Anger

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  For the mothers sisters daughters girls I have never been for the women who clean the Staten Island Ferry for the sleek witches who burn me at midnight in effigy because I eat at their tables and sleep with their ghosts. These stones in my heart are you of my own flesh whittling me with your sharp false eyes searching for prisms falling out of your head laughing me out of your skin because you do not value your own self nor me. This is a simple poem I will have no mother no sister no daughter when I am through and only the bones are left see how the bones are showing the shape of us at war clawing our own flesh out to feed the backside of our masklike faces that we have given the names of men. Donald DeFreeze I never knew you so well as in the eyes of my own mirror did you hope for blessing or pardon lying in bed after bed or was your eye sharp and merciless enough to endure beyond the deaths of wanting?

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Each of these imposed definitions has a place not in human growth and progress, but in human separation, for they represent the dehumanization of difference. And certainly there are very real differences between us, of race, sex, age, sexuality, class, vision. But it is not the differences between us that tear us apart, destroying the commonalities we share. Rather, it is our refusal to examine the distortions which arise from their misnaming, and from the illegitimate usage of those differences which can be made when we do not claim them nor define them for ourselves. Racism. The belief in the inherent superiority of one race over all others and thereby the right to dominance. Ageism. Heterosexism. Elitism. These are some of the distortions created around human differences, all serving the purpose of further separation. 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 the differences upon which they are imposed, and explore what these differences can teach us about the future we must all share. And we do not have forever. The distortions are endemic in our society, and so we pour energy needed for exposing difference into pretending these differences do not exist, thereby encouraging false and treacherous connections. Or we pretend the differences are insurmountable barriers, which encourages a voluntary isolation. Either way, we do not develop tools for using our differences as springboards for creative change within our lives. Often, we do not even speak of human difference, which is a comparison of attributes best evaluated by their possible effect and illumination within our lives. Instead, we speak of deviance, which is a judgment upon the relationship between the attribute and some long-fixed and established construct. Somewhere on the edge of all our consciousness there is what I call the mythical norm, which each of us knows within our hearts is “not me.” In this society, that norm is usually defined as white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian, and financially secure. It is within this mythical norm that the trappings of power reside. Those of us who stand outside that power, for any reason, often identify one way in which we are different, and we assume that quality to be the primary reason for all oppression. We forget those other distortions around difference, some of which we ourselves may be acting out within our daily lives. For unacknowledged difference robs all of us of each other’s energy and creative insight, and creates a false hierarchy. What does this mean for each one of us?

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  I walk down the withering limbs of my last discarded house and there is nothing worth salvage left in this city but the faint reedy voices like echoes of once beautiful children. The American Cancer Society Or There Is More Than One Way To Skin A Coon Of all the ways in which this country Prints its death upon me Selling me cigarettes is one of the most certain. Yet every day I watch my son digging ConEdison GeneralMotors GarbageDisposal Out of his nose as he watches a 3 second spot On How To Stop Smoking And it makes me sick to my stomach. For it is not by cigarettes That you intend to destroy my children. Not even by the cold white light of moon-walks While half the boys I knew Are doomed to quicker trips by a different capsule; No, the american cancer destroys By seductive and reluctant admission For instance Black women no longer give birth through their ears And therefore must have A Monthly Need For Iron: For instance Our Pearly teeth are not racially insured And therefore must be Gleemed For Fewer Cavities: For instance Even though all astronauts are white Perhaps Black People can develop Some of those human attributes Requiring Dried dog food frozen coffee instant oatmeal Depilatories deodorants detergents And other assorted plastic. And this is the surest sign I know That the american cancer society is dying— It has started to dump its symbols onto Black People Convincing proof that those symbols are now useless And far more lethal than emphysema. A Sewerplant Grows In Harlem Or I’m A Stranger Here Myself When Does The Next Swan Leave How is the word made flesh made steel made shit by ramming it into No Exit like a homemade bomb until it explodes smearing itself made real against our already filthy windows or by flushing it out in a verbal fountain? Meanwhile the editorial They— who are no less powerful— prepare to smother the actual Us with a processed flow of all our shit non-verbal. Have you ever risen in the night bursting with knowledge and the world dissolves toward any listening ear into which you can pour whatever it was you knew before waking Only to find all ears asleep or drugged perhaps by a dream of words because as you scream into them over and over nothing stirs and the mind you have reached is not a working mind please hang up and die again? The mind you have reached is not a working mind Please hang up And die again. Talking to some people is like talking to a toilet. One Year To Life On The Grand Central Shuttle If we hate the rush hour subways who ride them every day why hasn’t there been a New York City Subway Riot some bloody rush-hour revolution where a snarl goes on from push to a shove that does not stop at the platform’s edge the whining of automated trains

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  Please,” she responded. We hugged and cried and then we did what the women in my family do—we put on our fucking game faces and (you guessed it!) got busy. Spreadsheets. Research. Facebook groups. Phone calls. E-mails. Second and third opinions. Networking. Networking. Networking. My mom goes into beast mode with this stuff. Doctors are blown away by her thoroughness. They say things like, “I wish you could teach all my patients how to organize like this.” But like all beasts, Mom has teeth and she will use them. For example, don’t tell her she can’t have a physical copy of the latest round of blood work because “it isn’t standard procedure.” Moving mountains to save your loved ones isn’t standard procedure, either. Get her the damn report. Unfortunately, Mom’s tenacity is warranted. In today’s medical system, you have to be hypervigilant to get the care you need. For people with anxiety and control issues, this is the marathon that we’ve been training for our whole lives. No doubt, having a trauma history plays a role, too. We’re so accustomed to the chaos of crises that it feels natural and good to navigate storms. Survivors gonna survive. My mother’s fierceness and compassion are among the reasons my dad lived for as long, and as well, as he did. And this wasn’t the first time she had to go into beast mode. As I watched her eagle-eyeing nurses, meticulously taking notes and formulating important follow-up questions, I was reminded of how quickly she had also flown into action in the early days of my own diagnosis. How many years of her precious life would be eaten up by caring for loved ones with cancer? I was enraged for her. And yet I’ve sometimes felt like the reason I got sick was so we’d have half a clue about what to do when Dad needed us. Turns out my cancer was our family’s dress rehearsal. I didn’t sleep a wink that night, and I don’t remember what I said to Dad the next morning. What I do remember was his biopsy. I marveled at how dressed up he looked in his wingtips and crisp button-down shirt. In his words, “You have to look spiffy for these things.” He was still groggy as we were leaving the hospital. Seeing him looking so vulnerable was foreign territory. It reduced me to feeling like a little girl trying to imagine what a grown-up would do in this situation. How should I act? What should I say? “I’m sorry your rock is a little wobbly right now,” Dad whispered as I held his arm to steady his balance.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  For it is not the anger of Black women which is dripping down over this globe like a diseased liquid. It is not my anger that launches rockets, spends over sixty thousand dollars a second on missiles and other agents of war and death, slaughters children in cities, stockpiles nerve gas and chemical bombs, sodomizes our daughters and our earth. It is not the anger of Black women which corrodes into blind, dehumanizing power, bent upon the annihilation of us all unless we meet it with what we have, our power to examine and to redefine the terms upon which we will live and work; our power to envision and to reconstruct, anger by painful anger, stone upon heavy stone, a future of pollinating difference and the earth to support our choices. We welcome all women who can meet us, face to face, beyond objectification and beyond guilt. * One poem from this series is included in Chosen Poems: Old and New (W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1978), pp. 105–108.† This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua (Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, New York, 1984), first published in 1981.‡ From “For Each of You,” first published in From A Land Where Other People Live (Broadside Press, Detroit, 1973), and collected in Chosen Poems: Old and New (W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1982), p. 42.Fourth of July The first time I went to Washington, D.C. was on the edge of the summer when I was supposed to stop being a child. At least that’s what they said to us all at graduation from the eighth grade. My sister Phyllis graduated at the same time from high school. I don’t know what she was supposed to stop being. But as graduation presents for us both, the whole family took a Fourth of July trip to Washington, D.C., the fabled and famous capital of our country. It was the first time I’d ever been on a railroad train during the day. When I was little, and we used to go to the Connecticut shore, we always went at night on the milk train, because it was cheaper. Preparations were in the air around our house before school was even over. We packed for a week. There were two very large suitcases that my father carried, and a box filled with food. In fact, my first trip to Washington was a mobile feast; I started eating as soon as we were comfortably ensconced in our seats, and did not stop until somewhere after Philadelphia. I remember it was Philadelphia because I was disappointed not to have passed by the Liberty Bell.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Corded and crisp and pinafored, the five of us seated ourselves one by one at the counter. There was I between my mother and father, and my two sisters on the other side of my mother. We settled ourselves along the white mottled marble counter, and when the waitress spoke at first no one understood what she was saying, and so the five of us just sat there. The waitress moved along the line of us closer to my father and spoke again. “I said I kin give you to take out, but you can’t eat here. Sorry.” Then she dropped her eyes looking very embarrassed, and suddenly we heard what it was she was saying all at the same time, loud and clear. Straight-backed and indignant, one by one, my family and I got down from the counter stools and turned around and marched out of the store, quiet and outraged, as if we had never been Black before. No one would answer my emphatic questions with anything other than a guilty silence. “But we hadn’t done anything!” This wasn’t right or fair! Hadn’t I written poems about Bataan and freedom and democracy for all? My parents wouldn’t speak of this injustice, not because they had contributed to it, but because they felt they should have anticipated it and avoided it. This made me even angrier. My fury was not going to be acknowledged by a like fury. Even my two sisters copied my parents’ pretense that nothing unusual and anti-american had occurred. I was left to write my angry letter to the president of the united states all by myself, although my father did promise I could type it out on the office typewriter next week, after I showed it to him in my copybook diary. The waitress was white, and the counter was white, and the ice cream I never ate in Washington, D.C. that summer I left childhood was white, and the white heat and the white pavement and the white stone monuments of my first Washington summer made me sick to my stomach for the whole rest of that trip and it wasn’t much of a graduation present after all. I Am Your Sister Black Women Organizing Across Sexualities Whenever I come to Medgar Evers College I always feel a thrill of anticipation and delight because it feels like coming home, like talking to family, having a chance to speak about things that are very important to me with people who matter the most. And this is particularly true whenever I talk at the Women’s Center. But, as with all families, we sometimes find it difficult to deal constructively with the genuine differences between us and to recognize that unity does not require that we be identical to each other. Black women are not one great vat of homogenized chocolate milk.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  America already had a long history of politicians pretending to identify with the earnest plowman. In the South, it was more than a pastime—it was everything. The erudite Brain Truster, though raised on a dairy farm in upstate New York, couldn’t claim to be of hillbilly stock, nor did he sport farmers’ red suspenders like one of the New Deal’s loudest critics, Georgia governor Eugene Talmadge. He was not a rustic clown like Huey Long, who captivated audiences. He didn’t have a folksy nickname either, like South Carolina senator “Cotton Ed” Smith, who went on the warpath against Tugwell’s appointment as undersecretary of agriculture even before Roosevelt named him as head of the Resettlement Administration. Before his confirmation hearing, Tugwell’s friends had advised him to “affect a homely democratic manner, to suggest the dear old farm.” He refused to do so. 35 In 1936, a young Washington journalist named Blair Bolles accused Tugwell of a series of crimes against America. Writing for H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury, he shared the renowned editor’s choleric rage for harebrained uplifters. Bolles claimed that the poor who were under the agency’s supervision were willing to “crawl” into the “impersonal lap” of government dependency. They were all deluded and undeserving—the litany will sound familiar: “hillbilly clay- eaters,” “hoe-wielders” (backward tenant farmers looking for a handout), “urban poor who see success in green pastures,” and, last but not least, “desert-dwelling Indians.” Each of these was presumed a breed of men with nowhere to go. 36 Again and again, enemies of the New Deal railed against the royalist bureaucrat “Rex” Tugwell. He continued to infuriate opposing congressmen by dismissing their logic and defending government patronage with the line “nothing is too good for these people.” Tugwell had no patience for the illusion of democracy, or the pretense of being a man of the people, or the empty rhetoric of equal opportunity. An urbane “voice in the wilderness,” he boldly challenged the credibility of the old, illusive belief that America’s class boundaries were porous and that hard work was all it took to succeed. 37 Tugwell’s class argument was simple. He summed up his views in a 1934 speech in Kansas City when he said that the old standby refrain of “rugged individualism” really meant “the regimentation of the many for the benefit of the few.”

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  If this society ascribes roles to Black men which they are not allowed to fulfill, is it Black women who must bend and alter our lives to compensate, or is it society that needs changing? And why should Black men accept these roles as correct ones, or anything other than a narcotic promise encouraging acceptance of other facets of their own oppression? One tool of the Great-American-Double-Think is to blame the victim for victimization: Black people are said to invite lynching by not knowing our place; Black women are said to invite rape and murder and abuse by not being submissive enough, or by being too seductive, or too . . . Staples’ “fact” that Black women get their sense of fulfillment from having children is only a fact when stated out of the mouths of Black men, and any Black person in this country, even a “happily married” woman who has “no pent-up frustrations that need release” (!) is either a fool or insane. This smacks of the oldest sexist canard of all time, that all a woman needs to “keep her quiet” is a “good man.” File that one alongside “Some of my best friends are . . .” Instead of beginning the much-needed dialogue between Black men and Black women, Staples retreats to a defensive stance reminiscent of white liberals of the 60s, many of whom saw any statement of Black pride and self-assertion as an automatic threat to their own identity and an attempt to wipe them out. Here we have an intelligent Black man believing—or at least saying—that any call to Black women to love ourselves (and no one said only) is a denial of, or threat to, his Black male identity! 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. History and popular culture, as well as our personal lives, are full of tales of Black women who had “compassion for misguided black men.” Our scarred, broken, battered and dead daughters and sisters are a mute testament to that reality. We need to learn to have care and compassion for ourselves, also. In the light of what Black women often willingly sacrifice for our children and our men, this is a much needed exhortation, no matter what illegitimate use the white media makes of it. This call for self-value and self-love is quite different from narcissism, as Staples must certainly realize. Narcissism comes not out of self-love but out of self-hatred.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  If this vast product of creative energy were a celebration of death it would be nothing more than a mockery. We know full well that, whatever its defeats or limitations, this great body of creation represents the triumph of life over death. And so I make bold to say that no matter how vile, filthy, scabrous, scatalogical or obscene a book may be, if it serves life, if it aims at the cancer which is eating out the heart of the world, it is a good book, a righteous book, a holy book. To say of it that it is immoral, to call it pornographic or obscene, is like talking of spittle in connection with the hydrogen bomb. There is no book yet written devastating enough to wipe from the consciousness of living man the horrors to which he is now privy, the horrors which he is being asked to accept in advance in return for the privilege of belonging to a civilization which has virtually converted him into an unthinking, unfeeling monster. Monster, robot, slave, accursed one—it makes little difference which term one uses to convey the picture of our dehumanized condition. Never was mankind as a whole in a more ignoble condition than ours. We are all bound to one another in a disgraceful master-slave relationship; we are all caught in the same vicious circle of judge and be judged; we all aim to destroy one another if we cannot have our way. Instead of respect, toleration, kindness and consideration, to say nothing of love, we view one another with fear, suspicion, hatred, envy, rivalry and malevolence. Our world is grounded in falsity. In whatever direction you venture, into whatever sphere of human activity you penetrate, you encounter nothing but sham, fraud, deceit, falsehood. Cognizant of the fact that, no matter how highly placed, men can not, dare not, think freely, independently, I almost despair of making myself heard. And if I speak at all, if I venture to hazard my point of view about matters fundamental, it is because I am convinced that, however black the picture may be, a drastic change is not only possible but inevitable. I feel that it is my right and my duty as a human being to further this change. Without in the least wishing to glorify myself I should like to point out that there is evidence throughout my work that I myself have undergone a change; I say it is evident and obvious that the man who relates the story of his life is not the same as the “hero” who stalks the pages of these autobiographical novels. The man who confesses his sins, his crimes or his misdeeds is never the same as the one who committed them. Is it necessary for me to underline the fact that the author, in exposing his guilt and suffering, his fears and his triumphs, is but announcing his liberation and emancipation?

• From How to Deal with Angry People (2023)

  and have entirely different emotional reactions. TIP Finding the nuance in situations or motivations of others so as not to think of them as all bad can help people lessen their anger. Imagine, for instance that these two people are students who fail a test. The person with a depressed worldview might look at that experience and think, “Of course I failed it. I’m not smart enough and the teacher knows it. I’ll probably fail the entire class now.” The angry person, though, might externalize the cause and think, “This teacher doesn’t know anything. I failed because the test was unfair and they didn’t teach me well enough.” Interestingly, they may come to the same conclusion, that they will fail the class, but for very different reasons. The first will fail because they think they don’t have what it takes to be successful. The second will fail because they think the instructor isn’t a good enough teacher. Three Broad, Overlapping Categories of Thoughts When it comes to the automatic thoughts of angry people, there are three broad, overlapping categories that tend to cause or at least exacerbate their anger: high expectations of others, dichotomous thinking, and disaster thinking. High Expectations of Others I recently described the following scenarios on social media and asked people how they would respond if it happened to them: You’re driving along, going over the speed limit in the left lane, passing cars, going to get over as soon as you have a chance. The car behind you

• From How to Deal with Angry People (2023)

  In the end, much of this is rooted in the fact that she finds intense anger especially scary. “I still don’t have a healthy relationship with anger,” she told me. Izzy told me that her dad has softened a little as he has gotten older. It’s hard to tell if this due to the typical pattern of development or if it’s more specific to how their relationship as evolved. As people age, they often tend to relax a little as it becomes more important to experience positive emotions. When Izzy moved away from home, their relationship changed quite a bit. They saw each other less, obviously, and that impacted the way anger played out in their relationship. But, she also thinks that he’s become “more reflective” about his anger as he’s gotten older and this has changed how he emotes. Anger as an Emotion Izzy’s dad nicely illustrates how anger can be two things. An often sweet and loving person, he would get angry and “lose control emotionally,” as she described it. Like a lot of people when they are angry, he would lash out in these circumstances. As I said earlier, the angry experience is associated with a particular set of thoughts, physiological experiences, and behaviors. When we get mad, for example, our thoughts often shift to those of blaming, judgement, and revenge. How dare they, they should not have done that , or even I’ll get back at them for this are all things we might think when we get angry. Similarly, we often lash out physically or verbally when we get angry. Those thoughts of revenge we might experience can lead to vengeful actions. Like with Izzy’s dad, people will yell or say hurtful things. They will push, hit, or find other ways to aggress against the people they believed wronged them. Even when they don’t actually behave aggressively, they may want to. Psychologists call these action tendencies – when we want to carry out a particular behavior as part of our emotional response, but, because we are human and have the capacity for impulse control, we can stop ourselves and direct our anger differently. Finally, our anger brings with it a particular set of physiological responses. When we get angry, our fight-or-flight response kicks in to help prepare us to respond to the injustice or work through the blocked goals. Our heart rate increases, we start to breath more heavily, our muscles tense up, and our digestive system slows down. This fascinating and complex set of responses is rooted in our evolutionary history. Such responses offered our ancestors, human and nonhuman, a survival benefit.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  Since before that. Since the days of the Archangel Michael. In the not too distant past there was one who was given the cup of hemlock for being “the corruptor of youth.” Today he is regarded as one of the sanest, most lucid minds that ever was. We who are always being arraigned before the bar can do no better than to resort to the celebrated Socratic method. Our only answer is to return the question. There are so many questions one could put to the Court, to any court. But would one get a response? Can the Court of the Land ever be put in question? I am afraid not. The judicial body is a sacrosanct body. This is unfortunate, as I see it, for when issues of grave import arise the last court of reference, in my opinion, should be the public. When justice is at stake responsibility cannot be shifted to an elect few without injustice resulting. No court could function if it did not follow the steel rails of precedent, taboo and prejudice. I come back to the lengthy document representing the decision of the Oslo Town Court, to the tabulation of all the infractions of the moral code therein listed. There is something frightening as well as disheartening about such an indictment. It has a medieval aspect. And it has nothing to do with justice. Law itself is made to look ridiculous. Once again let me say that it is not the courts of Oslo or the laws and codes of Norway which I inveigh against; everywhere in the civilized world there is this mummery and flummery manifesting as the Voice of Inertia. The offender who stands before the Court is not being tried by his peers but by his dead ancestors. The moral codes, operative only if they are in conformance with natural or divine laws, are not safeguarded by these flimsy dikes; on the contrary, they are exposed as weak and ineffectual barriers. Finally, here is the crux of the matter. Will an adverse decision by this court or any other court effectively hinder the further circulation of this book? The history of similar cases does not substantiate such an eventuality. If anything, an unfavorable verdict will only add more fuel to the flames. Proscription only leads to resistance; the fight goes on underground, becomes more insidious therefore, more difficult to cope with. If only one man in Norway reads the book and believes with the author that one has the right to express himself freely, the battle is won.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  I am a lesbian woman of Color whose children eat regularly because I work in a university. If their full bellies make me fail to recognize my commonality with a woman of Color whose children do not eat because she cannot find work, or who has no children because her insides are rotted from home abortions and sterilization; if I fail to recognize the lesbian who chooses not to have children, the woman who remains closeted because her homophobic community is her only life support, the woman who chooses silence instead of another death, the woman who is terrified lest my anger trigger the explosion of hers; if I fail to recognize them as other faces of myself, then I am contributing not only to each of their oppressions but also to my own, and the anger which stands between us then must be used for clarity and mutual empowerment, not for evasion by guilt or for further separation. 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 Color remains chained. Nor is any one of you. I speak here as a woman of Color who is not bent upon destruction, but upon survival. No woman is responsible for altering the psyche of her oppressor, even when that psyche is embodied in another woman. I have suckled the wolf’s lip of anger and I have used it for illumination, laughter, protection, fire in places where there was no light, no food, no sisters, no quarter. We are not goddesses or matriarchs or edifices of divine forgiveness; we are not fiery fingers of judgment or instruments of flagellation; we are women forced back always upon our woman’s power. We have learned to use anger as we have learned to use the dead flesh of animals, and bruised, battered, and changing, we have survived and grown and, in Angela Wilson’s words, we are moving on. With or without uncolored women. We use whatever strengths we have fought for, including anger, to help define and fashion a world where all our sisters can grow, where our children can love, and where the power of touching and meeting another woman’s difference and wonder will eventually transcend the need for destruction.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  This is much the same as how the “creative relationships” between master and slave were always those benefiting the master. The results of woman-hating in the Black community are tragedies which diminish all Black people. These acts must be seen in the context of a systematic devaluation of Black women within this society. It is within this context that we become approved and acceptable targets for Black male rage, so acceptable that even a Black male social scientist condones and excuses this depersonalizing abuse. This abuse is no longer acceptable to Black women in the name of solidarity, nor of Black liberation. Any dialogue between Black women and Black men must begin there, no matter where it ends. * “The Myth of the Black Matriarchy” by Robert Staples in The Black Scholar, vol. 1, no. 3–4 (January–February 1970). † From We Will Make A River, poems by Mary McAnnally (West End Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1979), p. 27. The Uses of Anger Women Responding to Racism Racism. The belief in the inherent superiority of one race over all others and thereby the right to dominance, manifest and implied. Women respond to racism. My response to racism is anger. I have lived with that anger, ignoring it, feeding upon it, learning to use it before it laid my visions to waste, for most of my life. Once I did it in silence, afraid of the weight. My fear of anger taught me nothing. Your fear of that anger will teach you nothing, also. Women responding to racism means women responding to anger; the anger of exclusion, of unquestioned privilege, of racial distortions, of silence, ill-use, stereotyping, defensiveness, misnaming, betrayal, and cooptation. My anger is a response to racist attitudes and to the actions and presumptions that arise out of those attitudes. If your dealings with other women reflect those attitudes, then my anger and your attendant fears are spotlights that can be used for growth in the same way I have used learning to express anger for my growth. But for corrective surgery, not guilt. Guilt and defensiveness are bricks in a wall against which we all flounder; they serve none of our futures. Because I do not want this to become a theoretical discussion, I am going to give a few examples of interchanges between women that illustrate these points. In the interest of time, I am going to cut them short. I want you to know there were many more. For example: •I speak out of direct and particular anger at an academic conference, and a white woman says, “Tell me how you feel but don’t say it too harshly or I cannot hear you.” But is it my manner that keeps her from hearing, or the threat of a message that her life may change? •The Women’s Studies Program of a southern university invites a Black woman to read following a week-long forum on Black and white women. “What has this week given to you?” I ask.

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  My father was in the hospice phase of his battle with stage IV pancreatic cancer. His final wish was to die at home, which my mom and I, with steadfast support from my husband, Brian, had worked to honor, arranging for hospice nurses, medical equipment and support, and meal trains. Surrounded by family and his beloved dogs, Jack and Ella, his final days were full of life-on-pause moments like this one, deeply serene and sacred. Until the jackhammers kicked in. Literally. When I ripped open the curtains, I saw an entire wrecking crew tearing up a concrete pool in my parents’ neighbor’s backyard. Are you fucking kidding me? As far as I was concerned, Dad could go any minute now. His nurses had basically said as much, alerting us to “expect the unexpected,” which is something we were already growing used to. His once-flush complexion was now a constant state of pale. His previously athletic body had withered down to nearly half his regular body weight. Seemingly overnight, he’d started retaining fluid in his abdomen, something the lean golfer in him would have hated in “normal” times. For the physical changes alone, death by cancer can be a mindfuck. Patients can go from “bad” to “actively dying” in the blink of an eye. Whatever happened, I was not about to let him leave this planet listening to the earsplitting sounds of a piston hitting a striker plate up to 1,800 times per minute. If you’ve ever watched as a loved one gets ready to leave this world, you can understand the ferocious mama bear instincts that instantly took over me. Dad does not need construction right now. He needs Enya! (Or maybe I needed Enya.) His pain had risen to levels that required round-the-clock morphine. Though I couldn’t experience his physical agony firsthand, his pain sure felt like my pain every time I heard him groan. In the coming days, he would no longer be able to communicate with us. His language would go from a few words to hand squeezes to nothing. Step-by-step, he walked closer to his transition. I watched helplessly as Dad straddled an unfamiliar divide between holding on and completely letting go of control. For me, being in control has always been like wrapping myself in a warm, safe woobie. I dress-rehearse worstcase scenarios all the time, just to make sure that I’m never caught off guard. Yeah, I’m that person. But you know what totally ambushed me as Dad’s days started to dwindle? How there was absolutely nothing I could do to protect him. No amount of wishful thinking (If I never drop f-bombs again, maybe Dad will suddenly get better) or desperate prayer (Dude, can we work with the timeline here?) would help me stop his organs from slowly shutting down, right before my eyes. What I could control, though, was putting an immediate stop to the thunderous mechanical appliances shaking our house and messing up our hospice zen.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  I have heard it said—usually behind my back—that Black Lesbians are not normal. But what is normal in this deranged society by which we are all trapped? I remember, and so do many of you, when being Black was considered not normal, when they talked about us in whispers, tried to paint us, lynch us, bleach us, ignore us, pretend we did not exist. We called that racism. I have heard it said that Black Lesbians are a threat to the Black family. But when 50 percent of children born to Black women are born out of wedlock, and 30 percent of all Black families are headed by women without husbands, we need to broaden and redefine what we mean by family. I have heard it said that Black Lesbians will mean the death of the race. Yet Black Lesbians bear children in exactly the same way other women bear children, and a Lesbian household is simply another kind of family. Ask my son and daughter. The terror of Black Lesbians is buried in that deep inner place where we have been taught to fear all difference—to kill it or ignore it. Be assured: loving women is not a communicable disease. You don’t catch it like the common cold. Yet the one accusation that seems to render even the most vocal straight Black woman totally silent and ineffective is the suggestion that she might be a Black Lesbian. If someone says you’re Russian and you know you’re not, you don’t collapse into stunned silence. Even if someone calls you a bigamist, or a childbeater, and you know you’re not, you don’t crumple into bits. You say it’s not true and keep on printing the posters. But let anyone, particularly a Black man, accuse a straight Black woman of being a Black Lesbian, and right away that sister becomes immobilized, as if that is the most horrible thing she could be, and must at all costs be proven false. That is homophobia. It is a waste of woman energy, and it puts a terrible weapon into the hands of your enemies to be used against you to silence you, to keep you docile and in line. It also serves to keep us isolated and apart.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  And then I decided to contact one of my professors who had liked my work, to see if he had any ideas. That was real tough for me because I never expect anyone to come through for me. He asked me lots of questions about how I had been able to go to school during the day and work all night and why it had taken me six years instead of the usual four. Bottom line, he said he liked my work, said I had talent and grit, and recommended me to another former student who was starting a new company. The rest is history.” “That’s a very nice story. And it’s a tribute to you.” Larry looked at me soberly and said, “That’s the only time in my life that I’ve gotten help from a man. ” “I take it your dad didn’t help with your education?” He hooted. “Not a cent. The only good thing is that I didn’t expect any help. My dad is a taker, not a giver. He’s never thought of anyone in his life except himself. He’s a smart man. He can be a charmer when he puts himself out. He has a good sense of humor. But he has never made sacrifices for anyone. He’s selfish through and through. I used to think he was a hero, a great man. I even thought that he loved me. He kept telling me, ‘You’re my favorite.’ If that’s true, hell must have a special place for those who are their father’s favorite child.” I was taken aback by Larry’s bitterness. “What’s your relationship now? Do you ever see your dad?” “I see him rarely. Once or twice a year. We talk on the telephone. We chat about work. About the weather. We tell each other dirty jokes. But that’s the extent of it. We don’t communicate on a deeper level.” “Do you miss not having a closer relationship?” “I don’t really care to be close to him now,” Larry said evenly. Then, more gently, he added, “Sometimes I feel bad. Like I heard recently that he was diagnosed with prostate cancer and I’m sorry. But the truth is that my sister and I can’t be there for him. We’re still angry at him, even after all this time.” I wondered whether Larry’s father was aware of these feelings. “Tell me, did you ever try to tell him how hurt you were feeling or to talk about having a different kind of relationship?” Larry looked away and then stared down at his hands, inspecting his fingernails. “I did try. I tried to tell him about the issues between us that hurt me.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Now I am sure there are still some Black men who marry white women because they feel a white woman can better fit the model of “femininity” set forth in this country. But for Staples to justify that act using the reason it occurs, and take Black women to task for it, is not only another error in reasoning; it is like justifying the actions of a lemming who follows its companions over the cliff to sure death. Because it happens does not mean it should happen, nor that it is functional for the well-being of the individual nor the group. It is not the destiny of Black america to repeat white america’s mistakes. But we will, if we mistake the trappings of success in a sick society for the signs of a meaningful life. If Black men continue to define “femininity” instead of their own desires, and to do it in archaic european terms, they restrict our access to each other’s energies. Freedom and future for Blacks does not mean absorbing the dominant white male disease of sexism. As Black women and men, we cannot hope to begin dialogue by denying the oppressive nature of male privilege. And if Black males choose to assume that privilege for whatever reason—raping, brutalizing, and killing Black women—then ignoring these acts of Black male oppression within our communities can only serve our destroyers. One oppression does not justify another. It has been said that Black men cannot be denied their personal choice of the woman who meets their need to dominate. In that case, Black women also cannot be denied our personal choices, and those choices are becomingly increasingly self-assertive and female-oriented. As a people, we most certainly must work together. It would be shortsighted to believe that Black men alone are to blame for the above situations in a society dominated by white male privilege. But the Black male consciousness must be raised to the realization that sexism and woman-hating are critically dysfunctional to his liberation as a Black man because they arise out of the same constellation that engenders racism and homophobia. Until that consciousness is developed, Black men will view sexism and the destruction of Black women as tangential to Black liberation rather than as central to that struggle. So long as this occurs, we will never be able to embark upon that dialogue between Black women and Black men that is so essential to our survival as a people. This continued blindness between us can only serve the oppressive system within which we live. Men avoid women’s observations by accusing us of being too “visceral.” But no amount of understanding the roots of Black woman-hating will bring back Patricia Cowan, nor mute her family’s loss. Pain is very visceral, particularly to the people who are hurting. As the poet Mary McAnally said, “Pain teaches us to take our fingers OUT the fucking fire.”*

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  We have many different faces, and we do not have to become each other in order to work together. It is not easy for me to speak here with you as a Black Lesbian feminist, recognizing that some of the ways in which I identify myself make it difficult for you to hear me. But meeting across difference always requires mutual stretching, and until you can hear me as a Black Lesbian feminist, our strengths will not be truly available to each other as Black women. Because I feel it is urgent that we not waste each other’s resources, that we recognize each sister on her own terms so that we may better work together toward our mutual survival, I speak here about heterosexism and homophobia, two grave barriers to organizing among Black women. And so that we have a common language between us, I would like to define some of the terms I use: Heterosexism—a belief in the inherent superiority of one form of loving over all others and thereby the right to dominance. Homophobia—a terror surrounding feelings of love for members of the same sex and thereby a hatred of those feelings in others. In the 1960s, when liberal white people decided that they didn’t want to appear racist, they wore dashikis, and danced Black, and ate Black, and even married Black, but they did not want to feel Black or think Black, so they never even questioned the textures of their daily living (why should “flesh- colored” Bandaids always be pink?) and then they wondered, “Why are those Black folks always taking offense so easily at the least little thing? Some of our best friends are Black . . .” Well, it is not necessary for some of your best friends to be Lesbian, although some of them probably are, no doubt. But it is necessary for you to stop oppressing me through false judgment. I do not want you to ignore my identity, nor do I want you to make it an insurmountable barrier between our sharing of strengths. When I say I am a Black feminist, I mean I recognize that my power as well as my primary oppressions come as a result of my Blackness as well as my womanness, and therefore my struggles on both these fronts are inseparable. When I say I am a Black Lesbian, I mean I am a woman whose primary focus of loving, physical as well as emotional, is directed to women. It does not mean I hate men. Far from it. The harshest attacks I have ever heard against Black men come from those women who are intimately bound to them and cannot free themselves from a subservient and silent position.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  And these same white immigrant settlers were giving blankets lethal with smallpox germs to the indigenous peoples of North America, the American Indians. Each of you has come here today to touch some piece of your own power, for a purpose. I urge you to approach that work with a particular focus and urgency, for a terrible amount of Wurundjeri women’s blood has already been shed in order for you to sit and write here. I do not say these things to instigate an orgy of guilt, but rather to encourage an examination of what the excavation and use of the true language of difference can mean within your living. You and I can talk about the language of difference, but that will always remain essentially a safe discussion, because this is not my place. I will move on. But it is the language of the Black Aboriginal women of this country that you must learn to hear and to feel. And as your writing and your lives intersect within that language, you will come to decide what mistress your art must serve. October 24, 1985 East Lansing, Michigan Tomorrow is the second anniversary of the invasion of Grenada. The smallest nation in the western hemisphere occupied by the largest. I spoke about it to a group of Black women here tonight. It’s depressing to see how few of us remember, how few of us still seem to care. The conference on “The Black Woman Writer and the Diaspora” being held here is problematic in some ways, particularly in the unclear position of Ellen Kuzwayo, who had come all the way from South Africa to give the keynote address and arrived here to find the schedule shifted. But it was so good to see Ellen again. I’m sorry to hear her sister in Botswana has had another mastectomy. It’s been very exciting to sit down with African and Caribbean women writers whom I’ve always wanted to meet. Octavia Butler is here also, and Andrea Canaan from New Orleans. I haven’t seen her in over a year, and the look in her eyes when she saw me made me really angry, but it also made me realize how much weight I’ve lost in the past year and how bad my color’s been since I came home from Australia. I’ve got to go see Dr. C. for a checkup when I get home.