Remember What Audre Lorde Told Us: The Oppressor Doesn’t Determine What’s True

Since Donald Trump got here to energy for the second time in the USA, the assaults on all of our intersecting communities have been raining down quick and onerous.

The present Trump administration has unleashed an assault on undocumented immigrants; teachers who refuse to excise discussions of systemic racism from their curricula; trans schoolchildren and their teachers; people in need of reproductive health care; Palestinians resisting the ethnic cleansing of Gaza; recipients of humanitarian aid; diversity, equity and inclusion workers; Muslims in the U.S.; U.S. citizens who speak Spanish; children who are born in the U.S. to immigrant mother and father; Indigenous people; union workers; pro-Palestine activists; incarcerated people; abortion pill providers; trans workers facing discrimination; and plenty of others amongst us.

Already the coverage modifications made underneath the second Trump administration have derailed anti-discrimination laws and affirmative action initiatives, clean water protections, consumer protection measures, standard public health measures, medical doctors’ capacity to entry basic medical information and environmental protection efforts.

Within the face of those assaults, greater than ever we have to make house for Black Historical past Month as a time for deep reflection. Let’s declare house for a way of Black care, a time and house the place we have a good time or assemble to honor one another and people Black voices which have formed us, empowered us, augmented our crucial imginations, and have given of themselves their time, vitality, ache and love.

There’s nothing merely abtract or cerebral about this course of. It isn’t simple. Remembering might be painful, and but transformative and joyful. It’s a profoundly embodied and affective course of, a coming collectively that encourages variations and but negotiates such variations for mutually higher understanding and empowerment.

Considerably, Audre Lorde understood the which means of our interconnectedness, saying, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.”

Therefore, it’s with deep respect for Lorde’s scholarship, her political, philosophical and poetic voice, and her activism, that I interviewed Amber Jamilla Musser to focus on crucial insights of Audre Lorde’s work.

Musser is a professor of English and Africana research on the CUNY Graduate Heart. Her work critically engages necessary themes on the intersections of race, sexuality and aesthetics. Her just lately printed ebook is entitled, Between Shadows and Noise: Sensation, Situatedness, and the Undisciplined. The interview that follows has been calmly edited for readability and size.

George Yancy: It’s my understanding that Audre Lorde, utilizing the ability of self-descriptive company, outlined herself as a “Black, lesbian, mom, warrior, poet.” There’s something audacious about Lorde’s self-understanding. It’s a type of articulation that not solely courageously speaks the reality, nevertheless it additionally refuses an exterior gaze that’s typically stuffed with so many presuppositions that do violence. It’s that readability of self that speaks to self-empowerment. But, that readability is collectively generative; it encourages others to talk for themselves as they need (maybe demand) to be recognized. I’ll start there. Let’s speak in regards to the audacity of Lorde and her ardour for talking fact to energy, particularly when it comes to the way it reveals up in her written work.

Amber Musser: First, it’s necessary to do not forget that Lorde attracts power from being perceived as totally different, main her to argue in “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House” that, “It’s studying find out how to stand alone, unpopular and typically reviled, and find out how to make widespread trigger with these others recognized as outdoors the constructions with a view to outline and search a world during which we will all flourish. It’s studying find out how to take our variations and make them strengths.”

On this, what you describe as audacity, this fierce claiming of being, we will see that Lorde is just not content material with merely sitting with description, however desires to mobilize these identities towards altering the world. Right here, we see that Lorde’s assortment of labels — “Black, lesbian, mom, warrior, poet” — names a set of interlocking political identities. Though this can be a record of correct descriptions, what’s most necessary about them for Lorde is that they’ve formed the way in which she understands and strikes by means of the world. Her Blackness, for instance, has led to her considering deeply about racism; her lesbianism has influenced most of the erotic undertones in her poetry; and her motherhood informs the way in which she writes towards the long run. After all, Lorde is within the ways in which these identities intersect, however she can also be excited about how they orient her considering and being in opposition to varied types of oppression based mostly on her personal experiences of marginalization.

However there’s something else that’s necessary about Lorde’s self-claiming of those identities. Though she started lots of her public displays with this phrase, one of many locations the complete phrase of self-claimed identities seems in writing is in The Cancer Journals, the ebook of prose and journal entries that she printed in 1980 after her first bout with breast most cancers. The ebook is clear-eyed and filled with indictments: Lorde traces the ways in which racism and capitalism have elevated her and her group’s publicity to poisonous environmental pollution, and she or he forcefully critiques the superficiality of the medical-industrial complicated and its gendered expectations for what restoration from breast most cancers appears to be like like. On this context, I see Lorde’s claiming of her identities as an intervention in opposition to methods of energy that may see her as a statistic or object; right here, these labels communicate to her humanity and illustrate the various totally different ways in which she exists in group.

So I believe this set of labels is necessary and provoking for thus many causes; there’s the sheer radicality of present as a Black lesbian within the Fifties (and mom for the reason that Sixties), seeing how one can stay one’s identification politically, and there’s the insistence on prioritizing one’s humanity and group. In every of those, we’ve classes for find out how to transfer by means of the world.

My emphasis on the “collectively generative” displays what I see as Lorde’s goal to talk to and with others. Certainly, talking already implies sociality or being with others. Lorde wrote, “I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.” Lorde is clearly conscious of the chance concerned in refusing silence. Might you share a number of the methods during which you consider Lorde’s work on language and motion are necessary to us as we speak?

Later in that very same essay — which was initially printed in The Most cancers Journals, by the way in which — Lorde writes, “What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? 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?”

To me, that is Lorde’s invitation to talk fact to energy, to not permit the framework of the oppressor decide what’s true or actual by letting the world get smaller and smaller. On this manner it jogs my memory of Hannah Arendt’s warning that fascism proceeds by obfuscating the reality so that folks change into unaware of some other potentialities. Lorde asks us to recollect the significance of critique — that it solely turns into potential if individuals are talking from outdoors the facilities of energy. This additionally means paying attention to the ability dynamics that produce silence. It isn’t merely a matter of eager to say one thing; the power to talk additionally depends on the maintanenace of a public sphere.

In our present second, Lorde’s arguments make me suppose quite a bit in regards to the efforts behind ebook banning, the place books that permit readers to see and take into consideration lives past the white, Christian, heterosexual norm are being taken away from libraries and colleges. That is the kind of silencing that not solely disavows many ways in which individuals are dwelling their lives, however this silencing desires to make it tough for some to even think about different methods of being. On the one hand, these impulses towards censorship underscore the ability of the phrases and concepts that they need to ban, however however, they clearly serve to additional marginalize and, extra dangerously, criminalize or pathologize some ways of being, which in flip, impoverishes the political sphere by leaving individuals feeling disempowered and unable to talk.

We see loads of these identical forces at work in “cancel tradition” and doxing — in that individuals are being disallowed to talk by mobilizing bigger forces in opposition to them. Within the case of doxing, the observe removes the speaker’s sense of security by making them weak to the vigilant justice of the mob, and in cancel tradition, a group determines that somebody’s utterances are not welcome or, worse, that they have to be expelled from the group. However I believe right here the underlying questions are literally much less about speech and extra about what it means to be in group. To that, I might reemphasize that Lorde has a powerful funding in forming solidarity throughout distinction and dealing by means of disagreements and permitting individuals the security to take action.

Lorde powerfully acknowledged, “My response to racism is anger.” She implied that earlier in her life she expressed her anger in silence. She then emphatically says, “My concern of anger taught me nothing. Your concern of that anger will educate you nothing, additionally.” What I like about Lorde is how trustworthy she is about shared human embodiment, and a spread of affective states — anger, pleasure, eros. Once I learn “The Uses of Anger,” I believed in regards to the latest presidential election and the way Black women have been expressing anger regarding white women’s decision to vote for Trump, particularly given his nasty and violent remedy of girls. This speaks to an extended historical past of white ladies and their loyalty to whiteness. Inside this context, we should always observe that in “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” Lorde is crucial of the expectation that Black ladies are tasked with educating white ladies. She says, “It is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought.” What knowledge may Lorde share with Black ladies vis-à-vis the difficulty of white ladies’s loyalty to whiteness?

In loads of methods this query of “divided” loyalities goes again to what I used to be simply saying about group. One of many causes that Lorde is invested in working by means of distinction is that it may be helpful for seeing how individuals’s relationships to energy have an effect on their views. In “Age, Race, Class, and Intercourse: Girls Redefining Distinction,” Lorde writes, “it is not those differences between us that are separating us. It is rather a refusal to recognize those differences, and to examine the distortions which result from our misnaming them and their effects upon human behavior and expectation.”

Right here, I don’t see Lorde as advocating for Black ladies to show white ladies something, however I do see an emphasis on the significance of crucial self-reflection. Endeavor that sort of self-analysis would allow ladies to see how forces of patriarchy, classism, heterosexism and racism have turned individuals away from working towards their widespread trigger — the battle for equality, dignity and dismantling oppression. This work is necessary for everybody as a result of it helps to sow the seeds for solidarity. There’s, nonetheless, extra to Lorde’s politics. She was additionally pragmatic and nicely conscious of white ladies’s attachment not solely to whiteness, but additionally to the protections afforded by white patriarchy. And in gentle of that, I believe we have to take severely Lorde’s requires self-care, that are about recognizing that Black ladies live underneath circumstances of fixed duress and oppression, and that taking the time to take care of one’s self is radical as a result of it goes in opposition to the demand that Black ladies use their vitality and labor for others (together with training): “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

Lastly, Lorde can also be conscious of how internalized oppression operates. She warns of “the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which knowns only the oppressors’ tactics, the oppressors’ relationships.” Lorde’s level right here has implications for all of us who need to be freed from a number of and intersectional oppressions. Might you communicate to this?

Lorde keenly understood the ways in which experiences of energy formed the way in which individuals stay their lives. On the one hand, it makes for a wealthy tapestry of intersectional identities, however on the opposite, it produces these knots whereby these totally different relationships to energy lead to conflicting wishes — acutely aware or not. I’ve already talked about Lorde’s dialogue of white ladies, however in “Sexism: An American Disease in Blackface,” she writes, “On this nation, Black ladies historically have had compassion for everyone else besides ourselves. Now we have cared for whites as a result of we needed to for pay or survival; we’ve cared for our youngsters and our fathers and our brothers and our lovers.… We have to study to have care and compassion for ourselves, additionally.”

The explanations for this “compassion,” which holds others in larger regard than Black ladies and which we’d additionally describe as a kind of internalized oppression, has largely to do with survival. In some methods which means the reply to internalized oppression is structural. Fixing financial inequalities and offering entry to training, housing and jobs would relieve Black ladies of the burden of getting to rely upon others for security, which might then imply that their emotions may have free rein.

As a result of, in fact, the ways in which these types of structural dependency are skilled are, as Lorde factors out, by means of the devaluation of 1’s price and self. This brings me again to Lorde’s dialogue of caring for the self as a political act, and it additionally returns us to the place this dialog started — with the audacity of Lorde’s self-claiming of identification.

At this level, nonetheless, maybe we see that embedded inside every of the opposite labels “Black,” “girl,” “mom,” “lesbian” and “poet,” we all the time already discover “warrior” as a result of claiming every of those identities requires feeling by means of an oppositional framework to shed the bags of marginalization and devaluation to search out one thing that feels true.