Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference by Audre
Lorde. Excerpts from Sister Outsider,
Crossing Press, CA. 1984.
Much of Western European history conditions us to see human differences
in simplistic opposition to each other: dominant/subordinate, good/bad,
up/down, superior/inferior. In a society where the good is defined in terms of
profit rather than in terms of human need, there must always be some group of
people who, through systematized oppression, can be made to feel surplus, to
occupy the place of dehumanized inferior. Within this society, that group is
made up of Black and Third World people, working-class people, older people,
and women.
As a forty-nine-year-old Black lesbian feminist socialist mother of
two, including one boy, and a member of an interracial couple, I usually find
myself a part of some group defined as other, deviant, inferior or just plain
wrong. Traditionally, in American society, it is the members of oppressed,
objectified groups who are expected to stretch out and bridge the gap between
the actualities of our lives and the consciousness of our oppressor. For in
order to survive, those of us for whom oppression is as American as apple pie
have always had to be watchers, to become familiar with the language and
manners of the oppressor, even sometimes adopting them for some illusion of
protection. Whenever the need for some pretense of communication arises, those
who profit from our oppression call upon us to share our knowledge with them.
In other words, it is the responsibility of the oppressed to teach the
oppressors their mistakes. I am responsible for educating teachers who dismiss
my children’s culture in school. Black and Third World people are expected to
educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men.
Lesbians and gay men are expected to educate the heterosexual world. The oppressors
maintain their position and evade responsibility for their own actions. There
is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining
ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and
constructing the future.
Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a
profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people. As members of such an
economy, we have all been programmed
to respond to the human differences between us with fear and loathing and to
handle that difference in one of three ways: ignore it, and if that is not
possible, copy it if we think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is
subordinate. But we have no patterns for relating across our human differences
as equals. As a result, those differences have been misnamed and misused in the
service of separation and confusion.
Certainly there are very real differences between us of race, age, and
sex. But it is not those differences between us that are separating us. It is
rather our refusal to recognize those differences, and to examine the
distortions which result from our misnaming them and their effects upon human
behavior and expectation.
Racism, the belief in the
inherent superiority of one race over all others and thereby the right to
dominance. Sexism, the belief in the inherent superiority of one sex over the
other and thereby the right to dominance. Ageism. Heterosexism. Elitism.
Classism.
It is a lifetime pursuit for each one of us to extract these
distortions from our living at the same time as we recognize, reclaim, and
define those differences upon which they are imposed. For we have all been
raised in a society where those distortions were endemic within living. Too
often, we pour the energy needed for recognizing and exploring difference into
pretending those differences are insurmountable barriers, or that they do not
exist at all. This results in a voluntary isolation, or false and treacherous
connections. Either way, we do not develop tools for using human difference as
a spring-board for creative change within our lives. We speak not of human
difference, but of human deviance.
Somewhere, on the edge of consciousness, there is what I call a mythical norm, which each one of us
within our hearts knows “that is not me.” In America, this norm is usually
defined as white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian, and financially
secure. It is with this mythical norm that the trappings of power reside within
this society. Those of us who stand outside that power often identify one way
in which we are different, and we assume that to be the primary cause of all
oppression, forgetting other distortions around difference, some of which we
ourselves may be practicing. By and large within the women’s movement today,
white women focus upon their oppression as women and ignore differences of
race, sexual preference, class, and age. There is a pretense to a homogeneity
of experience covered by the word sisterhood
that does not in fact exist.
Unacknowledged class differences rob women of each others’ energy and
creative insight. Recently a women’s magazine collective made the decision for
one issue to print only prose, saying poetry was a less “rigorous” or “serious”
art form. Yet even the form our creativity takes is often a class issue. Of all
the art forms, poetry is the most economical. It is the one which is the most
secret, which requires the least physical labor, the least material, and the
one which can be done between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway,
and on scraps of surplus paper. Over the last few years, writing a novel on
tight finances, I came to appreciate the enormous differences in the material
demands between poetry and prose. As we reclaim our literature, poetry has been
the major voice of poor, working class, and Colored women. A room of one’s own
may be a necessity for writing prose, but so are reams of paper, a typewriter,
and plenty of time. The actual requirements to produce the visual arts also
help determine, along class lines, whose art is whose. In this day of inflated
prices for material, who are our sculptors, our painters, our photographers?
When we speak of a broadly based women’s culture, we need to be aware of the
effect of class and economic differences on the supplies available for producing
art.
As we move toward creating a society within which we can each flourish, ageism in another distortion of relationship which interferes without vision. By ignoring the past, we are encouraged to repeat its mistakes. The “generation gap” is an important social tool for any repressive society. If the younger members of a community view the older members as contemptible or suspect or excess, they will never be able to join hands and examine the living memories of the community, nor ask the all important question, “Why?” This gives rise to a historical amnesia that keeps us working to invent the wheel every time we have to go to the store for bread.
We find ourselves having to repeat and relearn the same old lessons
over and over that our mothers did because we do not pass on what we have
learned, or because we are unable to listen. For instance, how many times has
this all been said before? For another, who would have believed that once again
our daughters are allowing their bodies to be hampered and purgatoried by
girdles and high heels and hobble skirts?
Ignoring the differences of race between women and the implications of
those differences presents the most serious threat to the mobilization of
women’s joint power.
[…]
On the other hand, white women face the pitfall of being seduced into
joining the oppressor under the pretense of sharing power. This possibility
does not exist in the same way for women of Color. The tokenism that is
sometimes extended to us is not an invitation to join power; our racial
“otherness” is a visible reality that makes that quite clear. For white women
there is a wider range of pretended choices and rewards for identifying with
patriarchal power and its tools.
Today, with the defeat of ERA, the tightening economy, and increased
conservatism, it is easier once again for white women to believe the dangerous
fantasy that if you are good enough, pretty enough, sweet enough, quiet enough,
teach the children to behave, hate the right people, and marry the right men,
then you will be allowed to co-exist with patriarchy in relative peace, at
least until a man needs your job or the neighborhood rapist happens along. And
true, unless one lives and loves in the trenches it is difficult to remember
that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.
[…]
What are the particular details within each of our lives that can be
scrutinized and altered to help bring about change? How do we redefine
difference for all women? It is not our differences which separate women, but
our reluctance to recognize those differences and to deal effectively with the
distortions which have resulted from the ignoring and misnaming of those
differences.
As a tool of social control, women have been encouraged to recognize
only one area of human difference as legitimate, those differences which exist
between women and men. And we have learned to deal across those differences
with the urgency of all oppressed subordinates. All of us have had to learn to
live or work or coexist with men, from our fathers on. We have recognized and
negotiated these differences, even when this recognition only continued the old
dominant/subordinate mode of human relationship, where the oppressed must
recognize the masters’ difference in order to survive.
But our future survival is predicated upon our ability to relate within
equality. As women, we must root out internalized patterns of oppression within
ourselves if we are to move beyond the most superficial aspects of social
change. Now we must recognize differences among women who are our equals,
neither inferior nor superior, and devise ways to use each other’s difference
to enrich our visions and our joint struggles.
The future of our earth may depend upon the ability of all women to
identify and develop new definitions of power and new patterns of relating
across difference. The old definitions have not served us, nor the earth that
supports us. The old patterns, no matter how cleverly rearranged to imitate
progress, still condemn us to cosmetically altered repetitions of the same old
exchanges, the same old guilt, hatred, recrimination, lamentation, and
suspicion.
For we have, built into all of us, old blueprints of expectations and
response, old structures of oppression, and these must be altered at the same
time as we alter the living conditions which are a result of those structures.
For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.
As Paulo Freire shows so well in The
Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the true focus of revolutionary change is never
merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the
oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which knows only the
oppressors’ tactics, the oppressors’ relationships.
Change means growth, and growth can be painful. But we sharpen self-definition
by exposing the self in work and struggle together with those whom we define as
different from ourselves, although sharing the same goals. For Black and white,
old and young, lesbian and heterosexual women alike, this can mean new paths to
our survival.
We have chosen each other
and the edge of each others battles
the war is the same
if we lose
someday women’s blood will congeal
upon a dead planet
if we win
there is no telling
we seek beyond history
for a new and more possible meeting.
[1980]
Biography taken from www.poets.org
Poet, essayist, and novelist Audre Lorde was born on February 18, 1934,
in New York City. Her parents were immigrants from Grenada. The youngest of
three sisters, she was raised in Manhattan and attended Catholic school. While
she was still in high school, her first poem appeared in Seventeen magazine.
Lorde received her B.A. from Hunter College and an M.L.S. from Columbia
University. She served as a librarian in New York public schools from 1961
through 1968. In 1962, Lorde married Edward Rollins. They had two children,
Elizabeth and Jonathon, before divorcing in 1970.
Her first volume of poems, The First Cities, was published in 1968. In
1968 she also became the writer-in-residence at Tougaloo College in
Mississippi, where she discovered a love of teaching. In Tougaloo she also met
her long-term partner, Frances Clayton. The First Cities was quickly followed
with Cables to Rage (1970) and From a Land Where Other People Live (1972),
which was nominated for a National Book Award. In 1974 she published New York
Head Shot and Museum. Whereas much of her earlier work focused on the
transience of love, this book marked her most political work to date.
In 1976, W.W. Norton released her collection Coal and shortly
thereafter published The Black Unicorn. Poet Adrienne Rich said of The Black
Unicorn that "Lorde writes as a Black woman, a mother, a daughter, a
Lesbian, a feminist, a visionary; poems of elemental wildness and healing, nightmare
and lucidity." Her other volumes include Chosen Poems Old and New (1982)
and Our Dead Behind Us (1986). Poet Sandra M. Gilbert noted not only Lorde's
ability to express outrage, but also that she was capable of "of rare and,
paradoxically, loving jeremiads." Although her work gained wide acclaim,
she was also sharply criticized. In an interview in the journal Callaloo, Lorde
responded to her critics: "My sexuality is part and parcel of who I am,
and my poetry comes from the intersection of me and my worlds. . . . Jesse
Helms's objection to my work is not about obscenity . . .or even about sex. It
is about revolution and change. . . . Helms knows that my writing is aimed at
his destruction, and the destruction of every single thing he stands for."
Lorde was diagnosed with cancer and chronicled her struggles in her
first prose collection, The Cancer Journals, which won the Gay Caucus Book of
the Year award for 1981. Her other prose volumes include Zami: A New Spelling
of My Name (1982), Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984), and A Burst of
Light (1988), which won a National Book Award.
In the 1980s, Lorde and writer Barbara Smith founded Kitchen Table:
Women of Color Press. She was also a founding member of Sisters in Support of
Sisters in South Africa, an organization that worked to raise concerns about
women under apartheid.
Audre Lorde was professor of English at John Jay College of criminal
justice and Hunter College. She was the poet laureate of New York from
1991-1992. She died of breast cancer in 1992. The Collected Poems Of Audre
Lorde was published in 1997.
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