----------
>From: Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu>
>To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
>Subject: Re: the master's tools
>Date: Thu, Sep 16, 1999, 5:06 PM
>
>>alex lantsberg wrote:
>>
>>> The master's tools will never destroy the master's house.
>>> - Audre Lorde in Sister Outsider
>>>
>>> [From the 50 Years is Enough list, reformatted by your humble
>>> moderator. I don't think I agree with Audre Lord's aphorism at the
>>> end of Njoki's sig file, but that's another story.]
>>>
>>>what do folks on the list think about the statemen? i'm
>>>particularly interested in doug's story.
>>>
>>>frankly, i think that since the master has accumulated all of the
>>>best tools, then oftentime we have
>>>no choice but to use them.
>>
>>I'm not sure what tools she's talking about. Syllogisms? Calculus?
>>Computers? Rhyme and meter? Complex social organization? There seems
>>to me to be a big difference in how "tools" can be used - whether to
>>dominate or liberate.
>>
>>David Henderson, the ex-OECD economist, thinks that the use of the
>>Master's tool - the Internet - by anti-MAI campaigners is a very bad
>>thing. Seems a very good thing to me.
>>
>>Doug
>
>Well, don't be so literal-minded. Audre Lorde was speaking metaphorically
>as a poet. She was black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, and then some,
>too. Have you guys read _Sister Outsider_?
>
>Lorde's statement that "For the master's tool will never dismantle the
>master's house" can be understood more creatively. It can mean the
>'problems' of capitalism cannot be fully solved through the reforms of
>capitalism. It can mean sex/gender & racial oppressions cannot be fully
>analyzed within Marxist frameworks alone. It can mean that socialism is
>the necessary but not sufficient condition for the abolition of homophobia,
>racism, sexism, etc. Broadly, it can mean that analysis + political action
>must fit the problem to be solved. A screwdriver is not useful when what
>you need is a sledgehammer, and vice versa.
>
>Anyway, Lorde's statement appears in her paper (delivered in 1980) titled
>"Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference" (included in
>_Sister Outsider-): the paper primarily designed to address the question of
>class, racial, and other differences _within_ women's movements, some of
>whose practices have failed to address (and sometimes gone so far as to
>exclude in the past, as in Betty Friedan's "Lavender Menace") concerns of
>black women, working-class women, lesbians, and so on, while relating this
>internal problem to the broader social structures, with a view toward
>strengthening the Left.
>
>From _Sister Outsider_:
>
>***** Traditionally, in american society, it is the members of oppressed,
>objectified groups who are expected to stretch out and bridge the gap
>between the actualities of our lives and the consciousness of our
>oppressor. For in order to survive, those of us for whom oppression is as
>american as apple pie have always had to be watchers, to become familiar
>with the language and manners of the oppressor, even sometimes adopting
>them for some illusion of protection....Black and Third World people are
>expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to
>educate men. Lesbians and gay men are expected to educate the heterosexual
>world. The oppressors maintain their position and evade responsibility for
>their own actions....
>
> ...[I]n a patriarchal power system where whiteskin privilege is a
>major prop, the entrapments used to neutralize Black women and white women
>are not the same. For example, it is easy for Black women to be used by
>the power structure against Black men, not because they are men, but
>because they are Black. Therefore, for Black women, it is necessary at all
>times to separate the needs of the oppressor from our own legitimate
>conflicts within our communities. The same problem does not exist for
>white women....
>
> ...[A] fear of lesbians, or of being accused of being a lesbian,
>has led many Black women into testifying against themselves....But part of
>this need to misname and ignore Black lesbians comes from a very real fear
>that openly women-identified Black women who are no longer dependent upon
>men for their self-definition may well reorder our whole concept of social
>relationship....
>
> ...As a tool of social control, women have been encouraged to
>recognize only one area of human difference as legitimate, those
>differences which exist between women and men. And we have learned to deal
>across differences with the urgency of all oppressed subordinates....We
>have recognized and negotiated these differences, even when this
>recognition only continued the old dominant/subordinate mode of human
>relationship, where the oppressed must recognize the master's difference in
>order to survive.
>
> ...But our future survival is predicated upon our ability to relate
>within equality. As women, we must root out internalized patterns of
>oppression within ourselves, if we are to move beyond the most superficial
>aspects of social change....
>
> ...The old pattern, no matter how cleverly rearranged to imitate
>progress, still condemn us to cosmetically altered repetitions of the same
>old exchanges....
>
> ...For we have, built into all of us, old blueprints of expectation
>and response, old structures of oppression, and these must be altered at
>the same time as we alter the living conditions which are a result of those
>structures. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's
>house. (114-123) *****
>
>Have we so far advanced in gender equality, anti-homophobia, anti-racism,
>etc. -- inside and outside feminist orgs, labor unions, etc. and the Left
>in general -- that we can say, in good faith, to Lorde that we have
>overcome these problems already?
>
>Yoshie
>
>