”
― Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race

“I had planned to consult with a Black colleague, but when I approached her in the hall she had a crowd of students about, all of them talking, a stack of books in one arm, a mass of student papers in the other, seven committee reports wedged in between, as well as her small daughter in a backpack, and she was looking surreptitiously at her watch. So I went on reading and taking notes.”
― Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women's Writing

“If a group isn't being actively inclusive, it's being passively exclusive. This passive attitude results in lifestyle communities that do not reflect the local population.”
― Kevin A. Patterson, Love's Not Color Blind: Race and Representation in Polyamorous and Other Alternative Communities

“Without acknowledging the variety of the human experience, all you get is the perspective of majority representation, which is mostly white and male and straight and able-bodied and cisgender and "traditionally" attractive. None of those things are inherently negative... but neither are their alternatives. So, all deserve some spotlight.”
― Kevin A. Patterson, Love's Not Color Blind: Race and Representation in Polyamorous and Other Alternative Communities

“The next customer in line was a white woman who had purchased a set of baby’s pajamas for her pregnant sister.

“Men,” the customer said. “Who can understand the way their minds work?”

Mother knew what the lady was talking about, but she couldn’t laugh at a black man with her, even though she was only laughing at him for being a man.”
― Tayari Jones, Silver Sparrow

“Oppressions are by definition linked--linked by common ideologies, by institutional forces, and by socialization that makes oppressions normative and invisible.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Sister Species: Women, Animals and Social Justice

“During the last ten years or so, I've seen quite a lot of Gordon, selling off his land for him. You know Gordon. He goes for anything trendy, especially young people's fads. Goes all out for a while, until something else takes his attention. Disco dancing, anti-draft, cocaine, anti-nuke - he has his little fling at whatever is 'in.' Most of 'em seem kind of nasty to me, but then I’m a bourgeois flag-waver."

 "He calls me a fascist," Helena said.

 "Oh, sure. He'd call me one too, except that I'm an Oppressed Minority. I bother him because I don't behave the way his stereotype says I should.”
― Bob Leman, Feesters in the Lake & Other Stories

“Eradication of pain, "deviant", or "oppositional" behaviors does not indicate healing; however, it can signify successful conditioning.”
― Kierra C.T. Banks

“No group wants to be known locally or widely as "the group that is thoughtlessly, carelessly or intentionally unwelcoming to people of color.”
― Kevin A. Patterson, Love's Not Color Blind: Race and Representation in Polyamorous and Other Alternative Communities

“Reading from ourselves, with a clear awareness of the power relations that we need to defy in order to define our own identity, with the awareness of our fragmented identity that can be strengthened by acknowledging both its multiplicity and its incompleteness, and with the understanding that we are in process, that we are constantly hybridizing in our interactions with others, will empower us to cross the borders that we need to challenge in order to bring about transformation through the agency of our self-defined identity.”
― Leticia Guardiola-Saénz

“The progressive stack is basically a measure of how much you aren’t like, say, James Watt, the developer of the modern steam engine, the key invention of the Industrial Revolution. Watt was white, male, Protestant, straight, rich, mechanically skilled, and a scientific genius, so you’d better not be.”
― Steve Sailer

“Many social justice activists--many feminists--continue to work against one form of oppression while feeding the flames of another, without noticing that the blow torch behind the flames must be tuned off before we can have any hope of putting out the resultant fires.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Sister Species: Women, Animals and Social Justice