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

  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 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 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.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  It’s been very reassuring to find a medical doctor who agrees with my view of the dangers involved. And I certainly don’t reject nondamaging treatment, which is why I’m taking these shots, even though I hate giving myself injections. But that’s a small price balanced against the possibility of cancer. June 20, 1984 Berlin I didn’t go to London because I loved book fairs, but because the idea of the First International Feminist Bookfair excited me, and in particular, I wanted to make contact with the Black feminists of England. Well, the fact remains: the First International Feminist Bookfair was a monstrosity of racism, and this racism coated and distorted much of what was good, creative, and visionary about such a fair. The white women organizers’ defensiveness to any question of where the Black women were is rooted in that tiresome white guilt that serves neither us nor them. It reminded me of those old tacky battles of the seventies in the States: a Black woman would suggest that if white women wished to be truly feminist, they would have to examine and alter some of their actions vis-à-vis women of Color. And this discussion would immediately be perceived as an attack upon their very essence. So wasteful and destructive. I think the organizers of the bookfair really believed that by inviting foreign Black women they were absolving themselves of any fault in ignoring input from local Black women. But we should be able to learn from our errors. They totally objectified all Black women by not dealing with the Black women of the London community. Now if anything is to be learned from that whole experience, it should be so that the next International Feminist Bookfair does not repeat those errors. And there must be another. But we don’t get there from here by ignoring the mud in between those two positions. If the white women’s movement does not learn from its errors, like any other movement, it will die by them. When I stood up for my first reading to a packed house with no Black women’s faces, after I’d gotten letter after letter from Black British women asking when was I coming to England, that was the kiss- off. I knew immediately what was up, and the rest is history. Of course, I was accused of “brutalizing” the organizers by simply asking why Black women were absent. And if my yelling and “jumping up and down” got dirty looks and made white women cry and say all kinds of outrageous nonsense about me, I know it also reinforced other Black women’s perceptions about racism here in the women’s movement, and contributed to further solidarity among Black women of different communities.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  But you did not know it because we did not identify ourselves, so now you can say that Black Lesbians and Gay men have nothing to do with the struggles of the Black Nation. And I am not alone. When you read the words of Langston Hughes you are reading the words of a Black Gay man. When you read the words of Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Angelina Weld Grimké, poets of the Harlem Renaissance, you are reading the words of Black Lesbians. When you listen to the life-affirming voices of Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, you are hearing Black Lesbian women. When you see the plays and read the words of Lorraine Hansberry, you are reading the words of a woman who loved women deeply. Today, Lesbians and Gay men are some of the most active and engaged members of Art Against Apartheid, a group which is making visible and immediate our cultural responsibilities against the tragedy of South Africa. We have organizations such as the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays, Dykes Against Racism Everywhere, and Men of All Colors Together, all of which are committed to and engaged in antiracist activity. Homophobia and heterosexism mean you allow yourselves to be robbed of the sisterhood and strength of Black Lesbian women because you are afraid of being called a Lesbian yourself. Yet we share so many concerns as Black women, so much work to be done. The urgency of the destruction of our Black children and the theft of young Black minds are joint urgencies. Black children shot down or doped up on the streets of our cities are priorities for all of us. The fact of Black women’s blood flowing with grim regularity in the streets and living rooms of Black communities is not a Black Lesbian rumor. It is sad statistical truth. The fact that there is widening and dangerous lack of communication around our differences between Black women and men is not a Black Lesbian plot. It is a reality that is starkly clarified as we see our young people becoming more and more uncaring of each other. Young Black boys believing that they can define their manhood between a sixth-grade girl’s legs, growing up believing that Black women and girls are the fitting target for their justifiable furies rather than the racist structures grinding us all into dust, these are not Black Lesbian myths. These are sad realities of Black communities today and of immediate concern to us all. We cannot afford to waste each other’s energies in our common battles. What does homophobia mean?

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  Dr. Bigge thought the offence very grave: “the morals of a boy”, he declared, “were the most important part of his education: the matter must be probed to the bottom: he thought that on reflection I would not deny that I had seen a College boy that night in colors and in suspicious company.” I thereupon got up and freed my soul; the whole crew seemed to me mere hypocrites. “In the Doctor’s own House”, I said, “where I take evening preparation, I could give him a list of boys who are known as lovers, notorious even, and so long as this vice is winked at throughout the school, I shall be no party to persecuting anybody for yielding to legitimate and natural passion.” I had hardly got out the last words when Cotteril, the son of the Bishop of Edinburgh, got up and called upon me to free his House from any such odious and unbearable suspicion. I retorted immediately that there was a pair in his house known as “The Inseparables” and went on to state that my quarrel was with the whole boardinghouse system and not with individual masters who, I was fain to believe, did their best. The Vice-principal, Dr. Newton, was the only one who even recognized my good motives: he came away from the meeting with me and advised me to consult with his wife. After this I was practically boycotted by the masters: I had dared to say in public what Wolverton and others of them had admitted to me in private a dozen times. Mrs. Newton, the vice-principal’s wife, was one of the leaders of Brighton society: she was what the French call une maitresse femme, and a born leader in any society. She advised me to form girls’ classes in literature for the half-holidays each week; was good enough to send out the circulars and lend her drawing-room for my first lectures. In a week I had fifty pupils who paid me half a crown a lesson and I soon found myself drawing ten pounds a week in addition to my pay. I saved every penny and thus came in a year to monetary freedom. At every crisis in my life I have been helped by good friends who have aided me out of pure kindness at cost of time and trouble to themselves. Smith helped me in Lawrence and Mrs. Newton at Brighton out of bountiful human sympathy. Before this even I had got to know a man named Harold Hamilton, manager of the London & County Bank, I think, at Brighton. It amused him to see how quickly and regularly my balance grew: soon I confided my plans to him and my purpose: he was all sympathy. I lent him books and his daughter Ada was assiduous at all my lectures.

• From Giovanni's Room (1956)

  206 JamesBaldwin come, and Guillaume has hiswill.I think ifthis hadnot happened, Giovanniwouldnot have killedhtm. For,with his pleasure taken,andwhile Gio- vannistilllies suffocating, Guillaumebecomes a business man once moreand,walking up anddown, givesexcellent reasons whyGiovanni cannot workfor him anymore. Beneathwhat- everreasonsGuillaume invents,thereal one lies hidden, andtheyboth, dimly,intheir different fashions,seeit: Giovanni, like afallingmovie star, has lost his drawing power. Everything isknownabouthtm,hissecrecy has beendis- covered. Giovannicertainly feelsthis andthe ragewhich hasbeen building inhim formany monthsbegins tobe swollen nowwdth themem- ory ofGuillaume'shandsand mouth. Hestares atGuillaume in silence for amomentand then begins to shout. And Guillaume answers him. Withevery wordexchanged Giovanni's head beginsto roarand ablackness comesandgoes before hiseyes. AndGuillaumeis in seventh heaven andbegtns topranceabout the room — hehas scarcely evergottensomuchforso little before. Heplaysthissceneforallit'sworth, deeply rejoictnginthefactthatGiovanni's face grows scarlet,and his voicethick,watching with pure deUghtthe bone-hard musclesinhis neck.Andhe says something, forhethinksthe tableshave been turned;hesayssomething, one phrase,one insult, onemockery too many; andin a spUt second,in his ownshocked si- GIOVANNI'S ROOM 207 lence, in Giovannfs eyes, he realizes that he has unleashed something he cannot turn back. Giovanni certainly did not mean todo it.But he grabbed him, he struck him. Andwith that touch, and with each blow, the intolerable weightat the bottom of his heart beganto lift: now itwas Giovanni's turnto be delighted.The roomwas overturned, the fabrics were shredded, the odor of perfume was thick. Guillaume strug- gled to getoutof the room,but Giovannifol- lowed him everywhere:now it was Guillaume's turntobe surrounded. And perhapsatthevery moment Guillaumethoughthe had brokenfree, when he had reached the door perhaps,Gio- vannilungedafterhim andcaught him bythe sash ofthe dressing gown andwrappedthe sash around hisneck.Thenhesimplyheld on,sob- bing, becoming lightereverymomentasGuil- laume grewheavier, tighteningthe sashand cursing. Then Guillaume fell.AndGiovanni fell —back intothe room,thestreets, the world, into the presence andthe shadow ofdeath. Bythe time wefound thisgreat house it was clear that I had no right to comehere. By the time we found it, Idid not even want tosee it. But bythis time, also, there wasnothing else to do. There wasnothing else I wanted todo. I thought, itis true, ofremaining in Paris in order tobe close to the trial, perhaps to visithim in prison. But Iknew there wasno reason to do

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

  Billy’s experience with higher education is typical of what happened to many of the young people in this study who had college-educated parents. In his case, support was cut off in the middle of his freshman year. For others the cut came later or was aborted from the start. These children worked hard to gain admittance to a public university with high standards and often found part-time jobs to help pay tuition. Their parents promised to foot all or part of the remaining expenses but then broke their promise, with no warning. Checks suddenly failed to arrive. Embarrassed, discouraged, and angry, they opted for a solution that fit their earlier experiences: they dropped out and gave up or they faced years of hard work that they viewed as simply another legacy of their parents’ divorce. Their parents, meanwhile, offered no explanation or apology for their failure to help. Numbers sometimes tell a very dramatic story. The people in our divorce and comparison groups grew up side by side on the same streets, attended the same public high schools, and most of their fathers earned the same good incomes. When I compared everyone’s financial support for college, I was astounded. A little less than 30 percent of the youngsters from divorced families received full or consistently partial support for college compared with almost 90 percent of youngsters in intact families.6 That’s a whopping difference that speaks volumes about how children of divorce lead an entirely different life compared to their next-door peers in intact families. Their entry into adulthood begins painfully and precipitously—and very differently from their closest friends. The bottom line is that millions of young people, who might have expected and received financial help and encouragement from their families, now hear after divorce: You want a college education? You pay for it.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Anger is an appropriate reaction to racist attitudes, as is fury when the actions arising from those attitudes do not change. To those women here who fear the anger of women of Color more than their own unscrutinized racist attitudes, I ask: Is the anger of women of Color more threatening than the woman-hatred that tinges all aspects of our lives? It is not the anger of other women that will destroy us but our refusals to stand still, to listen to its rhythms, to learn within it, to move beyond the manner of presentation to the substance, to tap that anger as an important source of empowerment. I cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt, nor hurt feelings, nor answering anger; for to do so insults and trivializes all our efforts. Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness. Most women have not developed tools for facing anger constructively. CR groups in the past, largely white, dealt with how to express anger, usually at the world of men. And these groups were made up of white women who shared the terms of their oppressions. There was usually little attempt to articulate the genuine differences between women, such as those of race, color, age, class, and sexual identity. There was no apparent need at that time to examine the contradictions of self, woman as oppressor. There was work on expressing anger, but very little on anger directed against each other. No tools were developed to deal with other women’s anger except to avoid it, deflect it, or flee from it under a blanket of guilt. I have no creative use for guilt, yours or my own. Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action, of buying time out of the pressing need to make clear choices, out of the approaching storm that can feed the earth as well as bend the trees.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Most women have not developed tools for facing anger constructively. CR groups in the past, largely white, dealt with how to express anger, usually at the world of men. And these groups were made up of white women who shared the terms of their oppressions. There was usually little attempt to articulate the genuine differences between women, such as those of race, color, age, class, and sexual identity. There was no apparent need at that time to examine the contradictions of self, woman as oppressor. There was work on expressing anger, but very little on anger directed against each other. No tools were developed to deal with other women’s anger except to avoid it, deflect it, or flee from it under a blanket of guilt. I have no creative use for guilt, yours or my own. Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action, of buying time out of the pressing need to make clear choices, out of the approaching storm that can feed the earth as well as bend the trees. If I speak to you in anger, at least I have spoken to you: I have not put a gun to your head and shot you down in the street; I have not looked at your bleeding sister’s body and asked, “What did she do to deserve it?” This was the reaction of two white women to Mary Church Terrell’s telling of the lynching of a pregnant Black woman whose baby was then torn from her body. That was in 1921, and Alice Paul had just refused to publicly endorse the enforcement of the Nineteenth Amendment for all women—by refusing to endorse the inclusion of women of Color, although we had worked to help bring about that amendment. The angers between women will not kill us if we can articulate them with precision, if we listen to the content of what is said with at least as much intensity as we defend ourselves against the manner of saying. When we turn from anger we turn from insight, saying we will accept only the designs already known, deadly and safely familiar. I have tried to learn my anger’s usefulness to me, as well as its limitations. For women raised to fear, too often anger threatens annihilation. In the male construct of brute force, we were taught that our lives depended upon the good will of patriarchal power. The anger of others was to be avoided at all costs because there was nothing to be learned from it but pain, a judgment that we had been bad girls, come up lacking, not done what we were supposed to do. And if we accept our powerlessness, then of course any anger can destroy us.

• From Giovanni's Room (1956)

  142 James Baldwin streets, et il a fait ceci et il a fait cela, every- thing for me because he thought I was adorable, yarce qu'il rrCadorait—and on and on and that I had no gratitude and no decency. I maybe handled it all very badly, I know how I would have done it even a few months ago, I would have made him scream, I would have made him kiss my feet, je te jure!—but I did not want to do that, I really did not want to be dirty with him. I tried to be serious. I told him that I had never told him any lies and I had always said that I did not want to be lovers with him and—he had given me the job all the same. I said I worked very hard and was very honest with him and that it was not my fault if—if—if I did not feel for him as he felt for me. Then he reminded me that once—one time— and I did not want to say yes, but I was weak from hunger and had had trouble not to vomit. I was still trying to be calm and trying to handle it right. So I said, Mais a ce moment Id je n'avais pas un copain. I am not alone anymore, je suis avec un gars maintenant I thought he would understand that, he is very fond of ro- mance and the dream of fidelity. But not this time. He laughed and said a few more awful things about you, and he said that you were just an American boy, after all, doing things in France which you would not dare to do at home, and that you would leave me very soon. Then, at last, I got angry and I said that he did not pay me a salary for listening to slander and GIOVANNrS ROOM 143 then I heard someone come into the bar down- stairs so I turned around without saying any- thing more and walked out/ He stopped in front of me. 'Can I have some more cognac?' he asked, with a smile. 1 won't break the glass this time/ I gave him my glass. He emptied it and handed it back. He watched my face. 'Don't be afraid/ he said. "We will be alright. I am not afraid.' Then his eyes darkened, he looked again toward the windows.