The Master’s Tools Still Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House
Commentary by Chitown Kev
Black lesbian poet Audre Lorde’s dictum that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” is a staple of multiple academic disciplines (cultural studies, feminist literature, black literature) and is as popular in some circles as Sojourner Truth’s rhetorical question, “Ain’t I a Woman?”
I first read the essay (collected in Lorde’s 1984 essay collection Sister Outsider in my early 20’s and I am pretty sure that I’d heard the saying before then. Last Saturday, I decided to read the essay for the first time in a number of years and I was reminded I why I liked the essay from the moment that I read it and why the essay has especially resonated with me in the last couple of weeks.
The context first: Lorde was asked to participate in an academic conference and comment “upon papers dealing with the role of difference within the lives of American women: difference of race, sexuallty, class, and age.” She then goes on to describe multiple ways in which the conference failed to take those difference sinto account.
I think that from my first reading of the “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” I found Lorde’s discussion of “difference” to be refreshing and even unusual.
Even as a kid, I’ve always been fascinated by the differences that I can see in people and things; perhaps it’s because I always felt out of place. Seeking out and finding similarities among people: I certainly found it to be necessary— and I still do. But I have to confess that I find something rather...I don’t know, boring (?) about that whole process. It seemed to me then...and now...that there’s only so much that I can learn about myself and others through a recognition and study of similarities.
And I’ve always been a person that loves to learn.
To invoke difference as a basis for learning and celebration always seemed to widen my horizons. And Lorde took it even further in saying that “difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged.”
Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference -- those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older -- know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support.
I’m not a woman but I have certainly stood (and continue to stand) “outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable.” I have the mental, emotional, and even physical scars to prove it.
Nor can I claim to not have used “the master’s tools” (racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.) to gain some sort of personal advantage from time to time. I don’t think that I have ever been so naive as to think that the master’s tools could dismantle the master’s house but the master’s tools did seem, for a time, as if they could allow my stay in the master’s house to be more comfortable for however long I would be allowed to stay there.
Because I have used the master’s tools (more often than I’d like to admit, if I am honest) and because I have had the master’s tools used against myself and because I have seen the master’s tools used against others that celebrate and forge their personal power and even “genuine change” by cultivating their “difference,” I can certainly see the master’s tools being wielded or carried from a distance.
While the master’s tools can be seductive and can take on as many disguises and protean shapes as a Skrull, I have to get away from that tool set as fast and as far as possible for the sake of my own sanity and, as Ms. Lorde puts it, for my very “survival.”
So that I can, indeed, celebrate and forge my own “personal power” and even to bring about a little “genuine change” in the little bit of time that I have remaining on this planet.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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The Apollo Theater is known worldwide as the place “where stars are born and legends are made” and on February 27, it announced via Twitter the launch of Apollo New Works, a multi-collaborative project to help expose new voices of color to a wide audience. This will be the “first multi-work commissioning initiative dedicated to the creation of a diverse, 21stcentury American performing arts canon,” according to an emailed statement.
Apollo New Works’ inaugural series will feature 10 multinational artists and arts organizations: Ballet Hispánico; violinist Daniel Bernard Roumain together with BANDALOOP; Tony Award-nominated choreographer Camille A. Brown; choreographers Lil Buck and Jon Boogz of Movement Art Is; Black Gotham Experience, led by artist and historian Kamau Ware; Keith Josef Adkins from The New Black Fest; multimedia group Soul Science Lab; Grammy Award-nominated vibraphonist Stefon Harris; and playwright and director Talvin Wilks.
“Thanks to the generous support of the Ford Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Apollo New Works expands our commitment to collaboration with established and emerging artists of color whose work is essential to the Apollo, Harlem and the world,” said Kamilah Forbes, Apollo Theater’s executive producer, of the $3 million collaborative grant. “Artists reflect the celebrations and challenges of society, and our goal for this initiative is to champion a group of voices and promote a new generation of storytellers in an effort to develop a more diverse American canon.”
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This week, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a crucial case that could decide the future of abortion access in this country. It could pave the way for states to effectively ban abortion without ever overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that affirmed safe and legal abortion as a constitutional right. Even worse, it could overturn Roe altogether and in effect ban abortion for over 25 million women of reproductive age—a number that includes 3.5 million black people.
As black women who had abortions, we’re terrified that our loved ones won’t have the same access we did.
For many of us, even with Roe v. Wade, the promise of reproductive freedom has never been truly realized. The racism this country was founded upon has long-limited our access to economic opportunity, as well as our health care and health insurance. It’s also impeded and in some cases stolen our ability to vote for people who would protect our rights. These barriers have conspired to keep us from exercising our most basic human right— the ability to determine our own futures. The unsettling truth is that black women have never had that freedom.
Our history is fraught with reproductive oppression and coercion. Our ancestors’ bodies were used to develop the vaginal speculum and subjected to forced sterilization during medical procedures as a way to limit the black population—a horrific practice that exists today. We know systemic racism persists in our medical industry today through the medical bias that black communities face in attempts to access care. Our pain is taken less seriously, we are routinely misdiagnosed and untreated, and are far more likely to die in childbirth. And for some, this has contributed to a very real mistrust of the healthcare industry.
The system is simply rigged against us. But that doesn’t mean we can’t fight to access our rights within a system that is supposed to protect them.
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The African-Mexican confluence in music and dance is one of the rich legacies spawned by the assimilation of African rhythms into indigenous native culture in colonial Mexico. Compton Herald: Black Mexico: African rhythms infused music south of the border
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Carnival Coyolillo in Veracruz
Some cultural contributions from African assimilation in Mexican culture are unknown by the larger society. Three areas of significance involve music and dance, which, for most cultures throughout the world represent moments of relaxation and pleasure.
In Mexico, Indigenous people and Afro-Mexicans still perform music and dance accompanied by ancient African instruments. The songs have meaning and pay tribute to their forebears recalling uprisings against their cruel Spanish taskmasters. The very rhythms inherent in this music emanated from the souls of African slaves as they toiled in agony under the slash of the whip, and the brunt of the boot.
The music was not always a sad lament, however. Often, the field chorus were songs from the motherland that emboldened slaves with strength and courage to endure the daily grindstone. Africans and their progeny, the Afro-Mexicans, have contributed greatly to Mexico’s rich heritage of dance, music and song. Many musicians there – Central American and Ecuadorian, included – play traditional African instruments like “hand pianos” and the marimba, which have their origins in Africa and are used to perform the ceremonial “corridos” (song-stories) of Afro-Mexicans.
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By 1690, Jamaica was the jewel of Britain’s American possessions. An economy largely based on the production of sugar brought wealth and led to the beginnings of an imperial system.
But that system was built on the almost unimaginably brutal reality of slavery, enforced by almost equally unimaginable cruelties and daily punishments and control.
The system was ruthless and relentless. In the mid-18th century one plantation in Westmoreland Parish, site of the most serious slave revolt in 1760, recorded twice as many deaths as births, many from pure overwork. Importation of fresh slaves, often from the Gold Coast of Africa, filled the gap and reinforced the system – yet contained the seeds of the system’s eventual destruction.
Vincent Brown’s Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of An Atlantic Slave War, places the Jamaican revolts of 1760 firmly within the broader history of the time, notably the Seven Years War, for which Brown comments that “historians have barely noticed that the Jamaican insurrection was one of its major battles”. The judgment is correct when one remembers that the Caribbean, not just Quebec, was key to British strategy.
War suffuses this book: wars among African polities, wars between the European powers such as the War of Jenkins’ Ear and the Seven Years War, war and violence on the daily life of the plantation between master and enslaved. These “wars within wars”, Brown writes, ensured that “slavery’s violent conflicts integrated Europe, Africa, America, and the Atlantic ocean”.
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The racial wealth gap is larger today than it was when The United States passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The average white family currently holds about 10 times the wealth of a black one, and the average income from the labor of white families stands at about two times that of black ones (pdf). Left unchecked, the problem is only going to get worse.
An unintended byproduct of the polarizing 2016 presidential election cycle is that acknowledging the racial wealth gap is now almost mandatory for any progressive candidate seeking high office. At the same time, many on the political right have become more conservative, skeptical of any proposal that even hints at upsetting the proverbial apple cart, one might describe it as filled to the brim with the fruit of economic oppression. How is it possible to meaningfully narrow the racial wealth gap in this environment?
In too many discussions of America’s economic apartheid, well-meaning advocates make major points without making minor differences. Bringing about real change is going to require a coordinated shift in how we communicate about the critical action that is needed. Americans concerned with economic justice—which I still hold out hope is the majority of us—need to be more focused in our messaging, more targeted, and need to root it more firmly in the notion of fairness as opposed to the concept of equality, a victim of the late-term egalitarianism that has been weaponized against people of color for decades.
As the 2020 presidential field narrows, it’s important that we identify not only the candidates who support closing the racial wealth gap—they all do—but the candidates whose policies seem likely to make the most difference. Here’s my 2020 game plan for anyone concerned with economic justice:
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