It is because I recognize the brutality with which my own multi-branched ancestors have been treated that I can identify the despicable, lawless, cruel, and sadistic behavior that has characterized Israel's attempts to erase a people, the Palestinians, from their own land.
We should not look down on our first ancestors.
I just feel that 'The Color Purple,' which was my 10th book, was a true gift from my ancestors.
Part of my ancestry is Cherokee. And in that tradition, you become an adult when you're 52.
And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see - or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.
Israel is guilty of apartheid and persecution of the Palestinian people, both inside Israel and also in the Occupied Territories.
People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing to remain actually fools.
So many killings of black men in my lifetime. The physical shock is astounding.
I met Howard Zinn in 1961, my first year at Spelman College in Atlanta. He was the tall, rangy, good-looking professor that many of the girls at Spelman swooned over.
When I joined the freedom movement in Mississippi in my early 20s, it was to come to the aid of sharecroppers, like my parents, who had been thrown off the land they'd always known - the plantations - because they attempted to exercise their 'democratic' right to vote.
It's an awful feeling to write something that you feel is really important... and to feel that you're being published by people who really don't get it and/or don't really care.
I know black people love the idea that we finally have a beautiful, good-looking black president. But if he is doing awful things to us, we should wake up.
I think war is so incredibly backward, and I don't think it's intelligent, and it's not sane. So why would you want to support it?
I can easily imagine Obama sitting down and talking to any leader - or any person - in the world, with no baggage of past servitude or race supremacy to mar their talks.
Some people are painters, and some are ballet dancers, and I'm a writer.
I'm very disappointed in Obama. I was very much in support of him in the beginning, but I cannot support war. I cannot support droning. I cannot support capitulating to the banks.
We must do everything in our power to cease the behaviour that makes children everywhere feel afraid.
I deeply regret any harm, or any perceived harm, that I may have done to anyone by any behaviour of mine.
War contributes greatly to global warming, which shouldn't surprise us. All those bombs going off, all those rockets, all those planes and helicopters. All that fuel of various kinds being used. It pollutes the air and water of this very fragile and interconnected planet.
I love the women's movement, and I never thought of it as belonging to any particular segment of the population.
