Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

Lorde comes full circle to a consideration of socialism and its potential, alongside the impact of America’s global dominance. Unlike Russia, as discussed in “Notes from a Trip to Russia,” Grenada is not merely subject to American influence; it is a victim of American invasion. Lorde’s reflection on Grenada illustrates that the racist ideology within the fabric of American society produces American indifference to global atrocities against people of color:

The ready acceptance by the majority of americans of the Grenadian invasion and of the shady U.S. involvement in the events leading up to the assassination of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop both happen in an america whose moral and ethical fiber is weakened by racism as thoroughly as wood is weakened by dry rot. White america has been well-schooled in the dehumanization of Black people (179-80).

She also notes that the Pentagon’s calculated language in their propaganda campaign had its intended effect on white Americans who were already “enraged by myths of Black Progress” and “encouraged by government action never to take the life of a Black person seriously” (184). These remarks suggest that the personal and the political are intertwined, as well as the local and the global. The regularity of white hatred and state-sanctioned violence against Black people in the US excuses the US government’s apparent hypocrisy; America excuses its violence under the banner of democracy while ignoring the deaths of Haitians who drowned while fleeing Duvalier’s regime and the Reagan administration’s support of apartheid South Africa (180). To underline America’s normalization of Black subjugation and death, Lorde mentions Black youth and women lynched in US, the dismantling of the Civil Rights Commission, the increase of Black Americans living below the poverty line, and Black infant mortality rates (180-81).

Lorde demonstrates in her reflection that Black Americans’ response to the Grenada invasion indicates the extent to which they have internalized their own oppression. For example, she says that “many Black americans, threatened by some spectre of a socialism that is mythic and undefined at best, have bought the government line of ‘them’ against ‘us’” (184), and she notes that Black Americans have defended the Grenada invasion “under a mistaken mirage of patriotism” (184). Furthermore, she discusses how the invasion was a test for the Pentagon to see if Black American soldiers would fire on other Black people (183). At the same time, the invasion serves as “a naked warning to thirty million African-Americans. Watch your step. We did it to them down there and we will not hesitate to do it to you” (184). These points demonstrate the double messages that America sends to Black Americans: they belong when it benefits the power structure, and they will be othered and subjugated when it benefits the power structure.

This communicates that the racist power structure impedes any attempts at self-definition. Black Americans must be externally defined, whether through being othered and stripped of power, or under the false pretenses of inclusion. The same is true of Grenada. The invasion was a response to the country’s attempt to self-define: “Revolution. A nation decides for itself what it needs. How best to get it” (179). She intersperses the essay with the gains and developments Prime Minister Maurice Bishop and the People’s Revolutionary Government (PRG) made in Grenada, often alongside the situation following the US invasion. For example, she notes that the PRG brought free medical care and dentistry to the island. Yet, on her visit after the invasion, she observes a woman who is missing all of her front teeth (178). She also notes that unemployment under the PRG dropped by 26 percent in four years. Yet, after the invasion, unemployment increased back up to 35 percent (181). She devotes a section to detailing what Revolution meant in Grenada, including Bishop’s efforts to bridge class and color gaps and an information campaign to make Grenadians aware of America’s history of institutionalized racism and classism (186-87).

For Lorde, it was precisely this effort to address racism and classism that provoked US aggression, as Grenada’s efforts to self-define and self-empower had to be curbed for the US to preserve its own model of power. US coercion came in the form of “damaged businesses, destroyed homes and lives” (185), as well as “survivors stunned and frightened into silence by fear of being jailed and accused of ‘spreading unrest among the people’” (185). In addition to the violence, the US enforced illusion through media propaganda and disinformation campaigns (188).

As the final essay in Sister Outsider, “Grenada Revisited” emphasizes that other models of power and self-definition are possible and perhaps promising; however, the American machine is massive, old, and powerful. Because of the deep-rooted American ideologies that stir intimidation, coercion, and confusion on both local and global levels, personal and political, liberation is a long and hard struggle. However, Lorde concludes, “[M]uch has been terribly lost […] but not all—not the spirit of the people” (189).