the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect.

For within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men.

feel, therefore I can be free.

The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us – the poet – whispers in our dreams:

and to transpose them into a language so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion

Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.

Simone de Beauvoir once said: ‘It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for acting.’

The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.

It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. 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. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only