Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

Throughout Sister Outsider, Lorde reiterates that battling oppression is not solely external but requires attention to how oppression becomes internalized. Drawing on Paulo Freire’s The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Lorde is adamant that:

The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which knows only the oppressors’ tactics, the oppressors’ relationships (123).

Thus, any revolutionary or lasting change requires the oppressed to recognize and eradicate the seeds of oppression within themselves. As she discusses in “Eye to Eye,” Black women wage two battles against oppression: First, the external war against white racism; second, the internalized racism that fuels the anger they direct towards each other (163). For Lorde, this second battle is much more difficult because it requires the oppressed to hold a mirror up to themselves to confront their own self-loathing and how they may be complicit in others’ oppression.

Likewise, Lorde encourages white women and Black men to confront the oppressive tactics they’ve adopted. For example, in reference to Daly’s exclusion of Black goddess figures and myths, Lorde warns, “When patriarchy dismisses us, it encourages our murders. When radical lesbian feminist theory dismisses us, it encourages its own demise” (69).

Here, Lorde makes two important points about liberation: First, Black women’s perspectives are necessary, even foundational, to liberatory efforts; and second, when oppressed groups use the tactics of their oppressors against each other, it impedes liberation. Patriarchy affects Black and white women differently because of the relative privileges accorded to white women as a result of racism, so white women may use racist tactics to get ahead in the fight against patriarchy and give themselves an illusion of power. However, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change” (112).

Similarly, Black people inflict oppression on one another, usually on Black women—and especially Black women who love women. Lorde confronts sexism, anti-gay bias, and heterosexism in the Black community, and she especially focuses on how Black men harbor these prejudices and how, in turn, Black women participate because they are socialized to seek men’s approval. As with white women’s racism, this homophobic violence harms not only the Black women who bear the brunt of the violence; it harms the entire Black community. Lorde responds to Staples’s denunciation of Black Feminism, “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” (63).

Therefore, Black men must observe the ways that misogyny harms them, too, since misogyny “arise[s] out of the same constellation that engenders racism and homophobia” (64). In “Sexism: An American Disease in Blackface,” Lorde questions Black men’s violence against Black women as a result of their rage at racist and capitalist oppression, and she points out how their misogyny parallels the racism against them (61-62). Furthermore, “Black men’s feelings of cancellation, their grievances, and their fear of vulnerability must be talked about, but not by Black women when it is at the expense of our own ‘curious rage’” (61). That is, Black men must recognize that not only is their rage misdirected at Black women, but also that Black women cannot do the inner work for them. Black men must do that work themselves to eradicate what they have internalized of their oppression.

Anti-gay bias and heterosexism are also of concern because of the divisions they create, particularly between Black women of different sexual orientations. Lorde therefore encourages the Black community, but particularly the women, to re-examine their abuse of women who love women. In “Scratching the Surface,” she notes the energy wasted on antilesbian hysteria could be better spent in the fight against the actual oppressors (48). In “Age, Race, Class, and Sex,” she discusses how heterosexism and anti-gay bias appear among Black women (121-22). Again, these discussions suggest the need for Black heterosexual women to scrutinize their prejudice and see how their tactics against lesbian or bisexual women impede Black women’s solidarity and women’s liberation.

In short, to deny members of one’s community is to deny oneself, and “[t]he dehumanizing denial of self is no less lethal than the dehumanization of racism to which it is so closely allied” (50).