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

Since Donald Trump came to power for the second time in the United States, the attacks on all of our intersecting communities have been raining down fast and hard.

The current 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 parents; Indigenous people; union workers; pro-Palestine activists; incarcerated people; abortion pill providers; trans workers facing discrimination; and many others among us.

Already the policy changes made under the second Trump administration have derailed anti-discrimination laws and affirmative action initiatives, clean water protections, consumer protection measures, standard public health measures, doctors’ ability to access basic medical information and environmental protection efforts.

In the face of these attacks, more than ever we need to make space for Black History Month as a time for deep reflection. Let’s claim space for a sense of Black care, a time and space where we celebrate or assemble to honor each other and those Black voices that have shaped us, empowered us, augmented our critical imginations, and have given of themselves their time, energy, pain and love.

There is nothing simply abtract or cerebral about this process. It isn’t easy. Remembering can be painful, and yet transformative and joyful. It is a profoundly embodied and affective process, a coming together that encourages differences and yet negotiates such differences for mutually greater understanding and empowerment.

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

Hence, it is with deep respect for Lorde’s scholarship, her political, philosophical and poetic voice, and her activism, that I interviewed Amber Jamilla Musser to highlight critical insights of Audre Lorde’s work.

Musser is a professor of English and Africana studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her work critically engages important themes at the intersections of race, sexuality and aesthetics. Her recently published book is entitled, Between Shadows and Noise: Sensation, Situatedness, and the Undisciplined. The interview that follows has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

George Yancy: It is my understanding that Audre Lorde, using the power of self-descriptive agency, defined herself as a “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.” There is something audacious about Lorde’s self-understanding. It is a form of articulation that not only courageously speaks the truth, but it also refuses an external gaze that is often filled with so many presuppositions that do violence. It is that clarity of self that speaks to self-empowerment. Yet, that clarity is collectively generative; it encourages others to speak for themselves as they wish (perhaps demand) to be known. I’ll begin there. Let’s talk about the audacity of Lorde and her passion for speaking truth to power, especially in terms of how it shows up in her written work.

Amber Musser: First, it’s important to remember that Lorde draws strength from being perceived as different, leading her to argue in “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House” that, “It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths.”

In this, what you describe as audacity, this fierce claiming of being, we can see that Lorde is not content with merely sitting with description, but wants to mobilize these identities toward changing the world. Here, we see that Lorde’s collection of labels — “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” — names a set of interlocking political identities. Although this is a list of accurate descriptions, what is most important about them for Lorde is that they have shaped the way she understands and moves through the world. Her Blackness, for example, has led to her thinking deeply about racism; her lesbianism has influenced many of the erotic undertones in her poetry; and her motherhood informs the way she writes toward the future. Of course, Lorde is interested in the ways that these identities intersect, but she is also interested in how they orient her thinking and being against various forms of oppression based on her own experiences of marginalization.

But there is something else that is important about Lorde’s self-claiming of these identities. Although she began many of her public presentations with this phrase, one of the places the full phrase of self-claimed identities appears in writing is in The Cancer Journals, the book of prose and journal entries that she published in 1980 after her first bout with breast cancer. The book is clear-eyed and full of indictments: Lorde traces the ways that racism and capitalism have increased her and her community’s exposure to toxic environmental pollutants, and she forcefully critiques the superficiality of the medical-industrial complex and its gendered expectations for what recovery from breast cancer looks like. In this context, I see Lorde’s claiming of her identities as an intervention against systems of power that would see her as a statistic or object; here, these labels speak to her humanity and illustrate the many different ways that she exists in community.

“It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish.”

So I think this set of labels is important and inspiring for so many reasons; there is the sheer radicality of existing as a Black lesbian in the 1950s (and mother since the 1960s), seeing how one can live one’s identity politically, and there is the insistence on prioritizing one’s humanity and community. In each of these, we have lessons for how to move through the world.

My emphasis on the “collectively generative” reflects what I see as Lorde’s aim to speak to and with others. Indeed, speaking 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 aware of the risk involved in refusing silence. Could you share some of the ways in which you believe Lorde’s work on language and action are important to us today?

Later in that same essay — which was originally published in The Cancer Journals, by the way — 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, this is Lorde’s invitation to speak truth to power, to not allow the framework of the oppressor determine what is true or real by letting the world get smaller and smaller. In this way it reminds me of Hannah Arendt’s warning that fascism proceeds by obfuscating the truth so that people become unaware of any other possibilities. Lorde asks us to remember the importance of critique — that it only becomes possible if people are speaking from outside the centers of power. This also means being attentive to the power dynamics that produce silence. It isn’t merely a matter of wanting to say something; the ability to speak also relies on the maintanenace of a public sphere.

In our current moment, Lorde’s arguments make me think a lot about the efforts behind book banning, where books that allow readers to see and think about lives beyond the white, Christian, heterosexual norm are being taken away from libraries and schools. This is the type of silencing that not only disavows many ways that people are living their lives, but this silencing wants to make it difficult for some to even imagine other ways of being. On the one hand, these impulses toward censorship underscore the power of the words and ideas that they want to ban, but on the other hand, they obviously serve to further marginalize and, more dangerously, criminalize or pathologize many ways of being, which in turn, impoverishes the political sphere by leaving people feeling disempowered and unable to speak.

We see a lot of these same forces at work in “cancel culture” and doxing — in that people are being disallowed to speak by mobilizing larger forces against them. In the case of doxing, the practice removes the speaker’s sense of safety by making them vulnerable to the vigilant justice of the mob, and in cancel culture, a community determines that someone’s utterances are no longer welcome or, worse, that they need to be expelled from the community. But I think here the underlying questions are actually less about speech and more about what it means to be in community. To that, I would reemphasize that Lorde has a strong investment in forming solidarity across difference and working through disagreements and allowing people the safety to do so.

Lorde powerfully stated, “My response to racism is anger.” She implied that earlier in her life she expressed her anger in silence. She then emphatically says, “My fear of anger taught me nothing. Your fear of that anger will teach you nothing, also.” What I admire about Lorde is how honest she is about shared human embodiment, and a range of affective states — anger, joy, eros. When I read “The Uses of Anger,” I thought about the recent presidential election and how Black women have been expressing anger regarding white women’s decision to vote for Trump, especially given his nasty and violent treatment of women. This speaks to a long history of white women and their loyalty to whiteness. Within this context, we should note that in “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” Lorde is critical of the expectation that Black women are tasked with educating white women. She says, “This is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought.” What wisdom might Lorde share with Black women vis-à-vis the issue of white women’s loyalty to whiteness?

In a lot of ways this question of “divided” loyalities goes back to what I was just saying about community. One of the reasons that Lorde is invested in working through difference is that it can be useful for seeing how people’s relationships to power affect their perspectives. In “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” 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.”

Here, I don’t see Lorde as advocating for Black women to teach white women anything, but I do see an emphasis on the importance of critical self-reflection. Undertaking that type of self-analysis would enable women to see how forces of patriarchy, classism, heterosexism and racism have turned people away from working toward their common cause — the fight for equality, dignity and dismantling oppression. This work is important for everyone because it helps to sow the seeds for solidarity. There is, however, more to Lorde’s politics. She was also pragmatic and well aware of white women’s attachment not only to whiteness, but also to the protections afforded by white patriarchy. And in light of that, I think we need to take seriously Lorde’s calls for self-care, which are about recognizing that Black women are living under conditions of constant duress and oppression, and that taking the time to care for one’s self is radical because it goes against the demand that Black women use their energy and labor for others (including education): “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

Lorde has a strong investment in forming solidarity across difference and working through disagreements and allowing people the safety to do so.

Lastly, Lorde is also aware 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 point here has implications for all of us who want to be free of multiple and intersectional oppressions. Could you speak to this?

Lorde keenly understood the ways that experiences of power shaped the way people live their lives. On the one hand, it makes for a rich tapestry of intersectional identities, but on the other, it produces these knots whereby these different relationships to power result in conflicting desires — conscious or not. I’ve already mentioned Lorde’s discussion of white women, but in “Sexism: An American Disease in Blackface,” she writes, “In this country, Black women traditionally have had compassion for everybody else except ourselves. We have cared for whites because we had to for pay or survival; we have cared for our children and our fathers and our brothers and our lovers.… We need to learn to have care and compassion for ourselves, also.”

The reasons for this “compassion,” which holds others in higher regard than Black women and which we might also describe as a type of internalized oppression, has largely to do with survival. In some ways this means that the answer to internalized oppression is structural. Solving economic inequalities and providing access to education, housing and jobs would relieve Black women of the burden of having to depend on others for safety, which would then mean that their feelings could have free rein.

Because, of course, the ways that these forms of structural dependency are experienced are, as Lorde points out, through the devaluation of one’s worth and self. This brings me back to Lorde’s discussion of caring for the self as a political act, and it also returns us to where this conversation began — with the audacity of Lorde’s self-claiming of identity.

At this point, however, perhaps we see that embedded within each of the other labels “Black,” “woman,” “mother,” “lesbian” and “poet,” we always already find “warrior” because claiming each of these identities requires feeling through an oppositional framework to shed the baggage of marginalization and devaluation to find something that feels true.