Quarterly Journal of Speech

Vol. 97, No. 3, August 2011, pp. 283308

Anger Among Allies: Audre Lordes

1981 Keynote Admonishing the
National Womens Studies Association
Lester C. Olson

This essay argues that Audre Lordes 1981 keynote speech, The Uses of Anger: Women
Responding to Racism, has much to contribute to communication scholars understanding of human biases and rhetorical artistry. The significance of Lordes subject is
one reason for devoting critical attention to her speech, because, in contemporary public
life in the United States, anger has abiding relevance in an extraordinary range of
rhetoric and public address. Another reason for contemplating Lordes speech is the fact
that anger was a major theme throughout the internationally acclaimed poet-activists
advocacy. The essay suggests that Lordes speech illustrates a communication technique,
shifting subjectivities, which recurs in her rhetorical artistry.
Keywords: Audre Lorde; Anger; Emotions; Racism; Feminism; Womens Public Address

We are working in a context of oppression 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.
*Audre Lorde, The Uses of Anger

In this essay, I will argue that Audre Lordes keynote speech, The Uses of Anger:
Women Responding to Racism, which she delivered to the National Womens
Lester C. Olson is a Professor of Communication and Womens Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, where
he is a Chancellors Distinguished Teacher. He presented earlier versions of this essay to the National
Communication Association at Chicago in November 2004 and the Womens Studies Program at the University
of Pittsburgh in October 2006. For funding this research on Audre Lorde, he is grateful to Iowa State University
for a Carrie Chapman Catt Prize for research on Women and Politics, the National Endowment for the
Humanities for a Summer Stipend, and research grants from the Womens Studies Program at the University of
Pittsburgh. He thanks the editor and reviewers for helpful advice. Correspondence to: Lester C. Olson,
Department of Communication, 1117 Cathedral of Learning, University of Pittsburgh, 4200 Fifth Avenue,
Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA. Email: olson@pitt.edu
ISSN 0033-5630 (print)/ISSN 1479-5779 (online) # 2011 National Communication Association
DOI: 10.1080/00335630.2011.585169

284 L. C. Olson

Studies Association (NWSA) at Storrs, Connecticut during June 1981, has much to
contribute to communication scholars understanding of human biases.1 Established
as an academic, professional organization in 1977, the NWSAs mission is to lead the
field of womens studies in educational and social transformation.2 In her speech,
Black lesbian feminist Lorde endeavored to communicate concerning a difficult
subject across multiple differences with her audiences, especially a predominantly
white and heterosexual female audience of scholar-activists at the NWSA, and
whomever engaged various published versions. During 30 years since Lordes
keynote, humanities scholarship has regularly mentioned excerpts from Lordes
speech in commentary on racial anger in particular and tactical uses of emotions in
general. As a touchstone of agonistic oratory, Lordes speech models how marginalized scholar-activists have engaged in public spaces with members of relatively
dominant social groups, who consider themselves to be allies, not adversaries.3
Anger can be prismatic. In this resides both its utility and its hazard. On the one hand,
anger can illuminate with clarity and precision while energizing action. In her 1981 speech,
Lorde observed, Anger is loaded with information and energy (127). She claimed,
Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and
change (127). On the other hand, however, anger can fracture and deflect the same light,
splintering it into guilt, hurt feelings, defensiveness, fear, vengefulness, retaliation, or
hatred. Angers propensity to become uncontrolled, injurious, or destructive rage makes it
dangerous. Lorde noted these Janus-faced qualities of anger in her keynote by alluding to
the approaching storm that can feed the earth as well as bend the trees (130). Angers
precarious potentialities might explain discomfort many people experience in angers
presence. Anger can be useful and vexing to anyone committed to social justice.
Lordes public advocacy*an immense and consequential body of work consisting of
poems, speeches, essays, open letters, interviews, pamphlets, and books*is invaluable for
reasons that extend beyond her extensive commentary on human biases, because of its
rhetorical artistry while communicating across multiple human differences. In general,
Lordes advocacy demonstrated her understanding of how privilege and oppression can
combine in each persons life situation, influenced as she was by Paulo Freires Pedagogy of
the Oppressed, among other intellectual sources.4 Consequently, her public advocacy
avoided a simplistic reduction of conflicts to the roles of oppressor and oppressed, noticing
as she did how social, political, economic, educational, and religious factors impinge on
lives in ways that oftentimes have people, including herself, operating within both roles,
even if they are only mindful of one or another of them. In 1982, Lorde asked, In what way
do I contribute to the subjugation of any part of those who I define as my people?5
In this essay, I will suggest that Lorde translated Freires insights concerning the
combined roles of oppressor and oppressed into a powerful communication
technique that I have named shifting subjectivities. An advocate articulates a shift
in the second persona of an address, wherein the auditors or readers occupy one kind
of role initially and then, drawing on what is remembered or learned from that
position, are repositioned subsequently into a different role that is harder for them to
recognize or occupy, but that might possess some transforming power. Initially, for
example, Lorde focused on her women allies first-hand experiences of oppression

Anger Among Allies 285

under patriarchy to help them subsequently to recognize their own roles as

oppressors in similar practices across differences of race and sexuality. Concurrently,
another shift transpires in the advocates persona from a posture of identification
with the auditors or readers to confrontation of them across a difference. Both shifts
recur together in intricate combination in Lordes NWSA speech.
Today, Lorde is an iconic figure to several, diverse and overlapping communities in
the United States and abroad, especially people concerned with the advancement of
women, Blacks and other racial minorities, the impoverished, as well as gay men and
lesbians. Black feminist and political activist Angela Davis captured a key feature of
Lordes lifetime achievement in generating unanticipated coalitions: Through her life,
she galvanized alliances among individuals and groups who were not expected to
discover points of convergence.6 Because I agree with Lorde that There is no hierarchy
of oppression,7 it is important to me, as a white man, to come to terms with racism and
sexism, among factors such as economic class, sexuality, age, gender identity, ability,
religion, and the like. As a gay scholar of modest, rural origins, I believe, moreover, that
serious errors of judgment can result from concentrating on ones own oppression,
however daunting it is to deal competently with human diversity or to recognize ones
own role in the systemic devaluation of others. I concur with Lorde, too, that I should
recognize and use my privileges with care.8 So for more than 15 years now, I have been
attending to Lordes public advocacy. In 2002, after reading my earliest essays on Lordes
speeches, her estate opened her otherwise closed papers at Spelman College Archives to
me, an act of trust in a white male which, to my knowledge, had only been extended
previously to Lordes biographer, Alexis De Veaux.
That I am white and male raises legitimate concerns about the risks of dominance and
colonization across chasms of race and sex.9 Communicating about any group that one
does not belong to oneself can be hazardous to the group.10 However, it can be even
more hazardous to them to misuse privilege by never trying, because this practice
assures consequential inattention to their lives and ideas. Even difficult or disturbing
communication can provide a prospect for mutual growth. In my opinion, it becomes a
matter of being accountable for my interpretations and encouraging others who view
Lordes speeches differently to offer alternatives. Relatively dominant members within
marginalized communities have an understandable history of discouraging and,
sometimes, silencing examinations of intra- and intergroup conflict as divisive and a
luxury we can little afford.11 At the 1981 NWSA conference, this comment surfaced
among attendees responses to Lordes keynote. In this regard, my maleness in dealing
with a sustained conflict over racism between white and Black women is a delicate
matter, even though I have participated at various national conferences organized
primarily by and for women, among them two conferences of the NWSA.
Lorde regularly encouraged scholars of diverse backgrounds to engage her ideas.
In a 1980 speech, for instance, Lorde listed distortions around human differences
used to exclude work by women of Color from the curriculum: All too often, the
excuse given is that the literatures of women of Color can only be taught by Colored
women, or that they are too difficult to understand, or that classes cannot get into
them because they come out of experiences that are too different. She intimated

286 L. C. Olson

hypocrisy in such excuses: I have heard this argument presented by white women of
otherwise quite clear intelligence, women who seem to have no trouble at all teaching
and reviewing work that comes out of the vastly different experiences of Shakespeare,
Molie`re, Dostoevsky, and Aristophanes. Having amused audiences by the inconsistency of these excuses, she added, Surely there must be some other explanation.12
Lordes humor acknowledged her diverse audiences concerns, while encouraging
reflection on how scholars can misuse privilege by disengagement or protection in
ways that uncritically preserve power rather than examine how it can be used to learn
constructively from human differences to advance social justice.
This essay concentrates on Lordes 1981 keynote speech to the NWSA in an
endeavor to understand and appreciate anger from her standpoint, a brilliant,
accomplished Black lesbian public advocate and political activist, who participated in
several social justice movements. Her entire speech was published in the Womens
Studies Quarterly for Fall 1981 along with her co-presenter Adrienne Richs keynote,
Disobedience is What NWSA is Potentially About.13 In January 1982, an
abbreviated version of Lordes remarks circulated in the Philadelphia Lesbian and
Gay Task Force Bulletin.14 Being a perfectionist, Lorde revised her keynote by using
the text from Womens Studies Quarterly as a draft for another version published in
Sister Outsider: Essays & Speeches by Audre Lorde (1984).15 I assume that this text best
reflects her views. So I feature this version in the absence of a recording. During midNovember 1984, Lorde read the NWSA keynote at a public gathering in Eugene,
Oregon, where she and Barbara Smith conducted a community dialog concerning a
Black mans recent homicide.16 In addition, Dagmar Schultz had Lordes keynote
translated into German for publication in Berlin.17 Since 1987, the speech has been
anthologized in numerous collections concerning race, women, gender, language, and
multi-cultural experiences.18 Lordes keynote has become a touchstone to diverse,
marginalized communities in the United States and abroad.
The significance of Lordes subject matter is one reason for devoting attention to her
speech. In contemporary public life, anger has abiding relevance today in an
extraordinary range of rhetoric and public address. In 2007, syndicated columnist
George F. Will asserted that anger is more pervasive than merely political grievances
would explain. He averred that Americans are infatuated with anger because it is
democratic. He asserted, Anyone can express it, and it is one of the seven deadly sins,
which means it is a universal susceptibility.19 Although I will question Wills claim that
anger is democratic, his column testified nonetheless to angers ubiquity in US
culture. On July 16, 2010, The Chronicle Review devoted essays to Anger: How We
Became the United States of Fury, in which Sasha Abramsky characterized rage as the
most bipartisan emotion in America.20 Yet contributions by such recognized journalists and academic leaders have concentrated on anger expressed by the powerful and
privileged whose optimism and entitlement have been recently diminished or lost (such
as the so called Tea Party), not by members of marginalized communities such as Lorde.
Another reason to contemplate Lordes speech is the fact that anger was a major
theme throughout the internationally acclaimed activists advocacy. In her NWSA
keynote, she acknowledged, My anger has meant pain to me but it has also meant

Anger Among Allies 287

survival, and before I give it up Im going to be sure that there is something at least as
powerful to replace it on the road to clarity (132). Lorde distinguished between
anger and hatred, and she salvaged the former as potentially useful and generative
(129). Pamela Annas generalized that Lordes keynote talked about the empowering
and creative energy of anger, and the differences between anger and hate.21 As Elaine
Maria Upton observed, One of the prominent feelings to which the reader must
respond in Lordes writing is anger and often rage.22 It is not possible to understand
or appreciate Lordes advocacy without coming to terms with anger as a commonplace response to injustices and a resource for political activism*at times,
deliberately disruptive and consciously rupturing the usual rules of engagement.
The essay begins with a brief sketch of angers social and political uses, especially in
the United States during the 1960s and 1970s, to place Lordes keynote speech to the
NWSA within its historical moment, by encapsulating commonplace beliefs and
norms concerning anger and by identifying risks that attended racial expressions of
anger. After a necessarily concise orientation to anger in twentieth-century US
ideology, the essay turns to specific experiences impinging on Lordes decision to
make anger the central subject of her keynote, not an obvious decision given risks
that racisms systemic roots could be characterized as merely feelings. Here I will
scrutinize her conflicts with white feminists in womens organizations during the late
1970s. Finally, the essay examines Lordes remarks at the NWSA to explore possible
rhetorical explanations for her substantive claims and techniques. The conclusion
considers fragmentary evidence suggesting how Lordes audiences interacted with her
views during the conference and afterward. One result will be an appreciation for an
insightful speech by an exceptional orator and radical visionary. Another outcome
will be a deeper understanding of certain rhetorical uses of anger when expressed by
members of marginalized communities within US culture.
Anger, Marginalized Communities, and US Culture
Let me begin with a distinction between experiences of an emotion and social norms
or rules guiding its expression in public and private life. The latter has been referred
to as emotionology by Carol Z. Stearns and Peter N. Stearns to designate norms
that describe and to some extent regulate emotions such as anger. They underscore
that Emotionology is not the same thing as emotional experience. . . . A family may
discountenance anger, but there may be much anger in that familys operations.
Their book affirms accurately that American scholars largely have shared a wider
public desire to keep the problems of anger carefully beneath the surface.23 This
distinction is useful for approaching Lordes speech, because she both performs anger
and comments about re-envisioning norms for working constructively with it.
These germane norms can vary with race, sexuality, class, sex, and the like. Notice,
moreover, the specific places and ways in which emotions are expressed: alone in a
solitary space, in a private setting in the presence of others, by distant, personal or
open letters, or in public before groups, where emotions might be displayed or
carefully concealed. Mari J. Matsuda observed, There is a politics of anger: who is

288 L. C. Olson

allowed to get angry, whose anger goes unseen, and who seems angry when they are
not.24 Lordes speech noticed differences in anger stemming from white womens
violated presumptions of entitlement or privilege, on one hand, and Black womens
affective responses to being the target of their misuses, on the other.
Anger can be vexing within overlapping, marginalized communities because it can
become a source of fracture within and between already vulnerable social groups, even
though anger can be a resource sometimes mobilizing concerted action. In an essay
concerning AIDS activism, for instance, Robert Ariss observed, The most overt
organizational feature of ACT UP was its focus on the emotion of anger, an emotion
which was evoked to unite its members. ACT UPs mission statement declared, ACT
UP is a diverse, non partisan group united in anger and committed to direct action to
end the AIDS crisis.25 While ACT UPs mission exemplifies anger mobilizing concerted
action, anger has torn groups apart, as it did at NWSAs subsequent conference during
the late 1980s in Akron, Ohio, where I witnessed the organizations implosion at a wellattended Women of Color panel condemning its national office for racism.
In the United States, anger is routinely situated in public life as psychological.
Consequently, justifiable anger concerning systemic injustice can be displaced into each
persons attitude or sensibility.26 Myths encouraging individualism habituate many people
to collude in angers dis-location from public life into private malady. Characterized as
merely personal, anger may be mis-recognized as a maladjusted individual, not a
malfunctioning culture that rational people ought to experience with outrage. In this view,
what becomes necessary is therapy, not social and political change. In the United States,
this psychological maneuver has been a tool of political oppression for decades across
various marginalized communities.27 Although anger can be a habitual response to any
frustration and a dysfunctional, harmful emotion for people who are, as Ronald T. PotterEfron characterized it, Angry All the Time, anger can nonetheless be a legitimate response to
wrongful deeds, exemplified in Lordes speech by the systemic character of racism, sexism,
and biases against lesbians and gay men.28 Consequently, in listening to Lordes speech, a
familiar pitfall for audiences consists in making the political merely personal.
An extensive literature features anger among commonplace psychological
responses to death and dying, grief and loss.29 A few years before her 1981 speech,
Lorde confronted her mortality during her diagnosis for breast cancer, as she
recounted the previous year in The Cancer Journals (1980). Before her keynote, Lorde
was engaged in her ongoing battle with a disease that ultimately claimed her life. In a
handwritten draft for her keynote, Lorde wrote a definition of ANGER, as meaning
to distress, vex, hurt, trouble, wound, incite to wrath. She added that anger, from
the Old Norse, was to grieve.30 However, while her health crisis fueled her anger, to
characterize Lordes anger in psychological terms could deflect attention from the
public slights and injuries enacted through capricious biases. It is, therefore,
necessary to reject a simplistic binary between the psychological and the public, or
the personal and the political, by focusing instead on these entwined factors in
Lordes experiences of biases with the public and political firmly in the foreground.
Another simplistic dichotomy between the emotional and rational operates in
rhetoric and public address to the disadvantage of women, members of racial

Anger Among Allies 289

minorities, gay men, lesbians, the impoverished, the disabled, children, and other
vulnerable populations. Those who inhabit one or more of these categories are
regularly portrayed in stereotypes as merely emotional, and anger, in particular,
signals a distorted capacity for sound judgment. Along lines reminiscent of Aristotles
view,31 F. G. Bailey stressed, Displays of passion signal that reason (prudence) is in
abeyance; and those who lack prudence have a diminished capacity to plan
realistically and to foresee and so prevent an undesirable eventuality.32 In such a
culture, to foreground any emotion at all risks reproducing stereotypes of women and
minorities as emotional and feeling beings rather than rational and logical humans.
In contrast, in much of Lordes advocacy, including her 1981 keynote, she endeavored
to synthesize reasoning and feeling, not artificially separate them. Moreover, her
NWSA keynote spotlighted systemic sources for legitimate anger, which, in her view,
prudent and self-respecting people should recognize as rightfully worthy of wrath.
Lorde had to contend with a stereotype of the angry Black woman, as she
acknowledged during her keynote. For marginalized populations, anger can sometimes
seem emblematic for the entire group. Anger becomes an existential condition or an
immutable characteristic, a stereotype, not transient experiences or a warranted
affective response to unfair treatment. In US culture, Linda M. Grasso generalized, To
women envisioning a new America in the 1970s, anger was a vital political tool. She
might mean that women tactically used prevailing stereotypes deliberately by inhabiting
them. Grasso affirmed, Anger demanded attention, it propelled insight, artistry,
action; it exposed knowledge that had been buried, speech that had been silenced.33
More generally, referring to war protests and the counterculture of the late 1960s and
early 1970s, Barbara Deming observed a commonplace error that anger results from
relative powerlessness in the presence of injustice, because, Deming stressed, it is
precisely when some real hope is born at last, when a movement for change begins to
gain momentum, that anger pushes up*and has to be contended with.34
Then, too, in the United States, emotional labor tends to be done by members of
marginalized communities for dominant groups, Lorde believed. She wrote in an
early, handwritten draft for her NWSA keynote: I do not exist to feel your anger for
you. I have enough of my own.35 Oftentimes this labor is done in isolation or private
settings, because the public display of anger tends to be a privilege practiced among
aggressive supremacists across differences of race, sexuality, class, and the like.
Despite stereotypes, members of dominant groups oftentimes vent anger in public
ways that members of marginalized communities absorb into our bodies, at times
with harmful physiological consequences from internalized stress*that is, when we
are not practicing anger ourselves from positions of relative political power, social
privilege, or economic resourcefulness. Carol Tavris notes that, Paradoxically, some
of the angriest revolutionaries came from worlds of privilege, not misery.36 Public
displays of anger by the entitled can become authoritarian, a deliberately intimidating
demand for control or power, and, therefore, corrosive of democratic processes.
Thematic in Lordes public advocacy was her recognition that women and
minorities regularly misused anger across differences in that they tended hierarchically to vent anger horizontally or downward, not upwards toward precise systemic

290 L. C. Olson

sources of oppression.37 In Lordes view, misdirected anger usually resulted from fear
of dominant groups power and authority. Yet horizontal expressions of anger might
not always be misplaced, because of recurring problems that can arise from collusion,
betrayal, and opportunism among vulnerable populations through complicity with
dominant ones. In Black feminist bell hooks collection of essays entitled Killing
Rage, she commented with evident ambivalence on such anger.38 For members of
marginalized communities to display anger in public can become a risky mode of
what hooks has called talking back by speaking as an equal to figures of authority
and power, despite the dangers of punishment.39
Even so, as Mari Matsuda recognized in insights concerning a practice that she called
ask the other question, womens displays of anger can sometimes be a convenient public
mask for rehearsing bigotry, as relatively privileged women discipline minorities across
differences of race, sexuality, and class. Matsuda explained, When I see something that
looks racist, I ask, Where is the patriarchy in this? When I see something that looks sexist, I
ask, Where is the heterosexism in this? When I see something that looks homophobic, I
ask, Where are the class interests in this? She observed, No form of subordination ever
stands alone.40 Sometimes because of genuine pain or fear, other times under feigned or
cultivated personae of speaking truth to power, such women presume that they may safely
vent rage precisely because of the targets recognized vulnerabilities. Examples of such
anger will be evident in the next section.
Lorde believed that, despite the hazards of misusing anger, passionate emotions
were necessary for bringing about radical change. By featuring anger in her NWSA
keynote, she ventured to negotiate an intricate, entrenched ideology, buttressed by
individualism, in which no options were likely to have altogether positive outcomes,
as she surely realized. So why did Lorde feature anger as the central subject for her
NWSA keynote? Allow me to turn next to Lordes experiences before her 1981 speech,
because her confrontations with white feminists probably account for her decision to
concentrate on anger in her keynote, though certain personal matters factored in her
decision, too.
Racial Conflicts in Predominantly White Womens Organizations
During 1977, Lorde participated in an organization in Brooklyn, New York called
The Sisterhood, whose membership included other accomplished Black women
writers and artists, among them June Jordan, Toni Morrison, Donna Simms, Ntozake
Shange, and Alice Walker.41 Lordes experiences in this organization provide
background for appreciating her activism within predominantly white womens
feminist organizations, because the minutes for The Sisterhood affirmed a
collaborative decision to press for Black women writers and artists inclusion in
major Black and feminist journals and magazines. The March 20, 1977 minutes, for
instance, mentioned Zita Allens proposal that The Sisterhood try to influence major
publications such as Essence, Ms., Ebony, and First World to publish more young black
poets and writers. Lorde attended that March 20 meeting. In the minutes for
April 10, 1977 was Margo Jeffersons suggestion that The Sisterhood should try to

Anger Among Allies 291

influence Chrysalis, the new West Coast feminist magazine, to include black women
as much as possible and VeVe Clarke suggested that the West Coast organization,
Black Women Organized for Action, could help us in regards to Chrysalis.42
As this new magazines Poetry Editor, Lorde was well situated to implement such
suggestions, too, as indeed she did.
During the late 1970s, Lorde experienced conflicts with white women feminists
concerning racism in national forums. Examples of these included a public
confrontation with radical feminist Mary Daly over her exclusion of Black goddesses
from her book Gyn/Ecology (1978), which had argued that Christianity and other
religions perpetuated patriarchy, plus in house disagreements with the editorial board
of Chrysalis over race, and, above all, political confrontations during The Second
Sex Conference held at New York University in 1979, where Lorde delivered The
Masters Tools Will Never Dismantle the Masters House, denouncing the entire
conference as a racist and homophobic proceeding. These conflicts fueled Lordes
anger by exemplifying white womens organizationally ensconced racism, in her
considered opinion. In this section, I will argue that such experiences with white
women informed Lordes strategic decision to feature anger in her keynote.
In an open letter to Mary Daly written on May 6, 1979, Lorde commented that her
letter broke a silence that she had imposed on herself before December 1977: I had
decided never again to speak to white women about racism. I felt it was wasted
energy, because of their destructive guilt and defensiveness, and because whatever
I had to say might better be said by white women to one another, at far less emotional
cost to the speaker, and probably with a better hearing. Note that, in Lordes
comment, it was guilt and defensiveness which she portrayed as destructive, not
her public expressions of anger as a response to racism. After her open letters initial
circulation in Top Ranking, it was reprinted in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings
by Radical Women of Color (1981), and again in Sister Outsider (1984).43
During the late 1970s and into the early 1980s, Lorde spoke regularly about racism
at feminist organizations and forums dominated by white women. In 1980, for
instance, she remarked at Amherst College, There is a pretense to a homogeneity of
experience covered by the word sisterhood that does not in fact exist.44 One typed
manuscript for this speech has multiple lines crosshatching a section that identified
specific womens magazines and authors whose work, in Lordes estimation,
exemplified racism within womens publishing and writing: Savvy, Heresies,
Chrysalis, and Mary Dalys Gyn/Ecology, among them.45 However, these specific
names and publications were excised from a printed version of the speech in Sister
Outsider, presumably because Lorde was more concerned with transforming practices
than embarrassing particular people and groups. At present, I do not know whether
Lorde named them during her remarks at Amherst.
The excised examples merit attention here nonetheless, because they shed light on
Lordes perspective and illustrate practices which could be reconsidered by writers
and editors. Regarding Savvy, Lorde wrote that the straight white womens media
had used her article on breast cancer and illustrated it with pictures of a thin,
young, white woman. Invidious distortions arose from using a photograph to

292 L. C. Olson

encourage identification from majority readers. Consequently, Savvy appropriated a

Black womans prose for white audiences without attention to race as a factor
impinging on Black womens disproportionate cancer risks. In 1982, Lorde speculated
in Zami, which she called her biomythography, that racism accounted for her
securing and keeping a job that routinely exposed her to radiation.46 But Lorde did not
note such racial factors in her draft for the Amherst speech delivered a year earlier.
Lorde characterized Heresies as a feminist publication on Arts & Politics, which,
in selecting all-white material for their special issue on Lesbian Art & Artists,
declares that lesbian art and culture in america [sic] is, by definition, white. After
noting a pattern of exclusion and non-recognition, she continued, As an aside, I ask
that you also consider the reasons why there is a need for special issues of the work of
lesbians and third world women. Presumably, because Lordes aside was within a list
of negative examples, this comment encouraged her hearers to consider the special
issue as segregation of materials through a familiar editorial practice, which can
sometimes nonetheless be useful for spotlighting under-recognized work or emerging
themes.
Lordes excised examples indicated her awareness of how organizations sometimes
actively enabled racism by how they presented materials accepted for publication.
In Lordes view, Chrysalis, another progressive womens magazine, had featured
without comment, the work of a white artist whose visuals are clearly racist.
Presumably mindful of risks that attend censoring any artistic materials, Lorde
concentrated precisely on the magazines collusion with this racism by failing to offer
any editorial comment concerning it. In framing these examples, she observed in a
remark that she apparently did revise for her Amherst speech, For as long as any
difference between women means one of them must be inferior, then the recognition
of any difference must be fraught with guilt. To allow us to step out of stereotypes
therefore is too guilt-provoking, for it threatens the complacency of those women
who view oppression only in terms of sex, a righteous attitude that frees them of all
responsibility for their own oppressive behavior.47
In addition, throughout the late 1970s, especially in 1979, Lorde experienced a
sustained in house conflict with the predominantly white editorial board of Chrysalis
over what she viewed as their racist handling of poetry by minority women. Chrysalis
presented itself as a magazine of womens culture and, from its founding, sought to
represent the womens movement as diverse: Feminism is not a monolithic
movement, but rather includes the experiences, values, priorities, agendas of women
of all lifestyles, ages, and cultural and economic backgrounds, the magazine affirmed
in the initial issues front matter.48 Lorde had been the Poetry Editor of the magazine
since its first issue in 1977. Two of her essays*Poems Are Not Luxuries and Uses
of the Erotic*were published in the magazine.49 However, Lordes relationship with
the editorial board deteriorated as conflicts concerning organizationally ensconced
racism, in her judgment, recurred in the magazines handling of poems by Women
of Color. In a typed letter to the editors on July 20, 1979, Lorde detailed her concerns
about racism and concluded: I want my name off the mast-head of Chrysalis as

Anger Among Allies 293

Poetry Editor by the next issue, and I am quite prepared to take legal action to see
that this is done.50
As intense and consequential as Lordes conflicts with Chrysaliss editorial board
were, more crucial to her decision to focus on anger in the NWSA keynote were her
experiences at The Second Sex Conference, held in September 1979 at New York
University. As a speaker and workshop leader, who had been credited on the program
as a consultant, Lorde attended the 1979 conference, which honored the thirtieth
anniversary of Simone De Beauvoirs classic book. There, Lorde delivered her speech,
The Masters Tools Will Never Dismantle the Masters House, which ranks among
her most frequently engaged statements. Lorde denounced the conference organizers
for neglecting differences of race, sexuality, and class, although their invitation to her
promised to deal with these differences.
Afterward, Lorde received a lengthy letter from the conferences organizers, eight of
whom have their names typed on it, though only Jessica Benjamin signed it.51
Written on letterhead for The New York Institute for the Humanities, this letter
criticized Lorde for her public remarks as enormously painful to all of us. Dated
October 23, 1979, the letter*photocopies of which abound in Lordes papers*is
worth consideration at length because Lorde quoted verbatim from it, though
without attribution, during her NWSA keynote.
The eight conference organizers claimed, Had we not felt such admiration for you
as a poet and activist, we would not have felt so betrayed and disappointed. Because
you are black and lesbian, you seemed to speak with the moral authority of suffering.
The authors explained, But it was our purpose in organizing the conference to
challenge not only authority but political moralizing, and especially moralizing and
privilege that has until now been derived from victimization and suffering. For this is
a problem endemic to all women, (and any oppressed people) because all women
speak to varying degrees from the position of powerlessness, victimization, and
suffering. The organizers explained to Lorde, We worked to push the discussion
beyond the kind of vindictive and guilt-provoking politics that so often arise from
powerlessness. The letter charged, Unwillingly or not, your commentary triggered
off precisely the kind of discussion we hoped to avoid. This comment could be
interpreted as manifesting, however inadvertently, white womens ownership of the
center of feminist scholarship and an entitlement to define the rules of engagement
that regularly frustrated many women of color, lesbians, and the working class in the
1970s and 1980s.
The eight writers continued, It was not, as you suggested, our intention to
suppress the issue of racism at the conference. Rather we hoped to provide an arena
in which it could be discussed with the thoughtfulness and freedom from false
emotions which an issue of such weight and with such complex psychological
overtones requires. Lorde underlined and placed two exclamation marks in the
margins beside a subsequent sentence: We failed to provide this arena in regard to
racism because white women did not address the issue and black women did not
choose to come. The letter added, You must know that this estrangement has two
sides and that it is not a simple matter of white culpability. Yet, that white women

294 L. C. Olson

did not attempt to address the issue could be interpreted as admitting a disturbing
misuse of white privileges, while suggesting an extent to which racism was ensconced
at the conference. To Lorde, the eight organizers wrote, We thought that your
mode of presenting and simplifying the problem created a mood of hopelessness
about ever getting past guilt and recrimination into trusting communication and
action. It does not seem to have occurred to the eight writers that Lorde may
have deliberately ruptured possibilities for engagement under the usual rules in
which woman unmodified is presumptively white, heterosexual, or financially
comfortable.
Lordes 1981 NWSA keynote can be understood as responding in public to every
one of these charges without naming her interlocutors. Some passages Lorde quoted
verbatim in her keynote as examples of racism. A few years later, when Susan
Christian interviewed Lorde on September 24, 1983, concerning her experiences of
anger and rage, the interview made explicit connections among The Second Sex
Conference and the NWSA speech, as well as Lordes poem, Power,52 and her 1983
Essence article, with which this interview excerpt begins:
I had been wanting to write this thing since I gave a talk at NWSA two years ago on
anger between black women and white women, because its so heavy. You see, Id
talked the year before at the Simone de Beauvoir conference and I gave a paper
called The Masters Tools Will Never Dismantle the Masters House . . .. Well, you
cannot imagine the flack I got after I delivered that paper. I got these letters from
the organizers of the conference saying, You seem to speak with the moral
authority of suffering BUT . . . And Im reading these letters and Im thinking
Oh Jesus! These ladies cant deal! The Masters Tools was mild compared to what
I could say. So, at NWSA I talked about anger between black women and white
women, how they had to stop being afraid of black womens anger, because I wasnt
interested in guilt, their guilt didnt serve anyone. Its not black womens anger
thats corroding the earth. Obviously! But even when I gave this speech and I was
writing about anger between black women and white women what I really
wanted*as Im writing this*what I really wanted to talk about is anger between
black women . . . between women of color.
But I said to myself, I cant begin to touch this, not in this speech. First almost
all of these women there are going to be white. And sure enough . . .53

Therefore, Lordes focus on anger in her NWSA keynote resulted from her
experiences with white womens guilt as a source of fracture in predominantly white
womens organizations and conferences, even though, as Lorde mentioned later in
this interview, she was bothered by her nieces recent death from asthma, believing as
she did that asthma is really in many respects dammed-up anger.54 Lorde realized
that her audience at The Second Sex Conference heard her differently than she
apparently expected. What rhetorical content and techniques did she employ in her
subsequent endeavor to get a hearing from the NWSA in 1981? Let us turn next to
her keynote in an effort to discern the rhetorical dynamics of her speech to another
predominantly white and heterosexual audience of women and feminists, who were
presumably open to hearing her views given the conferences central theme: Women
Respond to Racism.

Anger Among Allies 295

Lordes Keynote Speech to the NWSA

At the NWSA, Lordes keynote examined emotional dynamics in unproductive
exchanges among women feminists, especially focusing on anger and racism. Her
remarks centered on the conference theme, which had been publicized through
various outlets. In the spring 1981 Womens Studies Quarterly, Pat Miller invited
participants to examine the conjunction of racism and sexism from an interdisciplinary, multicultural perspective as well as in the context of, for example,
community organizing, curriculum development, the media, and public policy.
Miller mentioned, Because racism, like sexism, is a personal as well as an
institutional issue, we have also arranged a series of small group consciousnessraising sessions to be held daily throughout the Convention.55 Estimates for
conference attendance ranged from 1,300 to 1,500 women, a noticeable decrease from
the previous NWSA conference. Some ascribed this lower attendance to the
convention theme, which was considered not scholarly, while others noted
competition from a nearby Berkshire Conference on the History of Women at
Vassar. Coverage of the NWSA conference in off our backs, which included a synopsis
of Lordes speech, generalized, It was a difficult conference.56
Lorde defined Racism as The belief in the inherent superiority of one race over
all others and thereby the right to dominance, manifest and implied (124). On first
appearance, Lordes speech seems at odds with its genesis and keynote role, because
both factors were systemic with regard to structure and organization. Lorde and
Adrienne Rich had been approached by NWSA planners to be featured speakers at a
previous conference at Bloomington, Indiana. Both women declined those invitations, believing as they did that one panel on racism would become tokenism.
Subsequently, at Storrs, Connecticut, where NWSA featured racism as the central
theme, the two women agreed to appear as keynote speakers together. Apparently,
negotiations with Lorde and Rich were factors in this themes emergence. Therefore,
their eventual appearance at the conference reflected their conviction that systemic
change at an organizational level was necessary to transform racism. Lorde had a
previous history of speaking with attention to systemic factors such as structure,
organization, and habitual social practices, as exemplified by her earlier, now classic
speech, The Masters Tools.
Initially, Lordes speech concerning anger contrasts oddly against this emphasis on
systems in that its entire first section details merely interpersonal examples listed one
after another after another in what seems like a litany of racist wrongs committed by
individual white women against Black women at academic conferences and womens
studies programs. Lorde framed these examples by saying, Because 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 (12425). There ensued an
extensive series of anecdotes illustrating white womens racism, in Lordes judgment.
These instances are powerful in that they exemplify what Chaim Perelman and Lucie
Olbrechts-Tyteca have referred to as presence in public argument.57 Yet they are so
relentlessly negative in their depictions of white womens conduct that they could

296 L. C. Olson

seem an indictment of her predominantly white audience. Of course, by their

presence at the conference, these white women had enacted openness to engaging
racism.
In at least three ways, Lordes analysis remained nonetheless systemic in its overall
focus. The first of these was the knowledge among many feminists that the personal is
the political in that an examination of individual experiences can illuminate structural
and institutional concerns. The speechs organization progresses from several, interpersonal examples to broader, more general and abstract considerations of anger as
social norms. At the time, a relatively basic insight would have been that these specific
white women felt entitled to make harmful remarks to Black women precisely because
of unexamined privileges ensconced by and within the organization. Second, Lordes
examples focused on interpersonal manifestations of racism to forestall or reduce the
risks of unproductive exchanges among the women attending the conference by calling
all participants awareness to how habitual, social conduct toward others could
precipitate them. Anticipating a reproduction of useless or damaging transactions,
Lorde sought to circumvent their recurrence at the conference. Finally, Lorde
articulated a way of understanding anger as potentially a generative, creative and
empowering resource for women to grow beyond their current views. She sought to
change social understandings of a key term and recurrent experience, by reformulating
norms to recognize it as a resource for rhetorical invention.
Most of Lordes initial comments concerning how racism evoked her anger were
well adapted to the audience of predominantly white feminists in that all but one of
them were already familiar to women who had endeavored to transform patriarchy,
regardless of race. Here was her list: the anger of exclusion, of unquestioned
privilege, of racial distortions, of silence, ill-use, stereotyping, defensiveness,
misnaming, betrayal, and co-optation (124).58 With the probable exception of
racial distortions, all of these would have been experientially familiar to these
attendees, white and Black, who had tried to transform patriarchy. So her list would
have skillfully promoted identifications among women at the outset before her
subsequent, detailed examples concentrating on white womens conduct toward Black
women. In those examples, some of these same practices recurred. So the sequencing,
which translated Freires insights concerning oppression into a specific communication practice that I have named shifting subjectivities, enhanced white womens ease
of understanding concerns pertaining to racism, even though such analogies are
oftentimes problematic and can be misleading.59
The first example in Lordes litany called white womens awareness to a double
bind that confronts Black advocates who express their emotions (recall The Second
Sex Conference organizers reference to false emotions). Lordes example was a
white woman, who remarked, Tell me how you feel but dont say it too harshly or
I cannot hear you (125). The white woman could be interpreted as asking Lorde to
speak in an inauthentic voice because her comfort as a listener was more important
to her than Lordes insights concerning systems. Lorde asked, But is it my manner
that keeps her from hearing, or the threat of a message that her life may change?
(125). Presumably, this first example preempted to some extent audience responses of

Anger Among Allies 297

discomfort or fear from experiencing her as another angry Black woman.60 Brenda R.
Silver commented concerning Lordes example, Most important is the question
whether mainstream feminism can respond to the angers coming from those women
perceived to be on the margins without replicating the politics of authority and tone
practiced by those in power when their position is threatened.61 Lordes example
would, moreover, have reminded her audience to focus on substance more than style
or delivery, while raising difficult concerns about the ethical responsibilities that
relatively dominant groups have to listen to marginalized speakers.
Lordes handwritten revisions on a typed manuscript evidence that she felt
compelled to spell out for her audience specifically how each of her examples was
racist by adding an explanation to each of them. She was not certain that the white
women could discern her perspective from each example without her explicit gloss.
In her second example, Lorde commented, The Womens 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 Ive gotten a lot. I feel Black women really understand me
a lot better now; they have a better idea of where Im coming from (125). Lordes
typed manuscript has a handwritten insert, which appears as printed text in Sister
Outsider, to amplify this example for her audience: As if understanding her lay at the
core of the racist problem (125). Lorde demanded that listeners of relatively
privileged positions endeavor to center on the lives and perspectives of those different
from themselves, not thoughtlessly reproduce dominance by expecting central
attention.
Other examples illustrate how white women assign Black women responsibility for
discussing racism, how it is a Black womens problem rather than one for dominant
groups to acknowledge and redress, and how white women sometimes depend on
Black women to do emotional labor for them. To illustrate the last, Lorde recalled
when a white woman had used possessives, we and our, in a question, Are you
going to do anything with how we can deal directly with our anger? (125). In reply,
Lorde asked the white woman, How do you use your rage? (125). Lordes
handwritten insert, which appeared in printed versions, explained, I do not exist to
feel her anger for her (125). Further, these possessives obfuscated differences in their
sources of anger or, for that matter, how white womens organizationally ensconced
and enabled racism might warrant Black womens anger. Still another example
suggested that white women were only comfortable dealing with little colored
children across the roads of childhood, the beloved nursemaid, the occasional
second-grade classmate (125), an illustration which encouraged reflection on
misusing white privilege selectively to engage Black womens voices. In this regard,
the example reiterated the woman who wanted to hear only comforting, not harsh,
Black womens voices.
Superficially, one later example is perhaps disturbing in appearing to bait the
audience to participate unwittingly in public acknowledgment of racial biases,
because the story was amusing and, it would appear, deliberately so. Alluding to Beth,
Lorde said, I wheel my two-year-old daughter in a shopping cart through a

298 L. C. Olson

supermarket in Eastchester in 1967, and a little white girl riding past in her mothers
cart calls out excitedly, Oh look, Mommy, a baby maid! (126). The audience
members could have laughed at the white childs exclamation for varied reasons,
including the white childs ignorance and navete or the speakers manner of delivery.
Yet Lorde continued, 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 (126). Lordes use
of your and you replaces the white girl in the cart with the audience members,
individually and collectively, you, not her.
Of course, Lordes story is racist and especially disconcerting in its childhood
manifestation. But the audiences laughter is less certainly so. Lordes interpretation
of the public laughter as evidence of an admission*a self-acknowledgment of
internalized racism by replacing the white girl with you*raised racisms specter
among white women allies consciously concerned enough about racism as to attend
the conference. Many manifestations of racism are unconscious, and this may have
been Lordes point. Laughter, which ordinarily bonds an audience together, could
have become, in the aftermath of Lordes interpretation, a collective self-recognition,
possibly a communal acknowledgment of the auditors guilt or shame.
Then, Lorde faulted the conference planners for not waiving the registration fee
for poor women and women of Color (126) and for the deficiencies of consciousness raising groups, which, in the past, were made up of white women who
shared the terms of their oppressions (130). Because, in CR groups, no tools were
developed to deal with other womens anger except to avoid it, deflect it, or flee from
it under a blanket of guilt (130), in later years Lordes eye to eye sessions sought
to change such CR practices into occasions for women to confront each other
concerning differences among women. These two examples illustrated how difficult
it can be from positions of relative privilege to recognize how familiar practices,
however well intended, can reproduce those privileged positions and how differences
in material resources, as racisms symptomatic consequences, can contribute cyclically
to absences, silences, and exclusions from conferences and organizations. Without
eliminating or adjusting fees to reflect income, the conference reproduced racisms
harms.
Lordes subsequent comments to the NWSA sketched an emotionology, to which
she turned with a personal, intimate revelation: I want to speak about anger, my
anger, and what I have learned from my travels through its dominions (127). What
follows, however, are oftentimes generalizations concerning anger in the abstract. For
example, she observed Any discussion among women about racism must include the
recognition and the use of anger. This discussion must be direct and creative because
it is crucial (128). Likewise, when she distinguished anger and hatred, her
comments were general: Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and
its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and
its object is change (129). To Lorde, anger implies peers meeting upon a common
basis to examine difference, and to alter those distortions which history has created
around our difference (129). As this remark illustrates, Lorde used distinctions

Anger Among Allies 299

between anger and hatred to build and to reinforce identifications among

women through their opposition to widespread misogyny among men, even as she
examined chasms separating white and Black women. This was a powerful unification
device that featured womens communal opposition to mens hatred. Her references
to peers might have mitigated habitual perceptions of anger as authoritarian,
intimidating, or domineering, since this word implies an exchange among equals.
To be sure, certain elements of Lordes subsequent commentary was drawn from
personal experience. For instance, she quoted certain passages from The Second Sex
Conference organizers letter to illustrate white womens incomprehension, misunderstanding, and blindness. Without attribution, Lorde quoted, Because you are
Black and Lesbian, you seem to speak with the moral authority of suffering (132). In
public reply to distant correspondence, Lorde commented, 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 (132).62 But the predominant feature of the section
nonetheless is its detailing of normative responses to anger, which were neither useful
nor helpful to minority women. Concerning displacement, Lorde commented,
I have seen situations where white 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 (127). Whereas the eight
organizers of The Second Sex Conference had given Lorde responsibility for the
destructiveness brought about by her anger, Lorde gave back to such white women
responsibility for misuses of anger, such as guilt and defensiveness, as more precisely
the source of any destructiveness: 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 (130). Such comments called participants
awareness to dichotomous potentialities for misusing or reclaiming anger.
Guilt recurred as an evasion throughout Lordes treatment of anger: Guilt is
only another way of avoiding informed action, of buying time out of the pressing
need to make clear choices (130). Lorde portrayed guilt and defensiveness as
impediments, employing metaphors for them as bricks in a wall against which we all
flounder (124). In Lordes view, so habitual were the impediments to using anger
well that she asserted, for Black women and white women to face each others angers
without denial or immobility or silence or guilt is in itself a heretical and generative
idea (129). Yet Lorde acknowledged that some womens experiences of anger within
certain mens conduct had habituated women to view anger as hazardous, perhaps
life-threatening. White womens defensiveness was warranted under specific circumstances. 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 (131). This remark alluded to a long, devastating history of
violence against women in ways that encouraged reflection on angers destructive,
sometimes deadly history. Yet it ignored womens capacity for abuse, brute force, and
violence, making the world tidy in ways that it could never be. This rhetorical move

300 L. C. Olson

could be interpreted as sexist in its depictions of men, who appeared only as

embodiments of brute force, not potential allies who used anger creatively and
generatively to enhance peoples lives. Even so, when Lorde unified all women as the
oppressed, she was logically entitled to do so on the basis of which group has greater
institutional power.
In her keynote, Lordes central point was that the white women could deal with
Black womens feelings in ways that ultimately deflected attention from systemic
arrangements of racial power. The white women at the NWSA conference may have
endured hurt feelings and diminished ethos, but they would have lost little, if any, of
their organizationally ensconced privilege and power. In this respect, they were
perhaps not so different with regard to race from the men with regard to sex. While
listening to Lordes angry voice, what listeners may be tempted to dismiss as
hyperbolic, sweeping, and simplistic generalizations*whether it concerns mens
misogyny or white womens racism*could signal a need to adjust listening practices
to situate the advocacy as commentary on systems, not individuals, and to recognize
generalizations as having exceptions and complexities. Further, for listeners who feel
unable to do much substantive to intervene*indeed, one can be dominant within a
system without dominating the system*listening may enact a transformative
practice which raises awareness that subsequently could inform political actions.
Tacitly drawing on Freires insights concerning how oppressed people can
internalize, embody, or host oppressive practices across other differences, Lorde
asked her audience of predominantly white feminists, whom she addressed as allies in
ongoing efforts to transform patriarchal culture: What woman here is so enamored
of her own oppression that she cannot see her heel print upon another womans face?
What womans terms of oppression have become precious and necessary to her as a
ticket into the fold of the righteous, away from the cold winds of self-scrutiny?
(132). These were not rhetorical questions. Rather they encouraged women to
contemplate how they were misusing their privileges across social differences, how
righteousness positions people as judge and jury above others, and what Lorde
described as the contradictions of self, woman as oppressor (130). Although she
affirmed, No woman is responsible for altering the psyche of her oppressor, even
when that psyche is embodied in another woman (133), Lordes keynote devoted
itself most fundamentally to this task, as did her other speeches during this period
from the late 1970s through the mid-1980s.
Lorde concluded: We welcome all women who can meet us, face to face, beyond
objectification and beyond guilt (133). The positive language nonetheless challenged her audience to consider whether they were, in fact, her allies. Were they,
instead, accomplices of overtly hostile racists, because white womens evasions
implicated them for colluding with the harms?63 Judith Kegan Gardiner generalized
in 1994 that Lordes keynote remarks certainly also challenge todays white feminist
readers, as they were intended to challenge her original NWSA audience, to ask on
what basis they consider themselves allies rather than enemies.64 Now nearly
two decades after Gardiners observation, the challenge abides. At times, allies in

Anger Among Allies 301

certain movements for social justice may be adversaries in others, though not
antagonistic enemies.
Conclusion
Lordes speech fulfilled the generic expectations of a keynote in that it amplified the
conferences theme, raised awareness of concerns that could have derailed the
conferences intellectual labor, and inoculated her audience against destructive
responses to anger. Worthy of notice is Lordes rhetorical artistry in what I have
named shifting subjectivities. Lorde translated Freires insights concerning the
combined roles of oppressor and oppressed in many peoples experiences into a
powerful communication technique in Lordes rhetorical artistry. To my knowledge,
this communication technique does not appear in rhetorical theories or standard
public address accounts, though it adapts to the experiences of relatively dominant
members of various marginalized communities*at a cost of adapting to a dominant
audiences consciousness in ways that can tacitly reproduce dominance. In this
technique, attention to Lordes speech nonetheless has a potential to transform
inherited ideas in rhetoric and public address.
Moreover, Lordes speech is rich in insights concerning the ethical responsibilities
of dominant audiences to listen to marginalized groups. Moving beyond familiar
advice to listeners to be mindful of stereotypes, or distraction by delivery rather than
substance, Lorde called on her audiences, as active listeners, to notice systems of
power pertaining to such factors as access to the forum, the taken for granted
practices and rules of engagement within it, as well as the pitfalls that can attend
attention to feelings rather than the systemic circumstances that warrant them as
legitimate. In this regard, Lordes story about her daughter had to have been painful
for her to recount because it dramatized her inability to shield her child from
pervasive racism harming Beths prospects for accurate recognition and her future. In
a culture wherein individualism holds sway as a powerful myth sustaining an
uncritical meritocracy, listeners can easily misplace the political as the personal, the
public as the private, and the systemic as an attitude or feeling. In contrast with a
rhetoric of true believers, in which a speaker can depend on audiences easily to supply
omitted ideas, Lordes keynote amplified her examples in detail, precisely because
privileged listeners habitual inattention to the lives of others had made it necessary.
Above all, Lordes keynote demanded that listeners of relatively privileged positions
center on the lives and perspectives of marginalized groups different from themselves
to understand and transform systems, not reproduce dominance by expecting central
attention.
That Lorde and Rich appeared together for the NWSA keynote enacted
cooperation between accomplished Black and white women poets, both of whom
were lesbian feminists: Their very presence testified to womens ability to transcend
the barriers of race, observed Berenice Fisher. Yet Fishers narrative suggests that
racism and guilt nonetheless characterized NWSA conference experiences: At one
point, a group of Black and Third World women stood condemning the conference

302 L. C. Olson

for its racist structure (the cost and location excluded many women) and the racism
of many of the presentations. Like the conference itself, most of the women at this
meeting were white, and many, I suspect, reacted in the same guilty way that
Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde had described in their keynote addresses.65 The
ideological inheritance concerning Lordes topic was so entrenched and human
agency so circumscribed by systems that reactions characterized by discomfort,
defensiveness, and guilt probably contributed both to ensuing confrontations during
the NWSA conference and to the relatively slight attention to Lordes keynote in
subsequent decades. Habitual responses to anger in US culture are such that,
predictably, Lordes efforts to transform it were met with circumscribed, limited
success.
One pattern of response to both keynote speeches was for participants to lament
the examination of anger among women allies as ill timed. Some were disheartened
by the speeches by Lorde and Rich, wrote Deborah S. Rosenfelt in an NWSA
conference overview, feeling that in these days of the primacy of the New Right and
the Moral Majority, anger among women who are essentially allies is a luxury we can
little afford. She added, Others saw the speeches as essential renderings of the
complexity of relations between women of color and white women.66 She apparently
meant that the speakers had failed to individuate sufficiently in their attention to
systems and groups. Biographer Alexis De Veaux observed, The reactions to Richs
and Lordes addresses were mixed, because participants felt that a show of feminist
solidarity was crucial in the broad, historical moment.67 However, Lorde endeavored
to make such solidarity more dependable in practice than merely apparent, by
rupturing presumptions that white womens experiences, practices, and privileges
could continue unmodified to encompass other women in ways responsive to their
lives.
Lorde was astute in assessing her performances and growing beyond their
limitations. After the conference she likewise was troubled by what others had
viewed as essential renderings of the complexity of relations among women, but
Lorde was concerned by her failure to appreciate differences among women of
Color. During her keynote, she apparently commented, The woman of Color who
is not Black and 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 waste ourselves fighting the truths between us
(12728).68 Afterward, in her journal, she noted, June 1, 1981 The anger talk went
well, fraught with the emotions of my other lives. Yet she added, I must amend it to
make the connections between this anger and the W of C [Women of Color] pain
with each other.69
In a later essay in Essence during October 1983, Lorde commented on angers
limitations. Although she affirmed that sometimes it seems that anger alone keeps
me alive; it burns with a bright and undiminished flame, she stressed that anger,
like guilt, is an incomplete form of human knowledge.70 That Lorde compared
anger to guilt suggests the magnitude of her reservations. Lorde observed that
anger can corrode the self (like a pool of acid), can mask pain and fear, and always

Anger Among Allies 303

focuses on past hate and harms, not a future vision. Anger concerning injustice tends
not to be pro-active in setting a forward-looking agenda and shaping visionary
actions, because anger is typically a reaction to anothers wrongful deeds, enabled by
systems of power. Consequently, a familiar double bind attends recognizing a
particular source of a slight or injury as worthy of any response in that another has
defined the terrain for a confrontation. Lorde wrote in her 1983 essay that strength
that is bred by anger alone is a blind force which cannot create the future. It can only
demolish the past. Such strength does not focus upon what lies ahead, but upon what
lies behind, upon what created it*hatred. In addition, she worried, one can
eventually come to value the hatred of ones enemies more than one values the love of
friends, for that hatred becomes the source of anger, and anger is a powerful fuel.71
Her 1981 keynote speech, in contrast, alluded only cryptically to angers limitations
(131). Lorde observed in a poem, There are so many roots to the tree of anger/that
sometimes the branches shatter/before they bear.72
Yet some who commend Lordes speech concerning The Uses of Anger seem not
to notice Lordes recognition of angers limitations, though she incrementally revised
her views. For example, in an exceptional orientation to scholarship concerning
womens anger, Linda M. Grasso mentions a distinction between corrosive and
generative anger before commenting, At the same time, however, Audre Lorde and
other feminist theorists convince me that anger named, understood, and directed at
the root cause of grievances fosters growth, alliance, and a radical re-conception of
self, world, and political agency.73 To be sure, Lorde did not, to my knowledge,
repudiate the idea that anger can manifest a healthy self-respect in the presence of
injustice. But she did spell out how anger alone was insufficient to sustain a
movement, because anger does not provide a vision of an inhabitable future. In
subsequent years, Lorde spoke less often of anger and more typically of using ones
energy, power, and privilege creatively in the service of ones vision.
Despite George Wills declaration that anger is democratic because it is a
universal human experience and one of the seven deadly sins, his assertions about
angers intrinsically democratic character do not bear inspection for a few reasons.
First, there are profound differences in how anger can be expressed and interpreted as
symbolic or communicative during intergroup and intragroup conflicts. Members of
certain marginalized groups cannot display anger without negotiating intricate,
entwined double binds that stem from entrenched stereotypes of the social group as
angry or emotional, while, at the same time, they risk deflecting political concerns
about systems into mere feelings in ways that usually undermine ethos. Consider, for
instance, recent election campaigns between Barack Obama and John McCain for the
Presidency of the United States. Obamas much exploited guilt-by-association with
minister Jeremiah Wright, whose rants were characterized as America-hating,
elicited concerns that Obama himself might be an angry Black male. Despite his
campaigns characterization of him as No Drama Obama, it became necessary for
Obama to speak about race and to distance himself from Wright to circumvent the
hemorrhaging of his campaign. In contrast, allegations concerning John McCains
temper as volcanic,*a temper which he had acknowledged in 2002 as a matter of

304 L. C. Olson

public speculation and personal concern, did not evoke any corresponding worries
about his whiteness.74 That this discrepancy in media coverage surfaced in accounts
of elite heterosexual, male power across a difference of race indicates that such
discrepancies would probably be magnified by interacting factors of sexuality, class,
age, disability, sex, and the like.
Furthermore, inasmuch as democratic processes depend on active information
seeking, anger stands in stark contrast to anxiety in that the latter tends to enhance
information seeking, while anger actually depresses total information seeking.75
Finally, anger expressed from social positions of inherited privilege and entitlement
can be interpreted as intimidating, authoritarian demands for control that can erode
democratic processes. Therefore, under current cultural conditions, anger cannot
plausibly be said to be either intrinsically democratic or to enhance democratic
processes with one crucial caveat: Peter Lyman has generalized regarding the anger
of the powerless that The benefit of taking anger seriously is that listening to those
who feel they have lost their right to be heard reduces social suffering, enriches
political dialogue, and enhances the ability of politics to redress injustice.76
What might one have in place of anger, however warranted by injustices
magnitude? This is not an easy question. In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt
suggested that, to her, forgiveness holds promise as an extraordinary human action
that moves beyond the victim-perpetrator cycle.77 But forgiveness, however
admirable, is not always possible or even desirable, especially when the harms are
irreparable or when perpetrators and indifferent bystanders refuse any responsibility
for their deeds. In the absence of an apology, an act of contrition or atonement, or
some gesture toward life-enhancing institutional changes and reparations, not always
necessarily materialistic, forgiveness may be elusive, if not premature in the absence
of justice and equality. Some harms are unforgivable. As another alternative, Black
feminist bell hooks has underscored the power of love to transform social relations
characterized by past injustices.78 Yet, both self-love, despite easily internalized selfloathing within hate-filled environments that hooks contemplated, as well as loving
ones enemies as oneself, however well enshrined in religious traditions, are not
realistic either. Even conditional amnesty for abusers in the interest of advancing
reconciliation poses perils and pitfalls.79 Though this matter is too complex to resolve
here, perhaps another possibility resides in determination suffused with an ethic of
care, compassion, and mercy for others, not only because of the altruism that such
actions can practice, but also because such conduct enacts a desirable sense of oneself
and projects a livable future for whomever performs it and their allies.80 Moreover,
such sustained conduct by individuals and communities might have a long-term
potential to change entire systems.
Notes
[1]

Worldcat lists an audio recording of Audre Lordes speech under the plenary session title
Racism, Homophobia, and the Power of Women (OCLC 23951607). That entrys
whereabouts is not known. Audre Lorde, Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,

Anger Among Allies 305

[2]
[3]
[4]
[5]
[6]

[7]
[8]
[9]
[10]
[11]
[12]
[13]
[14]

[15]

[16]
[17]
[18]

[19]
[20]
[21]

[22]

Sister Outsider: Essays & Speeches by Audre Lorde (Freedom, CA: Crossing, 1984), 12433.
Subsequent citations from this version will be in the main essay within parenthesis.
About NWSA, http://www.nwsa.org.
For Chantal Mouffes sense of agonism, see Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces, Art &
Research 1, no. 2 (2007), http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v1n2/mouffe.html.
Lorde mentioned Freire in ways that I foreground in this essay, see Audre Lorde, Age, Race,
Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference, Sister Outsider, 123.
Audre Lorde, Learning from the 60s, Sister Outsider, 139.
Angela Davis as quoted by Beverly Guy-Sheftall in Rudolf P. Byrd, Johnnetta Betsch Cole and
Beverly Guy-Sheftall, eds., I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings by Audre
Lorde (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 256.
Audre Lorde, There is No Hierarchy of Oppression, repr. in I Am Your Sister 21920.
Audre Lorde as quoted in Gay Community News (January 2127, 1990), 17: 5.
Elizabeth V. Spelman, Changing the Subject: On Making Your Suffering Mine, Fruits of
Sorrow (Boston: Beacon, 1997), 11332.
Linda Alcoff, The Problem of Speaking for Others, Cultural Critique 20 (19912): 532.
Deborah S. Rosenfelt, An Overview of the Third Annual NWSA Convention, Womens
Studies Quarterly 9, no. 3 (1981): 10.
Audre Lorde, Age, Race, Class, and Sex, Sister Outsider, 117.
Audre Lorde, Keynote Address: The NWSA Convention. The Uses of Anger, Womens
Studies Quarterly 9, no. 3 (1981): 710.
Audre Lorde, Philadelphia Lesbian and Gay Task Force Bulletin 4, no. 4 (1982): 7. A letter
from Rita Addessa to Lorde, December 3, 1981, concerns its condensation, Audre Lorde
Papers (henceforth, AL Papers), Box 3, f. 5, The Lesbian Herstory Archives, Brooklyn, NY
(henceforth, LHA).
The LHA holds a copy from the Womens Studies Quarterly with Lordes handwritten changes
on it; AL Papers, Box 3, f. 23, LHA. Additional, typed draft copies are at the LHA in Box 1,
f. 9 and Box 3, f. 26. The latter had the title The Anger Papers: The Uses of Anger. More
handwritten and typed draft copies are among AL Papers held at the Spelman College
Archives, Spelman College, Atlanta, Georgia (henceforth, SA), where a typed manuscript is
located in a file women & racism with other manuscripts for essays and speeches.
Additional typed and handwritten drafts of her NSWA keynote are in a file labeled Anger.
These papers are unprocessed.
Audiotape of Lordes remarks at Eugene, Oregon, Nov. 12, 1984, AL Papers, SA; another
audiotape at the University of Oregon (OCLC 3802226).
Dagmar Schultz to Lorde, letters dated July 17, 1981 and September 12, 1981, AL Papers, SA;
Alexis De Veaux, Warrior Poet (New York: Norton, 2004), 29596.
Audre Lorde, The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism, Women and Language
11, no. 1 (1987): 4; Mary F. Rogers, ed., Multicultural Experiences, Multicultural Theories
(New York: McGraw Hill, 1996), 27478; Bart Schneider, ed., Race, An Anthology in the First
Person (New York: Crown, 1997), 99109; Looking Back, Moving Forward, a special
anniversary issue of Womens Studies Quarterly 25, no. 12 (1997): 27885; Anne Minas,
ed., Gender Basics (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning, 2000), 3944.
George F. Will, Anger is All the Rage, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, March 26, 2007.
Anger: How We Became the United States of Fury, The Chronicle Review, with essays by
Sasha Abramsky, David P. Barash, and Elaine Tyler May, July 16, 2010, B612, quote on B3.
Pamela Annas, A Poetry of Survival: Unnaming and Renaming in the Poetry of Audre
Lorde, Pat Parker, Sylvia Plath, and Adrienne Rich, Colby Library Quarterly 18 (1982):
21, n. 16.
Elaine Maria Upton, Audre Lorde, 19341992, Contemporary Lesbian Writers of the United
States (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1993), 319.

306 L. C. Olson

[23]
[24]
[25]

[26]
[27]

[28]
[29]
[30]
[31]
[32]
[33]
[34]
[35]
[36]
[37]
[38]
[39]
[40]
[41]

[42]
[43]

[44]
[45]

[46]
[47]

Carol Zisowitz Stearns and Peter N. Stearns, Anger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1986), 14, 4.
Mari J. Matsuda, Beside My Sister, Facing the Enemy: Legal Theory Out of Coalition,
Stanford Law Review 43 (1991): 1185.
Robert Ariss, Performing Anger: Emotion in Strategic Responses to AIDS, Australian
Journal of Anthropology 4 (1993): 19; Charles Kaiser, The Gay Metropolis (New York:
Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 267348.
Marilyn Frye, A Note on Anger, The Politics of Reality (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing, 1983),
8494.
Peter Lyman, The Politics of Anger: On Silence, Ressentiment, and Political Speech,
Socialist Review 11, no. 3 (1981): 5574. For psychologys and psychiatrys role in the
systematic abuse of gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans-gender, and queer populations, see Kaiser,
Gay Metropolis, 23540. On race, William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs, Black Rage (New
York: Basic, 1968), which has been criticized for colluding with the psychological move, see
bell hooks, Killing Rage (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 12. On sex and gender, Carol Tavris,
Anger (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982); Christa Reiser, Reflections on Anger (Westport,
CT: Praeger, 1999).
Ronald T. Potter-Efron, Angry All the Time, 2nd ed. (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger,
2004).
Elisabeth Ku bler-Ross, Anger, On Death and Dying (New York: Macmillan, 1969), 5081.
This line is from a seven page, handwritten draft, AL Papers, SA. This line is not in any
printed versions of her speech.
Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. W. Rhys Roberts (New York: Modern Library, 1954), 20, 90100.
Frederick George Bailey, The Tactical Uses of Passion (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1983), 11.
Linda M. Grasso, The Artistry of Anger (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2002), 4.
Barbara Deming, On Anger, We Cannot Live Without Our Lives (New York: Grossman,
1974), 48.
These lines are from a seven page, handwritten draft, AL Papers, SA.
Tavris, Anger, 237.
For examples, Audre Lorde, Scratching the Surface: Some Notes on Barriers to Women and
Loving, Sister Outsider, 48; Audre Lorde, Learning from the 60s, Sister Outsider, 136.
hooks, Killing Rage, 26, see also 16.
bell hooks, Talking Back, Talking Back (Boston: South End, 1989), 5.
Matsuda, Beside, 1189.
Evelyn C. White, Alice Walker (New York: Norton, 1984), 298300. I am a Renegade, an
Outlaw, a Pagan*Author, Poet, and Activist Alice Walker in Her Own Words, [radio interview on Democracy Now! by Amy Goodman, February 13, 2006], http://democracynow.
org/2006/2/13/i_am_a_renegade_an_outlaw.
These minutes from The Sisterhood are held in AL Papers, SA.
Audre Lorde, An Open Letter to Mary Daly, This Bridge Called My Back, eds. Cherre
Moraga and Gloria Anzaldu a (Watertown, MA: Persephone, 1981; repr., New York: Kitchen
Table/Women of Color Press, 1983), 97; repr. in Sister Outsider, 6671.
Audre Lorde, Age, Race, Class, and Sex, Sister Outsider, 116.
A manuscript without crosshatches is in a file, Women and Racism, AL Papers, SA. The
quotations in the next few paragraphs are from this manuscript. Similar content can be
found on a typed manuscript with crosshatches at AL Papers, Box 3, f. 23, LHA.
Audre Lorde, Zami (Watertown, MA: Persephone, 1982), 12527.
Quotation is from the typed manuscript at AL Papers, SA, but similar phrasing can be found
in Lorde, Age, Race, Class, and Sex, Sister Outsider, 118.

Anger Among Allies 307

[48]
[49]
[50]
[51]

[52]
[53]
[54]
[55]
[56]
[57]
[58]
[59]
[60]

[61]
[62]

[63]

[64]
[65]
[66]
[67]
[68]

[69]
[70]
[71]
[72]
[73]

Chrysalis no. 1 (1977): n.p. [3].

Chrysalis nos. 3 and 9 respectively.
Audre Lorde, to the editors of Chrysalis, July 20, 1979, AL Papers, SA.
The Oct. 23, 1979 letter to Lorde has these names typed on it: Jessica Benjamin, Margaret
Honey, Serafina Bathrick, Kate Ellis, Carol Ascher, Muriel Dimen, Harriet Cohen, and Sara
Ruddick. The letter recurs in the AL Papers at SA, including a file labeled Replies and
another file labeled Face to Face[:] Black Womens Anger. Sara Ruddick wrote an apology
to Audre Lorde, April 3, [no year], AL Papers, SA.
Audre Lorde, Power, The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (New York: Norton, 1997),
21516, 31920.
Using the Destruction Within Us: An Interview with Audre Lorde, Susan Christian,
September 24, 1983, AL Papers, SA.
Using the Destruction.
Pat Miller, Third NWSA Convention To Be Held in Connecticut, Womens Studies
Quarterly, 9, no. 1 (1981): 30.
On attendance and factors impinging on it, Womens Studies Quarterly 9, no. 3 (Fall, 1981): 2,
and Alice Henry, Women Respond to Racism, off our backs, 11, no. 7 (July 31, 1981): 3.
Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric, trans. John Wilkinson and
Purcell Weaver (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969), 11620.
For comment on this line, Grasso, Artistry, 34.
Spelman, Fruits, 13132.
For commentary on these lines, Patricia Sharpe, F. E. Mascia-Lees and C. B. Cohen, White
Women and Black Men: Differential Responses to Reading Black Womens Texts, College
English 52 (1990): 142.
Brenda R. Silver, The Authority of Anger: Three Guineas as Case Study, Signs 16 (1991):
370.
For commentary concerning these lines, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Critical Response: Tide
and Trust, Critical Inquiry 15 (1989): 747, n. 1; Linda Garber, Identity Poetics (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2001), 99.
Mark McPhail, Complicity: The Theory of Negative Difference, Howard Journal of
Communications 3 (1991): 113; Maureen Mathison, Mark McPhail, and Mary Strine,
Forum, Communication Theory 7 (1997): 14985.
Judith Kegan Gardiner, Empathic Ways of Reading: Narcissism, Cultural Politics, and Russs
Female Man, Feminist Studies 20 (1994): 105.
See Berenice Fisher, Guilt and Shame in the Womens Movement: The Radical Ideal of
Action and Its Meaning for Feminist Intellectuals, Feminist Studies 10 (1984): 18586.
Rosenfelt, Overview, 10.
De Veaux, Warrior Poet, 294.
In Susan Christians interview, cited above, Lorde stressed how workshops after the NWSA
keynote precipitated a shift for her by focusing on angers among women of color: a Latina
woman of color was furious with me*because at one point [in the speech] I had spoken of
women of color*and she said You know, you talk about women of color but what you
really mean is black women. And I said No what I really mean is women of color. So she
said, well just once, I want to hear my name*my name. Im Chicana! And she really got
through to me. Without a recording, I have been unable to determine whether the passage
in printed texts was a revision of Lordes keynote.
For this journal, AL Papers, SA.
Audre Lorde, Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger, Sister Outsider, 152.
Lorde, Eye to Eye, Sister Outsider, 152.
Audre Lorde, Who Said It Was Simple? Collected Poems, 92
Grasso, Artistry, 11.

308 L. C. Olson

[74]

[75]

[76]
[77]
[78]
[79]
[80]

Kate Kenski, Bruce W. Hardy, and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, The Obama Victory (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2010), 6566 on McCain and 71, 8289 on Obama. Quotes from
71, 82, 86, and 65.
Nicholas A. Valentino, Vincent L. Hutchings, Antoine J. Banks, and Anne K. Davis, Is a
Worried Citizen a Good Citizen? Emotions, Political Information Seeking, and Learning via
the Internet, Political Psychology 29 (2008) 247. On memory and recall, see Andrew J. W.
Civettini and David P. Redlawsk, Voters, Emotions, and Memory, Political Psychology 30
(2009): 12551.
Peter Lyman, The Domestication of Anger: The Use and Abuse of Anger in Politics,
European Journal of Social Theory 7 (2004): 133.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).
bell hooks, Salvation (New York: William Morrow, 2001), xxiv.
For example, see Long Nights Journey into Day [videorecording]. Directed by Frances Reid
and Deborah Hoffmann. (San Francisco, CA: California Newsreel, 2000).
To Peter Lyman, care domesticates anger by redirecting its self-righteous concern for
the self to service on behalf of others, though care can be grounded in love as well,
The Domestication of Anger, 137.

Copyright of Quarterly Journal of Speech is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be
copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written
permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.