the master's tools

Liza Featherstone lfeather32 at erols.com
Thu Sep 16 16:36:42 PDT 1999


Thanks so much Yoshie, for quoting the whole context. Very useful. But I still don't think tools are a very good metaphor for what she's talking about. If she means, as she seems to, that oppressive *structures* have to change or be dismantled, no argument with that, of course. But that's not really what tools are. I know I'm being sort of creepily literal-minded here, except that I really don't think it makes all that much more sense in context. Why not just say we don't want to live in the master's house, and leave the tools out of it?

----------
>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
>
>



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