Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

These three essays emphasize Lorde’s unique position of being a Black lesbian and mother. She highlights how the acknowledgment of all these identities and roles affords her the perspective needed for responding to her peers’ oversights, in addition to speaking honestly and openly about her own necessary self-work and introspection. The responses to Robert Staples and Mary Daly reflect the position that Black women are in as they come up against Black men and white women who reduce oppression to a single issue, leaving Black women’s intersectional concerns (i.e., their concerns regarding intersecting identities, such as being both Black and women) wholly unaddressed. It is the wisdom, clarity, and foresight that comes from this unique (although difficult) position that allows Lorde to raise a male child who understands that oppression takes many forms and that he must find self-definition outside of those oppressive structures’ norms.

In her responses to Staples and Daly, Lorde clarifies that Black women’s liberation is integral to the liberation of both Black men and white women, and they must recognize that dismissing and violating Black women through sexist and racist tactics, respectively, is to ensure their own demise. She asks them both questions that should stimulate some self-reflection on how (if at all) such tactics can be justified. For Staples, she asks, “What correct analysis of this capitalist dragon within which we live can legitimate the rape of Black women by Black men?” (60). To Daly, she poses,

Do you ever really read the work of Black women? Did you ever read my words, or did you merely finger through them for quotations which you thought might valuably support an already conceived idea concerning some old and distorted connection between us? (68).

Although Lorde explains Staples’s and Daly’s oversights to them, she poses these questions to encourage them to think for themselves, and this hints at a point that Lorde makes several times throughout Sister Outsider: Black women are tired of stretching. It is an oppressor’s tactic to expect those whom they oppress to expend energy educating the oppressor and addressing the oppressor’s concerns; the oppressed thus never have the energy to address their own concerns. She says to Staples, “We have too often been expected to be all things to all people and speak everyone else’s position but our very own” (62). In addition, she warns Daly, “Yet I feel that since you have so completely un-recognized me, perhaps I have been in error concerning you and no longer recognize you” (70). That is, for both Black men and white women, Black women have been integral to their gains against oppressive structures—yet Black men and white women’s willingness to adopt the tactics of those same oppressive structures for some modicum of privilege over Black women communicates that they do not have the same concern for Black women’s liberation as Black women have had for theirs.

Black men and white women must also acknowledge that their oppressive techniques against Black women harm themselves as well because racism and sexism are inseparable in American society. Although Staples claims that Black feminism is white feminism in blackface, Lorde argues it is Black men’s adoption of sexist tactics that is a blackface performance, hence the title of the response, “Sexism: An American Disease in Blackface.” Lorde tells Staples that “freedom and future for Blacks does not mean absorbing the dominant white male disease of sexism” (63), and “ignoring these acts of Black male oppression within our communities can only serve our destroyers” (63). Similarly, she articulates to Daly that racism against Black women is destructive to feminism and only perpetuates a racist patriarchy. For Lorde, Daly’s dismissal of Black women and other women of color “does not essentially differ from the specialized devaluations that make Black women prey, for instance, to the murders even now happening in your own city” (69).

Lorde essentially asks Staples and Daly to undertake the introspection required to see the tools of oppression that they, as oppressed people, have internalized and then perpetuated. This is a major theme throughout the book: When the oppressed elevate themselves by grasping for privilege within a racist, sexist model of power, they forget that they are simply perpetuating that oppressive model and ultimately harming themselves in the process. To demonstrate that she, too, must do this internal work, she provides a transparent reflection of the challenges she faces as a lesbian mother of a male child in “Man Child: A Black Lesbian Feminist’s Response.”

In the essay about her relationship with her son, Jonathan, Lorde acknowledges her desire to raise a male child who “will not be destroyed by, nor settle for, those corruptions called power by the white fathers who mean his destruction as surely as they mean mine” (74). This contrasts with Staples’s view that Black women loving and speaking up for themselves threatens Black masculinity and identity (62) and that Black men can justify leaving their families in “protest against female decision making in the home” (63). In her response to Staples, Lorde even acknowledges that Jonathan, who is only 14 years old at the time, knows that “Black men themselves must examine and articulate their own desires and positions and stand by the conclusions thereof” (62). She here suggests that Black men who feel threatened by Black feminism cannot articulate their own position or sense of identity because what they have adopted as a sense of self and power is not even their own. Their idea of manhood comes from the very white fathers who have corrupted the meaning of power.

Thus, in Lorde’s relationship with her son, they both have the task of examining and re-defining masculinity, power, and relating, and this requires introspection and honesty. Lorde is aware of the ways that she has responded to Jonathan’s suffering, as well as her own, by beginning to pass on “that first lesson in the corruption of power, that might makes right” (76), or “the age-old distortion about what strength and bravery are” (76). Therefore, when she approaches her son to correct that distortion and model new ways of power and relating, she encourages the “reassessment of power as something other than might, age, privilege, or the lack of fear” (76). Again, this directly contrasts with what Staples espouses in his article.

Furthermore, Lorde’s reflection on her relationship with her son demonstrates that, unlike both Staples and Daly, she understands that survival requires recognizing that “oppression comes in many different forms” (75). This is one of the many places where Lorde demonstrates that her outsider position—as a Black lesbian—affords her the insight that oppressions are interconnected and so must be dealt with together, not as single issues. She knows that having lesbian parents gives Jonathan advantages because not only did he learn early on that oppression is multifaceted (75), but he also demonstrates unusual clarity and understanding for someone his age (80).

Where Staples and Daly act out their externally-defined identities and models of power, Lorde is committed to teaching her son that he must define himself—for himself, and from within himself—rather than receive external definition:

The strongest lesson I can teach my son is the same lesson that I teach my daughter: how to be who he wishes to be for himself. And the best way I can do this is to be who I am and hope that he will learn from this not how to be me, which is not possible, but how to be himself. And this means how to move to that voice from within himself, rather than to those raucous, persuasive, or threatening voices from outside pressuring him to be what the world wants him to be (77).

Thus, when these three essays are examined together, they reveal the insight and foresight available to Lorde who, because of the intersection of her identities—lesbian, Black, woman—faces oppression on multiple fronts. She hasn’t the privilege of overlooking sexism as does Staples, or racism as Daly, or anti-gay bias and heterosexism, either. Because she hasn’t those privileges, she can illuminate for Staples and Daly specifically, and for Black men and white women generally, how and where they have acted against their own self-interests by violating and oppressing Black women. Nevertheless, it is up to them to grow and introspect, which is the major lesson that Lorde passes on to her son, Jonathan.