Critic speak is tough, but we've got you covered.
Quote :"The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House"
Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. For difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening. Only within that interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways to actively "be" in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters.
The African-American activist, poet, and critic Audre Lorde first delivered this paper at an academic conference at New York University, where the crowd was made up of mostly middle-class and upper-middle-class white women. Lorde pointed out the lack of women of color at the conference—not to mention Third World women, lesbians, and poor women—and argued that mainstream feminists couldn't make "tolerance" their goal when it came to those under-represented groups. Tolerating isn't good enough: that'd be patronizing, and pretty doggone useless.
Basically, she dug her heels in by saying that if mainstream feminism was going to be all about straight white women's problems, it was going to be just as oppressive as the patriarchy that those women were trying to fight. Sure, it's hard work learning to listen to the voices of women whose experiences are totally different—it can be downright scary, and maybe even disturbing. She gets it. But she's saying that in the name of feminism, doing that work isn't an option, it's a necessity.
Her argument that "difference" is a political necessity wasn't just a call to arms; it also challenged those women of means to recognize their privilege, and to pay better attention to those who didn't have the same.