Colonize This! Quotes

“Feminism is comprised of values that are important to you as a woman, not ideals arrived at by forced consensus to which you should adjust your own life.”
― Daisy Hernandez, Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism

“This is the real work of woman of color feminism: to resist acquiescence to fatality and guilt, to become warriors of conscience and action who resist death in all its myriad manifestations: poverty, cultural assimilation, child abuse, motherless mothering, gentrification, mental illness, welfare cuts, the prison system, racial profiling, immigrant and queer bashing, invasion and imperialism at home and at war.

To fight any kind of war, Kahente Horn-Miller writes. "The Biggest single requirement is fighting spirit." I thought much of this as I read Colonize This! since this collection appears in print at a time of escalating world-wide war--In Colombia, Afghanistan, Palestine. But is there ever a time of no-war for women of color? Is there ever a time when our home (our body, our land of origin) is not subject to violent occupation, violent invasion? If I retain any image to hold the heart-intention of this book, it is found in what Horn-Miller calls the necessity of the war dance. This book is one rite of passage, one ceremony of preparedness on the road to consciousness, on the "the war path of greater empowerment.”
― Bushra Rehman, Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism

“This has been particularly difficult because many on the "left" uphold the mythology that since we work against "The evils of the world," we are somehow free of racism, sexism, classism, anti-Semitism, ableism and adultism (the institutional power adults have to oppress and silence young people). After years of antioppression training and organizing work, however, I now know that many "progressive" people and organizations are just as invested in either/ or dichotomous thinking and in perpetuating oppression in the world.”
― Bushra Rehman, Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism

“Strive to be kind to each other's whirlwind girl. Strive to remember that each one of us is precious and necessary, that drama and wars put out our light. Strive to remember that this is our one, short life, and the choices we make will determine what comes of it.”
― Bushra Rehman, Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism

“More often than not, I find identity politics to be defined narrowly in progressive circles. This can limit our work to build coalitions and solidarity across communities and movements because this leads us to simply replicate all that we want to eradicate in the world.”
― Daisy Hernandez, Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism

“We are taught that these are dualisms: Jewish/Arab, public/private, visible/invisible, Black/white, privilege/oppression, pride/shame. But these are false separations that don't exist.”
― Daisy Hernandez, Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism

“A teacher once described the Haitians in her class as very obedient and polite. I said that's because their families will beat them if they get in trouble. Sensing my disapproval, she said it is good that they discipline their kids. Yes, but it can be taken too far when they instill fear of authority and beat the spirit out of their children.”
― Bushra Rehman, Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism

“You have two things against you: you're black and you're a woman. Nothing is going to be easy.”
― Bushra Rehman, Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism

“Women's studies classes do not have to be a struggle for power between white women and women of color, yet that is often what they are because of white women's racism. White women must understand that the anger of women of color express in and outside of the classroom towards them is not an issue of "hurt feelings" or "misunderstandings". to reduce our experience of that racism to "misunderstandings" is both racist and reductionist. It is akin to men telling women that we are overreacting to their sexism.

The anger of women of color is a rational, response to our invisibility. It is a rational response to a racist, sexist, capitalist structure. It is not constructive for white women to tell us that our anger is making it hard for them to relate to us, that our anger makes them feel uncomfortable, that we are not willing to find common alliances with them. This is a classic example of white women's racism. They fail to realize that in telling us there is no place for our rage, they are becoming a part of what is colonizing us---the denial of our reality. They have to accept the fact that they don't understand our experiences and have an opportunity to learn something, maybe even about themselves as opposed to wanting to shut us up. Only then can any true understanding result among us.”
― Bushra Rehman, Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism

“Who was going to tell these women that they didn't have to live this way? I was.”
― Bushra Rehman, Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism

“I thought that if I gave everything I had inside to the people I loved, I would perhaps be able to prove I wasn't a bad person. The truth was that I really wasn't a bad person. And I didn't need to dedicate my life to defining the kind of person that I was.”
― Bushra Rehman, Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism

“I consider myself a woman who is working to understand how spoken and unspoken messages have shaped my experiences and political perspectives.”
― Bushra Rehman, Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism

“I heard him only encourage my brother to date Mexican girls. They would be so grateful to go out with a gringo.”
― Bushra Rehman, Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism

“I absolutely cannot ignore all that I have endured and achieved by settling for a passive life as Adam's Rib. Some may choose to call me a revel, but I am simply a woman searching for a happier life. One in which I am allowed to love myself, and not sacrifice that love in favor of society's values.”
― Bushra Rehman, Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism

“But a new kind of life, one that she had longed to know as a child, opened up to our mother when we left. Over endless late-night phone conversations, she sympathized with our bureaucratic dilemmas, asked about our new friends and reminded us to eat well and sleep plenty.”
― Bushra Rehman, Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism

“I've looked for salvation in love, friends, work, theater, filmmaking, writing, books and myself. It is a struggle. I've been saved in little and big ways. I wish my mother would find happiness while I'm here to see it.

Waiting is what I fear. That's what I realized on a subway ride from a visit to my mom and aunt. I'm not scared of ending up like my aunt as much as I'm scared of spending my whole life existing in that passive position. Every time they ask me about marriage,I feel my own answer to myself: If I'm not waiting, I have to find the courage to make something happen.”
― Bushra Rehman, Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism

“The "aha" factor is when you have always felt something but couldn't articulate it until someone gives you a naming system that allows you to point at all the pieces. While in Gambia a couple of years after college, I was criticized at a market by a female merchant for being too aggressive when I negotiated the price. She said I acted like a man and I should remember that I am just a girl. I felt horrible and wondered if I had been rude when I realized her criticism that "I wasn't acting like a girl" came from her acceptance of gender roles and male privilege. By analyzing the incident this way, I was also creating a mental world where things can be different.”
― Bushra Rehman, Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism

“When I graduated from high school, my mom and aunt got uncharacteristically emotional, remarking that it looked like I was going to make it.

I have inherited from these women a very pragmatic way of looking at the world, because they did whatever necessary to get the job done.”
― Bushra Rehman, Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism

“If feminism is in the water I drink, my mom's herstory is the dry land that pushes me to swallow.”
― Bushra Rehman, Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism

“Out on Ocean Avenue in Flatbus, where I was a poor Black girl, living in someone else's apartment in an all-white neighborhood, where my family was seen as "the help". And at eight in the morning, on that street with all of its white faces staring down at me or not seeing me at all, I walked with my head high and made it to the bus stop without flinching. It was my armor, too.”
― Bushra Rehman, Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism

“Years later, in my sophomore year of college, my father and I finally had it out over my overnight stays with a boyfriend. Fueled with the seedlings of early feminist scholarship, I told my father that I was not a virgin and called him a dinosaur for thinking that any one man was worth so much that I would sacrifice myself and wait till I was married. "I'm here to have fun too, Dad," I said. I still cringe that the way he looked at me in disgust.”
― Bushra Rehman, Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism

“I remember being asked at a conference, "If you could be cured of HIV today, but when the disease left your body, it took with it all the strength, unconditional love, compassion, endurance, and empowerment that you have acquired since being diagnosed, would you still agree to being cured?"

I thought really long and hard about my answer and with tears in my eyes I proudly held my head up and replied, "No.”
― Bushra Rehman, Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism

“I was frustrated with myself because I did not know how to handle the "logistics" of putting complex racial issues out in a group in a way that clearly demonstrated in word and deed that I was taking responsibility for my privilege while simultaneously taking an uncomfortable promising stand against white supremacy. Although I ha Audre Lorde's words floating around my mind, I had not yet learned how to apply her teachings to my own experiences.

Finally the group resolved that I could "choose" where to go. The feeling in the room was that the situation had been resolved. But it was not resolved for me. I felt alone. I felt that regardless of where I chose to go, it would be the wrong choice.”
― Bushra Rehman, Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism

“Before reading this book, I did not understand that my power and my commitment to fighting oppression lay in finding those places where my experiences of privilege and oppression seem to be at odds with one another. Lorde's work and life taught me that I must not be afraid to go to those complex and "messy" places to understand myself, the history of my people, and to learn how to use my identities in a clear and subversive way.”
― Bushra Rehman, Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism

“There's this trope that repeats itself in the books you and I read to save our lives: that if where you grew up is killing you, you can leave and make a chosen, identity-based fam that takes up where your bio-fam left off.”
― Bushra Rehman, Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism

“When they hoped for a better future for us, they didn't realize they were giving up a chance to have good Hindu, good Nigerian good Mexican daughters.”
― Bushra Rehman, Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism

“But family is only a safe zone until you kiss another woman, question the faith or go to the movies with a white boy.”
― Bushra Rehman, Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism

“We have also grown up with a body of literature created by women of color in the last thirty years-- Alice Walker's words about womanism, Gloria Anzaldua's theories about living in the borderlands and Audre Lorder's writing about silences and survival.”
― Bushra Rehman, Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism

“We were two dark haired women who moved in overlapping circles of writers, queers, artists, and feminists.”
― Bushra Rehman, Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism