The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House

???I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own. And I am not free as long as one person of colour remains chained. Nor is any one of you.???

really powerful collection of essays focusing on feminism, racism + sexuality. easy to read. highly recommend.

In this small collection of essays published between 1978 and 1982, Audre Lorde—who portrays herself as a ‘black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet'—addresses the multiplicity of identities that bring the personal and the political together on both individual and collective dimensions. The power of women, poetry and anger are thus analysed in light of these intersections and its inherent tensions that can spark radical transformation. 

In ‘The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master' s House', the essay that names this selection, Lorde states that the diversity of identities within a community can spark unity, solidarity and change as long as each identity is recognised and incorporated in the struggle for emancipation as equal to other related identities in a constructive (and not solely rethoric) manner. For ‘difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. (...) community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretence that these differences do not exist'. 

This statement implies that radical change must be seen as a mutidimensional, evolutive and contested process—we're not bound by the need to romanticise past experiences nor constrained by the existence of a charismatic leadership. Neither should we expect a false hierarchy of oppression (based on class, gender, sexual identity, race or ethnicity) to form the basis of revolution (‘There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives'). Unity does not entail unanimity and verticality; each individual—with its particular experiences of oppression and resistence—constructs and shapes the possibilities of revolution both within itself and as part of a community committed to a common goal of transformation.

‘Revolution is not a one-time event. It is becoming always vigilant for the smallest opportunity to make a genuine change in established, outgrown responses; for instance, it is learning to address each other's difference with respect. (...). The 1960s should teach us how important it is not to lie to ourselves. Not to believe that revolution is a one-time event, or something that happens around us rather than inside of us. Not to believe that freedom can belong to any one group of us without the others also being free. How important it is not to allow even our leaders to define us to ourselves, or to define our sources of power to us.'