The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House
⊳ The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House
⊳ Audre Lorde
⊳ Penguin Books
⊳ 1977-1982
“Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference – those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older – know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to make take our differences and make them strengths. 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. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.”
- Audre Lorde, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House
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“Women of 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 colour to educate white women – in the face of tremendous resistance – as to our existence, our differences, our related roles in our joint survival. This is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition a racist patriarchal thought.”
- Audre Lorde, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House
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“Racism and homophobia are real conditions of our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us 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.”
- Audre Lorde, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House
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“everything can be used
except what is wasteful
(you will need
to remember this when you are accused of destruction.)”
- Audre Lorde, For Each of You
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“I have no creative use for guilt, yours or my own. Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action, of buying time out of the pressing need to make clear choices, out of the approaching storm that can feed the earth as well as bend the trees. If I speak to you in anger, at least I have spoken to you: I have not put a gun to your head shot you down in the street; I have not looked at your bleeding sister’s body and asked, ‘What did she do to deserve it?’”
- Audre Lorde, Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism
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“To turn aside from the anger of Black women with excuses or the pretexts of intimidation is to award no one power – it is merely another way of preserving racial blindness, the power of unaddressed privilege, un reached, intact. Guilt is only another form of objectification. Oppressed people are always being asked to stretch a little more, to bridge the gap between blindness and humanity. Black women are expected to use our anger in the service of other people’s salvation or learning. But that time is over. My anger has meant pain to me but it has also meant survival, and before I give it up I’m going to be sure that there is something at least as powerful to replace it on the road to clarity.”
- Audre Lorde, Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism
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