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)