Audre Lorde
Day Six of #BlackHistoryMonth Black Theory:
Audre Lorde
"I was going to die, sooner or later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you.... What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language." I began to ask each time: "What's the worst that could happen to me if I tell this truth?" Unlike women in other countries, our breaking silence is unlikely to have us jailed, "disappeared" or run off the road at night. Our speaking out will irritate some people, get us called bitchy or hypersensitive and disrupt some dinner parties. And then our speaking out will permit other women to speak, until laws are changed and lives are saved and the world is altered forever. Next time, ask: What's the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare. Once you start to speak, people will yell at you. They will interrupt you, put you down and suggest it's personal. And the world won't end. And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don't miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And you will still flirt and paint your nails, dress up and party, because, as I think Emma Goldman said, "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution." And at last you'll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking." Your Silence Will Not Protect You
"For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices." The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House "Revolution is not a one-time event. It is becoming always vigilant for the smallest opportunity to make a genuine change in established, outgrown responses; for instance, it is learning to address each other’s difference with respect." Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches "Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist." The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House "Change means growth, and growth can be painful. But we sharpen self-definition by exposing the self in work and struggle together with those whom we define as different from ourselves, although sharing the same goals. For Black and white, old and young, lesbian and heterosexual women alike, this can mean new paths to our survival." Age, Race, Class, and Sex
"The civil rights and Black power movements rekindled possibilities for disenfranchised groups within this nation. Even though we fought common enemies, at times the lure of individual solutions made us careless of each other. Sometimes we could not bear the face of each other’s differences because of what we feared those differences might say about ourselves. As if everybody can’t eventually be too Black, too white, too man, too woman. But any future vision which can encompass us all, by definition, must be complex and expanding, not easy to achieve." Learning from the 60s
Links:
Writings -
The Master's Tools https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/dsala/pages/1343/attachments/original/1544567321/The_Master's_Tools_Will_Never_Dismantle_the_Master's_House.pdf?1544567321
There Is No Hierarchy of Oppressions https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/audre-lorde-there-is-no-hierarchy-of-oppressions
PDFs -
Sister Outsider - https://rhinehartibenglish.weebly.com/uploads/2/2/1/0/22108252/sister_outsider_audrey_lorde_ib_pdf_packet.pdf https://archive.org/details/sisteroutsideres00lord
Audio/Video -
The Master's Tools https://youtu.be/Ffm8Kmsdizo?si=151VrV7miVo39ODp