This Bridge Called My Back Quotes

“I am a woman with a foot in both worlds; and I refuse the split. I feel the necessity for dialogue. Sometimes I feel it urgently.”
― Cherríe L. Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

“A theory in the flesh means one where the physical realities of our lives — our skin color, the land or concrete we grew up on, our sexual longings — all fuse to create a politic born of necessity.”
― Cherríe L. Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

“...it is not really the difference the oppressor fears so much as the similarity. He fears he will discover in himself the same aches, the same longings as those of the people he has shit on... . He fears he will have to change his life once he has seen himself in the bodies of the people he has called different.”
― Cherrie Morago, Esta Puente, Mi Espalda: Voces De Mujeres Tercermundistas En Los Estados Unidos

“The real power, as you and I well know, is collective. I can’t afford to be afraid of you, nor you of me. If it takes head-on collisions, let’s do it: this polite timidity is killing us.”
― Cherríe L. Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

“I am what I am and you can't take it away with all the words and sneers at your command.”
― Cherríe L. Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

“Think of it in terms of men's and women's cultures: women live in male systems, know male rules, speak male language when around men, etc. But what do men really know about women? Only screwed up myths concocted to perpetuate the power imbalance. It is the same situation when it comes to dominant and non-dominant or colonizing and colonized cultures/ countries/ people. As a bilingual/bicultural woman whose native culture is not American, I live in an American system, abide by American rules of conduct, speak English when around English speakers, etc., only to be confronted with utter ignorance or concocted myths and stereotypes about my own culture.

-- Judit Moschkovich - "--But I Know You, American Woman”
― Cherríe L. Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

“Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage.
Naomi Littlebear”
― Cherríe Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

“We are challenging white feminists to be accountable for their racism because at the base we still want to believe that they really want freedom for all of us.”
― Cherríe L. Moraga Gloria Anzaldua, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

“I think of how, even as a feminist lesbian, I have so wanted to ignore my own homophobia, my own hatred of myself for being queer. I have not wanted to admit that my deepest personal sense of myself has not quite "caught up" with my "woman-identified" politics. I have been afraid to criticize lesbian writers who choose to "skip over" these issues in the name of feminism. In 1979, we talk of "old gay" and "butch and femme" roles as if they were ancient history. We toss them aside as merely patriarchal notions. And yet, the truth of the matter is that I have sometimes taken society's fear and hatred of lesbians to bed with me. I have sometimes hated my lover for loving me. I have sometimes felt "not woman enough" for her. I have sometimes felt "not man enough." For a lesbian trying to survive in a heterosexist society, there is no easy way around these emotions. Similarly, in a white-dominated world, there is little getting around racism and our own internalization of it. It's always there, embodied in someone we least expect to rub up against.”
― Cherríe L. Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

“The real power, as you and I well know, is collective. I can't afford to be afraid of you, nor your of me. It takes head-on collisions, let's do it" this polite timidity is killing us.”
― Cherríe L. Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

“I keep wanting to repeat over and over and over again, the pain and shock of difference, the joy of commonness, the exhilaration of meeting through incredible odds against it.”
― Cherríe L. Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

“Ayudar a las mujeres que todavía viven en la jaula dar nuevos pasos y a romper barreras antiguas.”
― Cherrie Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

“It doesn't take many years to realize the privileges, or lack thereof, attached to a particular shade of skin or texture of hair. It is this experience that moves light-skinned or "passable" Third World women to put themselves on the line for their darker sisters. We are all family.”
― Cherríe L. Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

“It doesn't take many years to realize the privileges, or lack thereof, attached to a particular shade of skin or texture of hair. It is this experience that moves light-skinned or "passable" Third World women to put themselves on the line for their darker sisters.”
― Cherríe L. Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

“For although some of us have traveled more easily from street corner to corner than the other sister whose color or poverty made her an especially visible target to the violence on the street, all of us have been victims of the invisible violation which happens indoors and inside ourselves; the self-abnegation, the silence, the constant threat of cultural obliteration.”
― Cherríe L. Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

“It is hard to be around other people talking about their lives and not be able to talk about your own in the same way. It causes a false and painful separateness—which I'll have to live with and ignore until I know how and what to do otherwise.”
― Max Wolf Valerio, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

“As I age, I watch the divide between generations widen with time and technol-ogy. I watch how desperately we need political memory, so that we are not always imagining ourselves the ever-inventors of our revolution; so that we are humbled by the valiant efforts of our foremothers; and so, with humility and a firm foothold in history, we can enter upon an informed and re-envisioned strategy for social/political change in decades ahead.”
― Cherríe L. Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

“What ideas never surface because we imagine we already have all the answers?”
― Cherríe L. Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

“My mother & father were not good teachers They are too deeply damaged by this culture which is one of obliteration I don’t know why I see differently than they do My blessing and burden”
― Cherríe L. Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

“Maybe people have become so stupid as a result of having too many machines”
― Cherríe L. Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

“the man is always putting down herbal remedies because they’re too available to everybody. Because if you find out you can heal yourself on your own, without him, he’s out of the job.”
― Cherríe L. Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

“I’m here screaming at the top of my lungs that Black people have to be free, you see. And over here I’m hearing people saying women have to be free too;”
― Cherríe L. Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

“Only together can we be a force.”
― Cherríe L. Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

“From our blood and spirit connections with these groups, we women on the bottom throughout the world can form an international feminism. For separatism by race, nation, or gender will not do the trick of revolution.”
― Cherríe L. Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

“A woman who writes has power. A woman with power is feared. In the eyes of the world this makes us dangerous beasts.”
― Cherríe L. Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

“Is it not possible for us to recognize, respect and settle our differences; to validate our various groups’ struggles and need for separate spaces, and yet to open our eyes to the fact that divided we are only likely to succeed at defeat?”
― Cherríe L. Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

“we need to keep in mind that in this country, in this world, racism is used both to create false differences among us and to mask very very significant ones—cultural economic, political”
― Cherríe L. Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”
― Cherríe L. Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

“Anyone who was raised and educated in this country has a very good chance of being ignorant about other cultures, whether they be minority cultures in this country or those of other countries.”
― Cherríe L. Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

“When the going gets rough, will we abandon our so-called comrades in a flurry of racist/heterosexist/what-have-you panic? To whose camp, then, should the lesbian of color retreat? Her very presence violates the ranking and abstraction of oppression. Do we merely live hand to mouth? Do we merely struggle with the “ism” that’s sitting on top of our own heads?”
― Cherríe L. Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color