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Shame produces trauma. Trauma produces paralysis.

Bell Hooks

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Bell Hooks
Paralysis
Trauma
Produces
Shame
Produce

More quotes by Bell Hooks

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Justice is possible without equality, I believe, because of compassion and understanding. If I have compassion, then if I have more than you, which is unequal, I will still do the just thing by you.
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The wounded heart learns self-love by first overcoming low self-esteem.
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Most of us find it difficult to accept a definition of love that says we are never loved in a context where there is abuse.
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Being oppressed means the absence of choices
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Only love can heal the wounds of the past. However, the intensity of our woundedness often leads to a closing of the heart, making it impossible for us to give or receive the love that is given to us.
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For black folks, the camera provided a means to document a reality that could, if necessary, be packed, stored, moved from place to place... [Photography] offered a way to contain memories, to overcome loss, to keep history.
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Feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.
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I often find it easier to be teaching or giving to others, and often struggle with the place of my own pleasure and joy.
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I feel sad that we have allowed these knee-jerk feminists who want to act like it's a struggle against men...but again that's the least politically developed strand of feminism.
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The rage of the oppressed is never the same as the rage of the privileged.
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While it has become “cool” for white folks to hang out with black people and express pleasure in black culture, most white people do not feel that this pleasure should be linked to unlearning racism.
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I think this is what people misunderstand about Martin Luther King saying to love your enemies. They think he was just using this silly little phrase, but what he meant was that as Black Americans we need to let our anger go, because holding on to it we hold ourselves down. We oppress ourselves by holding on to anger.
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It is poetry that changes everything.
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What's so amazing about this historical moment is that it is bringing class to the fore and we have to think about the nature of work and hierarchy.
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I think Black people need to take self-esteem seriously.
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There must exist a paradigm, a practical model for social change that includes an understanding of ways to transform consciousness that are linked to efforts to transform structures.
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I've written 18 books, mostly dealing with issues of social justice, ending racism, feminism, and cultural criticism.
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Had middle class black women begun a movement in which they had labeled themselves oppressed, no one would have taken them seriously.
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Feminist education — the feminist classroom — is and should be a place where there is a sense of struggle, where there is visible acknowledgment of the union of theory and practice, where we work together as teachers and students to overcome the estrangement and alienation that have become so much the norm in the contemporary university.
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We have to constantly critique imperialist white supremacist patriarchal culture because it is normalized by mass media and rendered unproblematic.
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