Lorde- THE USES OF Anger- Women Respond TO Racism PDF

Preview

Summary

bullet notes...

Description

LORDE: THE USES OF ANGER: WOMEN RESPOND TO RACISM Audre Lorde presented to the NWSAC in Storrs, Connecticut, her she initially explains racism as one race having superiority/ dominance above all other races. II. She explains how being silent and ignoring her opinions of racism and how it impacts her and her community was suffocating in a sense due to her initial “fear of that anger” which she lived with for many years. A. She means for her voice and out spoken-ness to be a voice for others who have the same anger. B. She uses her voice for “growth” meaning for a purpose not just to blatantly express anger with no goal in mind III. All the examples Lorde displays for the conference has been primarily a reflection of how white peoples responses to dealing directly with black issues. A. In these cases the white women were neglectful of the core issues and were acting as if they were the victimized such as, when the white woman says ; 1. “I think I’ve gotten a lot. I feel Black women really understand me a lot better now; they have a better idea of where I’m coming from.” a) The goal of this wasn’t for the black women to understand her perspective but for the white woman to understand where black women are coming from. IV. The individual hardships are also notified; A. “When an academic woman says, “I can’t afford it,” she may mean she is making a choice about how to spend her available money. But when a woman on welfare says, “I can’t afford it,” she means she is surviving on an amount of money that was barely subsistence in 1972, and she often does not have enough to eat.” 1. They aren’t providing equal access for women of color to attend conferences that would allow for voices from many backgrounds a fair chance to represented/heard. V. Racism is seen as just a common factor of life that is apart of our “existence”, yet anger is what is used to combat the invisible battle that is materialized in our society A. In order for POC ( Women particuarily) to advance they had to not allow racism and the acts of hatred they face “tear us[them] apart” 1. Bottling up their anger will only destroy women of color and they must use this anger to take action for their own empowerment. VI. If we continuously ignore the oppression of our fellow woman and refuse to face the privledge of white women that angers us then we are only further continuing the cycle and harming our sisters. A. “What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heelprint upon another woman’s face?” VII. Lorde is a lesbian WOC who is able to support her family due to her job yet she recognizes the struggles of those in her community, the closeted, the neglected, abused and silenced and believes that if we do not recognize the women in our communities we only empower a broken racist system. VIII. “For it is not the anger of Black women which is dripping down over this globe like a diseased liquid.” I....