#Instruments of destruction no vocals full

#Instruments of destruction no vocals full

But I hear your laughter is full of terror and disease. And so fifteen years later, at a conference on racism, you can still find that story humorous. I wheel my two-year-old daughter in a shopping cart through a supermarket in Eastchester in 1967, and a little white girl riding past in her mother’s cart calls out excitedly, “Oh look, Mommy, a baby maid!” And your mother shushes you, but she does not correct you.You avoid the childhood assumptions formed by the raucous laughter at Rastus and Alfalfa, the acute message of your mommy’s handkerchief spread upon the park bench because I had just been sitting there, the indelible and dehumanizing portraits of Amos ‘n Andy and your daddy’s humorous bedtime stories. White women are beginning to examine their relationships to Black women, yet often I hear them wanting only to deal with little colored children across the roads of childhood, the beloved nursemaid, the occasional second-grade classmate – those tender memories of what was once mysterious and intriguing or neutral.

I do not exist to feel her anger for her.

After I read from my work entitled “Poems for Women in Rage,” a white woman asks me: “Are you going to do anything with how we can deal directly with our anger? I feel it’s so important.” I ask, “How do you use your rage?” And then I have to turn away from the blank look in her eyes, before she can invite me to participate in her own annihilation.

After fifteen years of a women’s movement which professes to address the life concerns and possible futures of all women, I still hear, on campus after campus, “How can we address the issues of racism? No women of Color attended.” Or, the other side of that statement, “We have no one in our department equipped to teach their work.” In other words, racism is a Black women’s problem, a problem of women of Color, and only we can discuss it.

I feel Black women really understand me a lot better now they have a better idea of where I’m coming from.” As if understanding her lay at the core of the racist problem. The most vocal white woman says, “I think I’ve gotten a lot. “What has this week given to you?” I ask.

The Women’s Studies Program of a southern university invites a Black woman to read following a week-long forum on Black and white women.

I speak out of direct and particular anger at an academic conference, and a white woman says, “Tell me how you feel but don’t say it too harshly or I cannot hear you.” But is it my manner that keeps her from hearing, or the threat of a message that her life may change?.

In the interest of time, I am going to cut them short. Guilt and defensiveness are bricks in a wall against which we all flounder they serve none of our futures.īecause I do not want this to become a theoretical discussion, I am going to give a few examples of interchanges between women that illustrate these points. If your dealings with other women reflect those attitudes, then my anger and your attendant fears are spotlights that can be used for growth in the same way I have used learning to express anger for my growth. My anger is a response to racist attitudes and to the actions and presumptions that arise out of those attitudes. Women responding to racism means women responding to anger Anger of exclusion, of unquestioned privilege, of racial distortions, of silence, ill-use, stereotyping, defensiveness, misnaming, betrayal, and co-optation. Your fear of that anger will teach you nothing, also. Once I did it in silence, afraid of the weight. I have lived with that anger, ignoring it, feeding upon it, learning to use it before it laid my visions to waste, for most of my life. The belief in the inherent superiority of one race over all others and thereby the right to dominance, manifest and implied. In June 1981, Audre Lorde gave the keynote presentation at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference, Storrs, Connecticut.