Audre Lorde
Audre Lorde
Audre Lordewas an African American writer, feminist, womanist, lesbian, and civil rights activist. As a poet, she is best known for technical mastery and emotional expression, particularly in her poems expressing anger and outrage at civil and social injustices she observed throughout her life. Her poems and prose largely dealt with issues related to civil rights, feminism, and the exploration of black female identity. In relation to white feminists in the United States, Lorde famously said, “the master's tools will...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth18 February 1934
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You [white women] fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you; we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs on the reasons they are dying.
It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.
We must wake up knowing we have work to do and go to bed knowing we've done it.
When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.
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 at last you'll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.
Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.
Divide and conquer must become define and empower.
When I dare to be powerful - to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.
Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.
For we have built into all of us, old blueprints of expectation and response, old structures of oppression and these must be altered at the same time that we alter the living condition which are the result of those structures. For the master's tool will never dismantle the master's house.
If I cannot air this pain and alter it, I will surely die of it. That's the beginning of social protest.
Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.
We tend to think of the erotic as an easy, tantalizing sexual arousal. I speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way.
The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.