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Last week, I wrote about the importance of liberal funders investing in progressive leaders the way the right wing invests in conservative ones. A colleague wrote in the comment section on social media, “I don’t think the left is going to win by copying the Right. The Right appeals to the interests of the wealthy. The truly radical Left does not. In fact, the radical Left poses a direct threat. Master’s house, Master’s tools…”
Several colleagues agreed. I think the comment is thought-provoking. The right appeals to the wealthy, whereas true leftists are a threat to those who hoard wealth and power; I can’t agree more.
However, I do think Audre Lorde’s quote has been frequently used out of context. People bring it up every time I mention learning from the right. Like when I talked about how we need to be politically engaged. Or how we need to use money the way the right does. Whenever anyone suggests learning anything from the conservative movement, someone will mention the quote.
Here is Audre Lorde’s full essay where the quote is mentioned. She had been invited to speak at a conference on feminism. From my reading of the essay, she was frustrated being tokenized as one of the few Black women invited to speak. She called out the exclusion by the conference of other women, including those who were poor, lesbian, or from other countries. She called out white women using the same oppressive tactics on other women that men often use against women to maintain the patriarchy. Here’s the extended quote:
“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 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. 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.”
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Read full article here…
