Reminds me of a story my aunt tells. She was living in the boonies, miles from a store, no car, an infant and two toddlers, not much money. The flies were thick that summer during hay season. She couldn't nurse her baby because every time she tried, she'd be plagued with flies. Exasperated, she set out plates of honey, hoping the flies would find another sweet attraction _and_ get caught in the stickiness.
No such luck. They buzzed happily about, never once going near those plates of honey. It wasn't just that they preferred her breast milk. They just wouldn't go near the honey, no matter whether there was competition or not.
for Lorde, one of the ways oppression works is by "internalized structures of oppression" that inculcate the idea that divisions of race, glass, gender, able-bodiedness, etc are seen as the enemies of solidarity. They are not understood as productive--as generative of solidarity.
Thus, lesbians were told to bracket their concerns in order to work to end the oppression of _all_ women _as_ women. Black women were told not to bring up issues of racism within the feminist movement because it weakened the bonds of sisterhood. Etc.
Lorde is saying, "You can't tear down the house of oppression by using the same tactics by which the masters built and defend the house of oppression."
The house isn't anything we want. We don't want to pluck the flowers from the chain and wear the chain without any consolation. We want to break the chain and cull the living flower.
We want to tear down the house of oppression, not so we can sit in caves. We want to take the land, the food we produce, the _homes_ (not houses) we built for ourselves, the cultures and customs we created and make a better world.
The objection people have is when some people apply the phrase to things Lorde didn't necessarily think were the tools of oppression. Lorde didn't include such things as literacy, rationality, a complex division of labor, technology, etc. among the (master's) tools of oppression.
It seems to me that if you want to argue with Lorde, then the context matters. If you want to argue with what you believe are poor extensions of her aphorism, then your audience would be persuaded by understanding how she's using it incorrectly. Alternatively, one could take on Lorde and argue that the specific tools of oppression to which she referred are, indeed, not productive and are, instead, destructive to solidarity.
Kelley