The following are quotes gathered from Audre Lorde's book Sister Outsider that speak to the anger often held by women of colour - an anger that most white people will never understand but her words are, I trust, a faithful testimony to how it is to be a black woman in the USA. I think more white people could do well to read her words and take them in.
I see so many white people treading carelessly on the topic of racism, dropping snide, sarcastic, careless and ill-considered comments on conversations about this issue as if there was no real pain in it for anyone anymore. Perhaps they imagine that racism is over and no doubt they can't imagine what it might be like to be on the receiving end of hatred every day of your life simply for the colour of their skin and, heartbreakingly, most of them wouldn't even try to consider what it might be like. I see so many white people making jocular comments having no idea of the immense pain they are triggering in people of colour who might even just be observing the conversation. They white people think it's a friendly back slap but the one they're slapping is profoundly sunburned from decades of racism.
And, of course, anger is not the full story for women of colour and not all experience it in the same way. But as white people we must know that, living in a society as racist as the one we live in now, there is likely pain present so that we can proceed with care and empathy and not like most white people do in these conversations, like a bull in a china shop.
It is a blessing, though tragic that it requires saying, that some people of colour have been willing to open up a vein to their emotional world and express to white people what it is like for them. Might we believe them and be guided by their words in our actions every day.
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"Anger is an appropriate reaction to racist attitudes, as is fury when the actions arising from those attitudes do not change." p, 129
"One woman wrote, "Because 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." p, 132
"Decisions to cut aid for the terminally ill, for the elderly, for dependent children, for food stamps, even school lunches, are being made by men with full stomachs who live in comfortable houses with two cars and umpteen tax shelters. None of them go hungry to bed at night. Recently, it was suggested that senior citizens be hired to work in atomic plants because they are close to the end of their lives anyway." p, 140
"For while we wait for another Malcolm, another Martin, another charismatic Black leader to validate our struggles, old Black people are freezing to death in tenements, Black children are being brutalized and slaughtered in the streets, or lobotomized by television, and the percentage of Black families living below the poverty line is higher today than in 1963." p, 141
"Where does the pain go when it goes away?" p, 144
"Every Black woman in America lives her life somewhere along a wide curve of ancient and unexpressed angers." p, 144
"My Black woman's anger is a molten pond at the core of me, my most fiercely guarded secret. I know how much of my life as a powerful feeling woman is laced through with this net of rage. It is an electric thread woven into every emotional tapestry upon which I set the essentials of my life — a boiling hot spring likely to erupt at any point, leaping out of my consciousness like a fire on the landscape. How to train that anger with accuracy rather than deny it has been one of the major tasks of my life." p, 144
"When I started to write about the intensity of the angers between Black women, I found I had only begun to touch one tip of a three-pronged iceberg, the deepest understructure of which was Hatred, that societal deathwish directed against us from the moment we were born Black and female in America. From that moment on we have been steeped in hatred - for our color, for our sex, for our effrontery in daring to presume we had any right to live. As children we absorbed that hatred, passed it through ourselves, and for the most part, we still live our lives outside of the recognition of what that hatred really is and how it functions. Echoes of it return as cruelty and anger in our dealings with each other. For each of us bears the face that hatred seeks, and we have each learned to be at home with cruelty because we have survived so much of it within our own lives." p, 145
"What other creature in the world besides the Black woman has had to build the knowledge of so much hatred into her survival and keep going?" p, 150
"What other human being absorbs so much virulent hostility and still functions?" p, 151
"We are Black women born into a society of entrenched loathing and contempt for whatever is Black and female." p, 151
"I am writing about an anger so huge and implacable, so corrosive, it must destroy what it most needs for its own solution, dissolution, resolution." p, 157
"As Black women, we have wasted our angers too often, buried them, called them someone else's, cast them wildly into oceans of racism and sexism from which no vibration resounded, hurled them into each other's teeth and then ducked to avoid the impact. But by and large, we avoid open expression of them, or cordon them off in a rigid and unapproachable politeness. The rage that feels illicit or unjustified is kept secret, unnamed, and preserved forever. We are stuffed with furies, against ourselves, against each other, terrified to examine them lest we find ourselves in bold print fingered and named what we have always felt and even sometimes preferred ourselves to be — alone." p, 166
"Sometimes it feels as if I were to experience all the collective hatred that I have had directed at me as a Black woman, admit its implications into my consciousness, I might die of the bleak and horrible weight." p, 171