American - Playwright | October 18, 1948 -
Sisterhood is important because we are all we have to stand on. We have to stand near and by each other, pray for one another, and share the joys and the difficulties that women face in the world today. If we don't talk about it among ourselves, then we are made silent by the patriarchy, and that serves us no purpose.
Ntozake Shange
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I remember that my mother used to take me to see ballets, especially if there were black people in them.
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I'm a firm believer that language and how we use language determines how we act, and how we act then determines our lives and other people's lives.
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Multiculturalism isn't about culture, it's about power.
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I started writing because there's an absence of things I was familiar with or that I dreamed about. One of my senses of anger is related to this vacancy - a yearning I had as a teenager... and when I get ready to write, I think I'm trying to fill that.
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I write for young girls of color, for girls who don't even exist yet, so that there is something there for them when they arrive. I can only change how they live, not how they think.
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If anything is life-changing, being the descendant of a slave is.
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Spell-check ruins my work. It fixes all my slang and dialect into standard English. So I'm caught in a tangle of technology that feels very foreign to me.
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Multiculturalism is a white people joke.
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White people use their literature to maintain culture. That's why you find references to Milton and Spencer and Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky in contemporary novels.
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I was chastised for writing several obituaries for Malcolm X, exploring different aspects of his writing. One teacher in particular told me, didn't I think I was beating a dead horse? and dismissively threw my paper on my desk.
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Before I went to college, I went to the S.N.C.C. office three times a week to offer my services and catch up on my 'Liberator' magazine. The other two days, I went to the Lycee Francais to keep my French crisp. I felt comfortable in the diversity of my worlds.
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