The beauty in her delivery serves as a fundamental example of the necessary presence that poetry has in womanhood. Lorde herself is a living embodiment of that poetry.
They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Jul 24 Written By Elina Arbo. Elina Arbo. It develops and is perpetuated in the desire for power and control.
Physical forms of oppression— chains, jails, redlining, legal segregation, illegal segregation— depend on conceptual forms of oppression, on mental shortcuts that let us act quickly and decisively, without thinking , against a perceived enemy, and against our common human interests. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.
They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. See whose face it wears. They advance conquerors, not justice. And women are dangerous, after all. If many in the U. Misogyny proliferates the way racism does, the way any irrational hatred does—with name-calling and conformity. What is the theory behind racist feminism? Lorde wants the reader to understand that these tools will only allow the intellectual elites at the conference to pretend that they are exacting change, but, in reality, they are merely part of the oppression, as evidenced by those who they employ when they attend these conferences.
Now, some might say that these scholars were raised within this system and can do nothing about it, and, perhaps, they are not even aware of it. But, Lorde takes on these critics before they even have a chance to offer this objection. This brilliant rebuttal shines a massive spotlight on these scholars at their greatest point of weakness. The lack of female inclusion in art and literature, both black and white, is what is so often the railed against by these scholars at these conferences.
Thus, she is showing them that it is not society who is oppressing these black women; it is American academia which is oppressing these black women. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower. Why were two phone calls to me considered a consultation? Am I the only possible source of names of Black feminists? Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educated men as to our existence and our needs. Now we hear that it is the task of women of Color to educate white women—in the face of tremendous resistance—as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival.
This is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought. 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 there.
See whose face it wears. That you have ended by imposing on me An image of myself. All Rights Reserved.
Skip to content Preface: In the s, women of color and lesbians in the United States called on feminist scholars to recognize their own discriminatory practices and to analyze the intersections of racial, sexual, and gender hierarchies. Lorde knew firsthand the dilemmas of bridging cultures. Raised in Harlem by Caribbean immigrant parents, she had been one of the few black women within the lesbian bar culture that flourished in post-World War II New York City.
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