The New Press

I HAVE LEARNED MUCH FROM TAOIST THOUGHT; it has been a comfort to me since I read my first Taoist poem: Sitting quietly, doing nothing, spring comes, and the grass grows by itself. By Bashō, I believe. But there is also, from that tradition, this thought: A wanderer’s home is in the road. This has proved very true in my life, much to my surprise.

I wish I could say white women treated me and other black people a lot better than the men did, but I cannot. It seemed to me then and it seems to me now that white women have copied, all too often, the behavior of their fathers and their brothers, and in the South, especially in Mississippi, and before that, when I worked to register voters in Georgia, the broken bottles thrown at my head were gender-free

I want the Israeli government to be made accountable for its behavior toward the Palestinians, and I want the people of the United States to cease acting like they don’t understand what is going on. All colonization, all occupation, all repression basically looks the same, whoever is doing it. Our heads cannot remain stuck in the sand; our future depends on our ability to study, to learn, to understand what is in the records and what is before our eyes.