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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

audre lorde

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Lorde and Morrison on identity and action

Audre Lorde and Toni Morrison were born on the same birthdate, February 18: Morrison in 1931 and Lorde in 1934.

Thanks to the good folks at Many Voices, I’ve been listening to Audre Lorde speaking to students at UCLA. The date of the lecture is unclear, but the video uploader places the session in the early 1990s.

She begins by inviting the audience to inquire of themselves, “Who am I and how do I use who I am in the service of what I believe?”

Then Lorde reads from her stories of her childhood and early adult in the East Village, New York City, learning to recognize her identity as Black, woman, and lesbian, and how each of these components of what made her her also differentiated her life experiences from those of the people around her.

The talk is about an hour long and includes an extended Q&A session with UCLA’s students on seeking and building community and being courageous.


Some of the highlights:

  • “We recognized oppression as oppression no matter where it came from. It is not the function of a woman—any woman—to love or to accept the psyche of her oppressor, even when that psyche is embodied in another woman.”
  • “As we identify who we are, we begin the journey to use that power. It is what empowerment is all about. Power that is not used is dangerous because power is never quiescent; it’s never neutral. If I do not use my power, however relative it is; if I do not find out what it is and learn how to use it, someone else is using it. The power you do not use, is being used against us.”
  • “We get strong by doing the thing we need to be strong for. So there’s always that little risk. And yes, you’re afraid. We’ll always be afraid. If we wait until we’re not afraid to move, not afraid to act, [then] we’ll be sending little messages on the Ouija board… I started out like we all started out: like a coward.”
  • “You must have a group where you feel articulated and accepted. And if it doesn’t exist, you have a responsibility to create it.”
  • “Isolation is corrosive and it is dangerous. It is anti-revolutionary, too, which is why so many of us exist in isolation. Get together. If there are two of us doing something, maybe next week, there’ll be four. You need to know you are not alone. And you have a responsibility to make whoever you identify with know that they are not alone either.”

I wonder how Toni Morrison would respond to Lorde’s concept of collective courage: Morrison draws strength from a more solitary generative process.

She describes writing as an act of creation that connects her with the external world and gives her the tools to interpret the world and reinvent it. Morrison has said that the artist and writer have the power to challenge tyrannies and that they do that work by persistently creating and writing.

“There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear,” she wrote.

I first quoted that statement in March 2015. Six years beforehand that, Morrison explained to UC-Davis’ Pam Houston how writing allows her to experience the good news that we can continue to grow: wherever we start in our understanding of ourselves or our sense of connection to the wider world isn’t the end of our story. We can, as Lorde said, grow more courageous through disciplined action. We can perceive others more clearly as we attend to the world around us.

Toni: I feel more friendly when I am writing, nicer to people, much more generous, also wiser. I am full of a kind of tenderness toward people and all they have to hide, all they have to construct. Not pity, not sympathy, just tenderness. Knowing that the job of being a human is so hard, and it is the only job there is left—though we keep on pretending otherwise. If I am in that good place and I run into someone I dislike, I feel more human and they seem more human…

There are all sorts of ways people try to stay connected, try not to live in hate. Religion may be one of them, but for me the central thing is the writing. The art itself. Putting my intelligence and my humanity to the best possible use, and I get better because I am doing it. The writing teaches me that I can’t just reach some little plateau and say that’s it, this is the place. It is always a search.

Pam: And that is the good news.

Toni: That is the good news.”

Read the rest.

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Self-care among activists

a golden retriever lies on a bed, paws off the edge.
If only working like a dog meant resting like one too. Photo credit: Jacob Ufkes

I’m in Philadelphia this week with a few thousand organizers for the 29th annual Creating Change conference.

The first time I attended, in Denver, CO, I co-presented on the intersections of climate change, faith, and sexual orientation and gender identity with Peterson Toscano, J Mase III, and Rev. Nancy Wilson.

This time around, the conference is in Philly. I’ve already fallen in love with the city’s downtown area, and I’m also envious of its Amtrak station (New York Penn station is nothing if not chaotic!).

The first full day of Creating Change features a racial justice institute: an opportunity for attendees to dig into models of the cycles of oppression, socialization, and liberation, share coping and resistance techniques, explore each others’ stories about being raced in this society, and practice new strategies for participating in frank conversations about race, racism, and racial justice.

A major part of racial justice work for people of color is the work of self-care, and that’s what I focused on today.

The small group I participated in reflected on statements such as “Self-care is a divine responsibility” as well as Audre Lorde’s classic definition in A Burst of Light of self-care as both “self-preservation” and “an act of political warfare.”

Lorde, I learned a few years ago, died in her late 50s from breast cancer.

If the US had a healthcare system that allowed people to nurture their health proactively and receive sound, affordable care when needed, Lorde might still be with us. She might also be with us today if all of the communities in which she worked—academic, artistic, and activist—held in common a vision of “work” that didn’t consume workers’ lives but rather provided them with space to imagine and contribute and recover from labor at a humane pace.

This is an element of contemporary activist culture that still needs a lot of attention. People are working relentlessly on issue after issue year after year and there are structural reasons why: workplace culture, movement culture, precarious jobs and the over-performing that often accompanies precarity, as well as the passion and compassion that drive many activists to keep pressing for justice even when they aren’t compensated.

These factors aren’t about individual will to live and die on the treadmill. I’d bet that most of us aren’t conscious about the demands our routines make on us: we’re only conscious that we don’t wake up rested, or keep contracting colds, or feel overwhelm altogether too often.

Spaces like the room I spent this afternoon in are a rare chance to reassess that common routine. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be revisiting my routine, the obligations I’ve taken on, and those I’ve created for myself—including my daily writing practice.

I encourage you to review your routine too. Even if you’re sure that “everything is fine,” sometimes “fine” is not good, and we can do better.

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Imprinted with fear

Partial text from Audre Lorde's poem, "a litany for survival" (1978)
From Audre Lorde’s “a litany for survival,” in The Black Unicorn (1978)

Fear learned early can affect us life-long.

In a working paper on the topic, Harvard child psychologists explain that intense, chronic fear and anxiety hampers children’s ability to learn, and undermines their ability to correctly perceive threats. Without intervention, children raised in chronically fearful environments learn to interpret ambiguous situations in a negative way, build stress as they preemptively work to protect themselves, and adopt an “aggressive” stance toward the world.

Furthermore, “simply removing a child from a dangerous situation will not by itself undo the serious consequences or reverse the negative impacts of early fear learning.” We have to create new emotional and neurological architecture to replace the old while we also work to change the outer environments that made old fears seem reasonable.

I read the Harvard paper and couldn’t help but think about the fear-based rhetoric that’s become a normal part of political, religious, and charitable communication. Lobbyists argue for one candidate by invoking the disasters they believe a different candidate is responsible for. Religious leaders warn adherents against an interpretation by threatening community censure at best and post-mortem punishment at worst. And even nonprofits that otherwise focus on reducing harm and making society more just sometimes send out letters that are full of suspicion and full of fear.

This doesn’t work well for any of us.

Take a week or two just to notice the tenor of the communications that you receive from organizations or send to your own audiences. Where does the fallacy of argumentum in terrorem, the appeal to fear, seem to crop up most? What can you do to squeeze it out of your toolbox, and anywhere it doesn’t produce good results? And how do you find fear affecting you and the small and large life choices you make?