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1981

The Uses of Anger The Uses of Anger

Audre Lorde

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KEYNOTE ADDRESS: THE NWSA CONVENTION

The Uses of Anger Audre Larde

Racism. The belief in the inherent superiority of one race over all others and thereby the right to dominance, manifest and

implied. Women respond to racism. My response to racism is anger. I

have lived with that anger, on that anger, beneath that anger, on

top of that anger, ignoring that anger, feeding upon that anger,

learning to use that anger before it laid my visions to waste, for

most ofmy life. Once I did it in silence , afraid of the weight of that

anger. My fear of that anger taught me nothing. Your fear of that

anger will teach you nothing, also.

Women responding to racism means women responding to

anger, the anger of exclusion, of unquestioned privilege, of racial

distortions, of silence, ill-use, stereotyping, defensiveness, mis-

naming, betrayal, and coopting.

My anger is a response to racist attitudes, to the actions and presumptions that arise out of those attitudes. If in your dealings

with other women your actions have reflected those attitudes ,

then my anger and your attendant fears, perhaps, are spotlights

that can be used for your growth in the same way I have had to use

learning to express anger for my growth. But for corrective

surgery, not guilt . Guilt and defensiveness are bricks in a wall

against which we will all perish, for they serve none of our futures.

Because I do not want this to become a theoretical discussion, I

am going to give a few examples of interchanges between women

that I hope will illustrate the points I am trying to make. In the

interest of time, I am going to cut them short. I want you to know

that there were many more.

For example:

• I speak out of a direct and particular anger at a particular

academic conference , and a white woman comes up and 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

message that her life may change?

• 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 . "What has this week given to you?" I ask .

The most vocal white woman says, "I think I've gotten a lot. 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. These are the bricks that go into

the walls against which we will bash our consciousness , unless we

recognize that they can be taken apart.

• 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

Audre Lorde.

their work ." In other words , racism is a Black women's problem , a

problem of women of Color, and only we can discuss it.

• After I have 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 impor-

tant." I ask, "How do you use your rage?" And then I have tot urn

away from the blank look in her eyes , before she can invite me to

participate in her own annihilation. Because I do not exist to feel

her anger for her.

• White women are beginning to examine their relationships to

Black women, yet often I hear you wanting only to deal with the

little colored children across the roads of childhood, the beloved nurse-

maid, the occasional second-grade classmate ; those tender memo-

ries of what was once mysterious and intriguing or neutral. You

avoid the childhood assumptions formed by _the raucous laughter at Rastus and Oatmeal, 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

and Andy and your Daddy's humorous bedtime stories.

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. And so , fifteen years later, at a conference on racism,

you can still find that story humorous. But I hear your laughter is

full of terror and dis-ease.

Women's Studies Quarterly 9:3 (Fall 1981) 7

• At an international cultural gathering of women, a well-

known white American woman poet interrupts the reading of the

work of women of Color to read her own poem, and then dashes

off to an "important panel."

• Do women in the academy truly want a dialogue about

racism? It will require recognizing the needs and the living con-

texts of other women. When an academic woman says, for instance, "I can't afford it," she may mean she is making a choice

about how to spend her available money. But when a woman on

welfare says, "I can't afford it," she means she is surviving on an

amount of money that was barely subsistence in 1972, and she

often does not have enough to eat. Yet the National Women's

Studies Association here in I 981 holds a Convention in which it

commits itself to responding to racism, yet refuses to waive the

registration fee for poor women and women of Color who wished

to present and conduct workshops. This has made it impossible

for many women of Color-for instance, Wilmette Brown, of

Black Women for Wages for Housework-to participate in this

Convention. And so I ask again: Is this to be merely another situation of the academy discussing life within the closed circuits

of the academy?

To all the white women here who recognize these attitudes as

familiar, but most of all, to all my sisters of Color who live and

survive thousands of such encounters-to my sisters of Color who

like me still tremble their rage under harness, or who sometimes

question the expression of our rage as useless and disruptive (the

two most popular accusations), I want to speak about anger, my

anger, and what I have learned from my travels through its

dominions.

Everything can be used. except 11·hat is wasteful. You 11·ill need

to ·remember this. when you are accused o.ldestruction. Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially

useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional,

which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can

become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change.

And when I speak of change . I do not mean a simple switch of

positions or a temporary lessening of tensions, nor the ability to smile or feel good. I am speaking of a basic and radical alteration

in all those assumptions underlining our lives.

I have seen situations where whit e women hear a racist remark,

resent what has been said. become filled with fury. and remain

silent, because they are afraid. That unexpressed anger lies within

them like an undetonated device, usually to be hurled at the first

woman of Color who talks about racism.

But anger expressed and translated into action in the service of

our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of

clarification , for it is in the painful process of this translation that we identify who are our allies with whom we have grave differenc-

es, and who are our genuine enemies .

Anger is loaded with information and energy . When I speak of

women of Color, I do not only mean Black women. We are also

Asian American , Caribbean , Chicana, Latina, Hispanic, Native

Americ a n , and we have a right to each of our nam es. The woman

of Color who charges me with rendering her invisible by assuming

that her struggles with racism are identical with my own has

something to tell me that I had better learn from, lest we both

8 Wom e n's Studi es Quart erly 9:3 (Fall 1981)

waste ourselves fighting the truths between us. If I participate,

knowingly or otherwise, in my sister's oppression and she calls me

on it, to answer her anger with my own only blankets the sub-

stance of our exchange with reaction. It wastes energy I need to

join with her. And yes, it is very difficult to stand still and to listen

to another woman's voice delineate an agony I do not share, or

even one in which I myself may have participated.

We speak in this place removed from the more blatant remind-

ers of our em battlement as women. This need not blind us to the

size and complexities of the forces mounting against us and all

that is most human within our environment. We are not here as

women examining racism in a political and social vacuum. We

operate in the teeth of a system for whom racism and sexism are primary, established, and necessary props of profit. Women

responding to racism is a topic so dangerous that when the local

media attempt to discredit this Convention they choose to focus

upon the provision of Lesbian housing as a diversionary de-

vice-as if the Hartford Courant dare not mention the topic chosen

for discussion here, racism, lest it become apparent that women

are in fact attempting to examine and to alter all the repressive

conditions of our lives.

Mainstream communication does not want women, particu-

larly white women, responding to racism. It wants racism to be

accepted as an immutable given in the fabric of existence, like

evening time or the common cold.

So we are working in a context of opposition and threat, the

cause of which is certainly not the angers which lie between us, but

rather that virulent hatred leveled against all women, people of

Color, Lesbians and gay men, poor people-against all of us who

are seeking to examine the particulars of our lives as we resist our

oppressions, moving toward coalition and effective action.

Any discussion among women about racism must include the

recognition and the use of anger. It must be direct and creative,

because it is crucial. We cannot allow our fear of anger to deflect

us nor to seduce us into settling for anything less than the hard

work of excavating honesty; we must be quite serious about the

choice of this topic and the angers entwined within it, because, rest

assured, our opponents are quite serious about their hatred of us

and of what we are trying to do here.

And while we scrutinize the often painful face of each other's

anger, please remember that it is not our anger which makes me

caution you to lock your doors at night, and not to wander the

streets of Hartford alone. It is the hatred which lurks in those

streets, that urge to destroy us all if we truly work for change

rather than merely indulge in our academic rhetoric.

This hatred and our anger are very different. Hatred is the fury

of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and

destruction. Anger is the grief of distortions between peers, and its

object is change. But our time is getting shorter. We have been raised to view any difference other than sex as a reason for

destruction , and for Black women and white women to face each

other's angers without denial or immobilization or silence or guilt

is in itself a heretical and generative idea . It implies peers meetin g upon a common basis to examine difference, and to alter those

distortions which history has created around difference . For it is

those distortions which separate us. And we must ask ourselves:

Who profits from all this? Women of Color in America have grown up within a symphony

of anguish at being silenced, at being unchosen, at knowing that when we survive, it is in spite of a whole world out there that takes

for granted our lack of humanness, that hates our very existence,

outside of its service. And I say "symphony" rather than "cacoph-

ony" because we have had to learn to orchestrate those furies so that they do not tear us apart. We have had to learn to move

through them and use them for strength and force and insight within our daily lives. Those of us who did not learn this difficult

lesson did not survive. And part of my anger is always libation for

my fallen sisters. Anger is an appropriate reaction to racist attitudes , as is fury

when the actions arising from those attitudes do not change. To

those women here who fear the anger of women of Color more than their own unscrutinized racist attitudes , I ask: Is our anger

more threatening than the woman-hatred that tinges all the

aspects of our lives? It is not the anger of other women that will destroy us, but our

refusals to stand still , to listen to its rhythms , to learn within it, to

move beyond the manner of presentation to the substance, to tap

that anger as an important source of empowerment. I cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt, nor hurt feelings , nor

answering anger; for to do so insults and trivializes all our efforts.

Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one's own actions or lack of action. I fit leads to change then it can be useful,

since it becomes no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge . Yet all too often , guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication ; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they

are, the ultimate protection for changelessness. Most women have not developed tools for facing anger con-

structively . CR groups in the past , largely white, dealt with how to

express anger, usually at the world of men . And these groups were

made up of white women who shared the terms of their oppres- sions . There was usually little attempt to articulate the genuine

differences between women , such as those of race, color, class, and sexual identity. There was no apparent need at that tim e to exam -

ine the contradictions of self , woman, as oppressor. There was

work on expressing anger , but very little on anger directed against each other. No tools were developed to deal with other women's

anger except to avoid it, deflect it, or flee from it under a blanket of guilt.

I have no creative use for guilt , yours or my own. Guilt is only

another way of avoiding informed action, of buying time out of the pressing need to make clear choices, out of the approaching

storm that can feed the earth as well as bend the trees. If I speak to you in anger , at least I have spoken to you ; I have not put a gun to

your head and shot you down in the street; I have not looked at your bleeding sister's body and asked, "What did she do to deserve

it?" This was the reaction of two white women to Mary Church Terrell's telling of the lynching of a pregnant Black woman whose

baby was then torn from her body. That was in 1921, and Alice Paul had just refused to publicly endorse the enforcement of the

Nineteenth Amendment for all women -excluding the women of Color who had worked to help bring about that amendment.

The angers between women will not kill us if we can articulate them with precision, if we listen to the content of what is said with

at least as much intensity as we defend ourselves from the manner of saying. Anger is a source of empowerment we must not fear to

tap for energy rather than guilt. When we turn from anger we turn from insight, saying we will accept only the designs already

known , those deadly and safely familiar. I have tried to learn my

anger's usefulness to me, as well as its limitations. For women raised to fear, too often anger threatens annihilation.

In the male construct of brute force, we were taught that our lives

depended upon the good will of patriarchal power. The anger of

others was to be avoided at all costs, because there was nothing to be learned from it but pain, a judgment that we had been bad girls, come up lacking, not done what we were supposed to do. And ifwe

accept our powerlessness , then of course any anger can destroy us. But the strength of women lies in recognizing differences

between us as creative, and in standing to those distortions which

we inherited without blame but which are now ours to alter. The

angers of women can transform differences through insight into power. For anger between peers births change, not destruction,

and the discomfort and sense of loss it often causes is not fatal, but

a sign of growth. My response to racism is anger. That anger has eaten clefts into

my living only when it remained unspoken, useless to anyone. It

has also served me in classrooms without light or learning, where the work and history of Black women was less than a vapor. It has

served me as fire in the ice zone of uncomprehending eyes of white women who see in my experience and the experience ofmy people

only new reasons for fear or guilt. And my anger is no excuse for not dealing with your blindness, no reason to withdraw from the

results of your own actions. When women of Color speak out of the anger that laces so many

of our contacts with white women, we are often told that we are "creating a mood of hopelessness," "preventing white women

from getting past guilt," or "standing in the way of trusting com- munication and action." All these quotes come directly from

letters to me from members of this organi zation within the last two years . One woman wrote, "B ecause you are Black and Lesbian,

you seem to speak with the moral authority of suffering ." Yes, I am Black and Lesbian , and what you hear in my voice is fury , not suffering. Anger, not moral authority . There is a difference.

To turn aside from the anger of Black women with excuses or

the pretexts of intimidation, is to award no one power-it is merely another way of preserving racial blindness, the power of

unaddressed privilege, unbreached, intact. For guilt is only yet another form of objectification. Oppressed peoples are always

being asked to stretch a little more, to bridge the gap between blindness and humanity . Black women are expected to use our

anger only in the service of other people's salvation, other people's learning. But that time is over . My anger has meant pain to me but

it has also meant survival, and before I give it up I'm going to be sure that there is something at least as powerful to replace it on the

road to clarity. What woman here is so enamoured of her own oppression. her

own oppressed status, that she cannot see her heelprint upon another woman's face? What woman's terms of oppression have

Women's Studies Quarterly 9:3 (Fall 1981) 9

become precious and necessary as a ticket into the fold of the

righteous, away from the cold winds of self-scrutiny?

1 am a Lesbian woman of Color whose children eat regularly

because I work in a university. If their full bellies make me fail to

recognize my commonality with a woman of Color whose children

do not eat because she cannot find work, or who has no children

because her insides are rotted from home abortions and steriliza-

tion ; if I fail to recognize the Lesbian who chooses not to have

children, the woman who remains closeted because her homo-

phobic community is her only life support, the woman who

chooses silence instead of another death, the woman who is terri-

fied lest my anger trigger the explosion of hers; if I fail to recognize

them as other faces of myself, then I am contributing not only to

each of their oppressions but also to my own, and the anger which

stands between us then must be used for clarity and mutual

empowerment , not for evasion by guilt or for further separation. I

am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are

very different from my own. And I am not free as long as one

person of Color remains chained. Nor is any one of you.

I speak here as a woman of Color who is not bent upon destruc-

tion, but upon survival. No woman is responsible for altering the

psyche of her oppressor, even when that psyche is embodied in

another woman. I have suckled the wolf's lip of anger and I have

used it for illumination, laughter, protection, fire in places where

there was no light, no food, no sisters, no quarter. We are not

goddesses or matriarc hs or edifices of divine forgiveness; we are

not fiery fingers of judgment or instruments of flage llation; we are

women always forced back upon our woman's power. We have

learned to use anger as we have learned to use the dead flesh of

animals; and bruised , battered, and changing, we have survived

and grown and, in Angela Wilson's words, we are moving on . With or without uncolored women. We use whatever strengths we

have fought for, including anger, to help define and fashion a

world where all our sisters can grow, where our children can love,

and where the power of touching and meeting another woman's

difference and wonder will eventually transcend the need for destruction .

For it is not the anger of Black women which is dripping down

over this globe like a diseased liquid. It is not my anger that

launches rockets, spends over sixty thousand dollars a second on

missiles and other agents of war and death, pushes opera singers

off rooftops, slaughters children in cities, stockpiles nerve gas and

chemical bombs, sodomizes our daughters and our earth. It is not

the anger of Black women which corrodes into blind, dehumaniz - ing power, bent upon the annihilation of us all unless we meet it

with what we have, our power to examine and to redefine the

terms upon which we will live and work ; our power to envision

and to reconstruct, anger by painful anger, stone upon heavy

stone, a future of pollinating difference and the earth to support our choices.

We welcome all women who can meet us, face to face, beyond objectification and beyond guilt.

Copyright © 1981 by Audre Lorde

Audre Lo rde's Chosen Poems and her "bio-myth-ography" en- titled I've Been Standing on This Street Corner a Hell of a Long Time will be out in 1982.

AN OVERVIEW OF THE THIRD ANNUAL NSWA CONVENTION

A Time for Confrontation Deborah S. Rosenfelt

If exhilaration characterized the first annual NWSA Convention in Lawrence , Kansas, and consolidation the second in Blooming- ton, this third Convention on "Women Respond to Racism"was a time for confrontation. That word , of course, can imply either a squar ing-off-against or a facing-together -with. Both processes were enacted at the Convention, perhaps inevitably , given a theme that acknowledged and permitted a certain kind of political strug- gle. The tone was set in opening addresses by Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde, which prepared us for the necessary, painful , yet productive expression of anger. Some were disheartened by the speeches, feeling that in these days of the primacy oft he New Right and the Moral Majority , anger among women who are essentially allies is a luxury we can littl e afford. Others saw the speeches as essential renderings of th e complexity of relations between women of color and white women, something that has to be acknowledged before and during the larger undertakings on which we work together.

The Convention program included more than 200 workshops,

10 Women's Studies Quarterly 9:3 (Fall 1981)

panels, and roundtables on topics ranging from theory about the intersections of sex, race, class, and affectional preference in society and culture, to strategies for institutional change; from the history and literature of women of color and that of their relation- ship with white women , to discussions of the issues now faced by women trying to work together in multiethnic programs and pro - jects; from developin g multicultural curricula in various educa - tional contexts, to analyzing the roles of women in Third World countries. These international panels, by all accounts, were some of the better-attended and more exciting of the sessions. One Con- vention-goer, by careful timing, managed to hear John etta Cole and Sonia Alvarez speaR on "Sex, Race, and Socialist Transforma- tion in Cuba and Nicara gua" ; catch Stephanie Urdang in another session on "Women and Anti -Colonial Struggles"; and take in a bit of a panel on "International Women Respond to Racism ," moderated by Aziza al-Hibri , before participating in her own session on "The Role of Women in National Development and Revolution in the Third World." The Convention program alone