Daily Inspiration Quote by Barbara Smith

Black feminism is framed here not as a theory you read, but as a practical technology you live inside. Barbara Smith’s genius is the modesty of “a little easier”: a deliberately under-sold claim that signals how hard “simply to be Black and female” has historically been. The line carries the weight of lives spent translating themselves for institutions that insist on splitting identity into manageable parts - race over here, gender over there, with class and sexuality treated as optional footnotes. Smith refuses that dissection. Her “gift” is wholeness.

The subtext is also a rebuke. If being Black and female requires political scaffolding just to feel survivable, the problem isn’t Black women’s “attitude” or “strength”; it’s the social order that makes ordinary selfhood feel like an act of defiance. Black feminism, in Smith’s telling, lowers the cost of existence: it legitimizes anger, pleasure, ambition, softness - the full range - without demanding that Black women audition for sympathy.

Context matters: Smith helped articulate Black feminist politics in the 1970s, alongside the Combahee River Collective, at a moment when mainstream feminism often centered white women’s experiences and Black liberation movements often centered men. Her sentence is an accounting of what happens when people organize around what’s been erased. The payoff isn’t just policy or representation; it’s psychic. A movement becomes a mirror, and the mirror makes room.