Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

In these three essays, Lorde addresses the need for women’s solidarity across differences. Such solidarity requires that women understand that the fear-based exclusion of other, different women perpetuates oppression. The fear and rejection of difference are tools of the oppressors against those with whom the oppressed share common goals. For Lorde, only infinitesimal change is possible within white male models of power. Women, then, must use difference as a well of creativity for self-definition and for imagining and manifesting what is possible outside dominant power structures.

Lorde directs much of her comments at white women, since “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” (117). Speaking directly to white women at The Second Sex Conference of 1979, she reminds them that neglecting race, sexuality, class, and age differences among American women “weakens any feminist discussion of the personal and the political” (110). With this opening, Lorde sets the stage for a wider discussion of differences in “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” where she extends the discussion beyond white women. Although, she does reiterate in “Age, Race, Class, and Sex” the driving points of “Master’s Tools”: the dismissal of women of color and the adoption of racist patriarchal tools. In “Age, Race, Class, and Sex,” she writes that “white women ignore their built-in privilege of whiteness and define woman in terms of their own experience alone” (117). Furthermore, white privilege allows them to identify with “patriarchal power and its tools” (119) based on the illusion of sharing power with their white, male oppressors.

These ideas—of limited definitions of woman and the lure of identifying with one’s own oppressors based on the illusion of power—relate back to Lorde’s letter to Mary Daly, as well as “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.” Women’s liberation, to the extent that it complies with a racist patriarchy, is only white women’s liberation; this means excluding the histories and voices of women of color and making excuses for the exclusion. Lorde notes that white women academics often justify their exclusion of racially diverse literature by saying that the literature is too difficult to understand or that women of colors’ experiences are too different for white women to teach in their classes. However, as Lorde points out, they still teach the literature of white men whose experience also differs from theirs (117). This suggests that white women demonstrate a vested interest in preserving a particular vision of womanhood—one that is white and allows them to identify with their white male counterparts and access proximal power.

Furthermore, Lorde argues that white women’s “reluctance to see Black women as women and different from themselves” (118) is due to their avoidance of white guilt. She mentions this guilt in “Age, Race, Class, and Sex,” when she says, “[A]s long as any difference between us means one of us must be inferior, then the recognition of any difference must be fraught with guilt” (118). She elaborates in “The Uses of Anger” when she explains to white women that their guilt is not a response to Black women’s anger about racism—it is a response to their own actions or lack thereof regarding racism (130). In addition, while guilt can lead to change, it is more often used to protect ignorance and preserve the status quo (130). Thus, white women’s rejection of differences functions to preserve their relative privilege and proximal power in terms of race, which sacrifices true liberation for women in the process.

Although a large portion of this section is devoted to addressing racial differences within the women’s movement, Lorde identifies other differences that require attention. For example, a women’s magazine collective privileging prose over poetry exemplifies classism since “poetry has been the major voice of poor, working class, and Colored women” (116). In addition, ageism impedes learning and relating across age differences, so women repeat the mistakes of earlier generations and remain in a repetitive cycle (117). Lorde also addresses Black women regarding anti-gay bias and heterosexism, noting that “a fear of lesbians, or of being accused of being a lesbian, has led many Black women into testifying against themselves” (121), a point made previously in “Scratching the Surface: Some Notes on Barriers to Women and Loving.” This section’s discussion of classism and ageism echoes the first essay, “Notes from a Trip to Russia,” where Lorde notes the Russian concept of labor and value, as well as the sturdiness and assuredness of elderly people in Russia. This section also recalls her points about Black people’s justified rage regarding capitalism’s impact on their lives in “Sexism: An American Disease in Blackface.” What she demonstrates, then, is the interconnectedness of all oppressive systems, and thus how women’s liberation must be multifaceted and attentive to those multiple systems’ varied impacts. By ignoring these differences, a woman risks perpetuating sexism and patriarchy by using the very tools of her oppressors.

Because the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house—that is, because working within a framework does not diminish that framework—“old blueprints of expectation and response, old structures of oppression […] must be altered at the same time as we alter the living conditions which are a result of those structures” (123). In other words, women must completely re-define their approach to differences. The dominant/subordinate model of relationship and difference must give way to a model of mutuality and honored differences. Lorde says in “The Master’s Tools”:

Within the interdependence of mutual (nondominant) difference lies that security which enables us to descend into the chaos of knowledge and return with true visions of our future, along with the concomitant power to effect those changes which can bring that future into being. Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged (111-12).

She also posits that “the power of touching and meeting another woman’s difference and wonder will eventually transcend the need for destruction” (133). Thus, these three essays illustrate that a new approach to difference requires discarding the oppressor’s tactics, as varied as they may be.