[lbo-talk] "master's tools" (was po-mo prince)

[kelley at pulpculture.org]

what a bunch of lame lazy asses. as usual, y'all sit around bitching about 
the quote. type in audre lord master's tools and lookee, Yoshie's archived 
the entire context of the quote for us in 19fuckin99:


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.


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)