Concurrently, when it comes to matters of the heart we are encouraged to treat partners as though they were objects we can pick up, use, and the disc… - bell hooks

This fear of maleness that they inspire estranges men from every female in their lives to greater or lesser degrees, and men feel the loss. Ultimately, one of the emotional costs of allegiance to patriarchy is to be seen as unworthy of trust. If women and girls in patriarchal culture are taught to see every male, including the males with whom we are intimate, as potential rapists and murderers, then we cannot offer them our trust, and without trust there is no love.

Writing is my passion. It is a way to experience the ecstatic. The root understanding of the word ecstasy — “to stand outside” — comes to me in those moments when I am immersed so deeply in the act of thinking and writing that everything else, even flesh, falls away.

"The "we" evoked here is all of us, black people/people of color, who are daily bombarded by a powerful colonizing whiteness that seduces us away from ourselves that negates that there is beauty to be found in any form of blackness that is not imitation whiteness."