Women today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educate men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns. 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. Simone de Beauvoir once said: “It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for acting.” 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 there. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.
– from Audre Lorde ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’, comments at “The Personal and the Political Panel,” Second Sex Conference, New York, September 29, 1979, published in “Sister Outsider: Essays & Speeches by Audre Lorde (1984)
I don’t believe you can learn by passive interaction with the material. Learning can only take place in the active examination of the materials you read next to your own living, let that form of interaction take place rather than functioning as a computer. I am not interested in human computers and I don’t think you are either. It will be necessary for us to know each other and who we are as we look at this work.
[…]
Developing a sense of power while ignoring the realities of our lives is like trying to sail across the Atlantic Ocean on a paper boat. Simone de Beauvoir says, and I love this quotation because it feels real to me, it is only in the recognition of the genuine capacities of our lives that we may develop a motivation towards action. In other words, action lacks grounding when it takes place inside a vacuum or from a position of naivete. It is only in the face of enormous odds facing us that we can genuinely act and touch our power. We do not live in fantasies or fairy tales. To recognize the shape of what opposes us feels to me to be a very strengthening habit; to recognize the shape of the realities of our lives, particularly when they are painful and insoluble.
– from Audre Lorde ‘Black Women’s Poetry Seminar’, Freie Universitat Berlin, April – July 1984, published in “Audre Lorde: dream of europe, selected seminars and interviews 1984-2012 (2020)
