Age, Race, Class, And Sex By Audre Lorde

In the memoir Zami: A New Spelling of my Name, by Audre Lorde, Lorde discusses many memories and ideas that make her who she is. One of the more distinct parts is her relationship to her mother and the rest of the world because of her race. Audre Lorde and her mother are both black, however, her mother is white passing and it puts a strain on how Lorde deals the racism she faces from strangers and her friends. Lorde talks about her dealings with race as a child and as an adult to help define who she is.

Lorde was a minority in every group that she belonged to, and although she gained support and began to have the ability to self-integrate, she still faced hardships through discrimination. Lorde's feeling that she did not belong completely runs throughout the book: "The ‘time' when I would have to protect myself alone, although I did not know how or when. For Flee and me, the forces of social evil were not theoretical, not long distance nor solely bureaucratic" (205). Here Lorde is pointing out that her struggle is not solely one of a lesbian. Lorde is a double minority in this case because she is a black and a lesbian. This point to the argument in the text as a whole, that Lorde is still a minority even in her own groups, for example, she is even a minority in her own family (the only lesbian) and therefore Lorde's battle of integration did not end at her finding a group of friends.. This emphasizes Lorde's argument that throughout the book, she lives in houses, but never has a home. Lorde, being a double and sometimes even triple minority continues to experience hardship throughout the book. On page 255, Lorde again looks to her friends and lovers as a

Audre Lorde is an unbelievable human being and her responses to other feminists regarding such issues were well argued and came from such an intelligent and intuitive human being who simply wanted to be heard and respected. I think that her openness about her hostility with other black women is such a strong admission, and her inner poetess is strongest at that time. She overlooked the world of men very well, except to mention them only in relation to women's suffering, and in relation to themselves. She talked of Malcolm X but only very briefly. Her statement that "The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am.

Lorde was a minority in every group that she belonged to, and although she gained support and began to have the ability to self-integrate, she still faced hardships through discrimination. Lorde's feeling that she did not belong completely runs throughout the book: "The ‘time' when I would have to protect myself alone, although I did not know how or when. For Flee and me, the forces of social evil were not theoretical, not long distance nor solely bureaucratic" (205). Here Lorde is pointing out that her struggle is not solely one of a lesbian. Lorde is a double minority in this case because she is a black and a lesbian. This point to the argument in the text as a whole, that Lorde is still a minority even in her own groups, for example, she is even a minority in her own family (the only lesbian) and therefore Lorde's battle of integration did not end at her finding a group of friends.. This emphasizes Lorde's argument that

In The essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” is a descriptive essay in which Zora Neale Hurston discovers her real identity. At the beginning of the essay, the setting takes place in Eatonville, Florida describing moments when Zora greets her neighbors by singing and dancing without anybody judging her. Back then, she was free from feeling different among other races. However, a tragedy happened when she was thirteen, her mom passed away and she left home to attend school in Jacksonville where she experiences discrimination due to her color of skin. She was introduced to a different lifestyle where the color of her skin was an unfortunate thing. However, she felt this change effected the way she viewed her appearance, as well as inside her. Here she also experienced isolation that comes from being different compared to other races. Hurst realizes that it’s more than just being “colored”, but how race can separate people. Back in history, Jacksonville’s habitants were a mixture of blacks and whites. In Jacksonville, Hurst was just another “colored girl.” However, this essay motivated me to analyze, evaluate and synthesize these works and explore the concepts and themes that run through each of the readings. Most importantly, find out what made this essay so important in American literature. According to the description in the essay, I have notice that the author Hurston uses literary devices like metaphor and tone that I found interesting and deserving for the reader to enjoy this journey.

The famous leader Martin Luther King once said, “Being a Negro in America means trying to smile when you want to cry. It means trying to hold on to physical life amid psychological death. It means the pain of watching your children grow up with clouds of inferiority in their mental skies. It means having their legs off, and then being condemned for being a cripple.” This quote pretty much summed up the way in which African Americans felt during the 1960’s. They had basically no meaning to life. They were irrelevant. Whites wanted no part in them. This was especially the case in the state of Mississippi. Anne Moody, writer of the autobiography, Coming of Age in Mississippi explains the importance of the civil rights movement in the state of Mississippi and the influence it had on her life and her viewpoint.

Because Lorde grew up in the 1930s, she faced both gender and racial discrimination. One of the main and highly valuable influences in Lorde's life was her mother, who was always happy and pleasant in the face of any issue that came her way. That was especially true with the discrimination issues that she faced, because the

Hughes story, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”, veers away from the conventions of Du Bois’s essay as rather than focusing on the value of black art as a key in social movements, it involves black artists who would rather neglect their blackness and rather took on the culture of whites. The speaker claims he enjoys being white more than being an African American, and Hughes describes this as “the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America-this urge within the race towards whiteness…”. Much like Du Bois, Hughes writes about the “beauty” of Negro art, and aims to uplift the appeal of negro language and culture as he examines African American artists who stayed true to their roots and culture whose works are amongst those that are still heavily praised even decades later.

     There is so much richness in Negro humor, so much beauty in black dreams, so much dignity in our struggle, and so much universality in our problems, in us-in each living human being of color-that I do not understand the tendency today that some American Negro artists have of seeking to run away from themselves, of running away from us, of being afraid to sing our own songs, paint our own pictures, write about our selves-when it is our music that has given America is greatest music out humor that has enriched its entertainment media for the past 100 years, out rhythm that has guided its dancing feet From plantation days to the Charleston…Yet there are some of us who say, “Why write about Negroes? Why not just a writer?” And why not-if no one wants to be “just a writer?” Negroes in a free world should be whatever each wants to be-even if it means being “just a writer…” (Hughes, 773)

Power by Audre Lorde is a five stanza poem depicting her emotions after hearing the news of a black ten year-old boy being shot to death by a white policeman. Lorde uses a prose poem to describe her anger and hatred towards the unjust system. Lorde is advocating awareness to the racial injustice to show society difficulties people face through race. Power uses Lorde’s work through a literal and nonliteral context to demonstrate white supremacy. In her poem, she uses a time frame between the shooting and the trial case. She uses that to her advantage to show her initial anger toward the oppressed. Each stanza details how much power a race can have and how they use it to be superior.

​​Audre Lorde is Caribbean-American who lived a rough life. Her poetry explains what she is dealing with, and how she feels with the things she is facing. The two text that will be covered throughout this paper are “Zami: A new spelling of my name” and “Cancer journal.” During the time period of her life she have writing her syntax and structure in her writing, by what was happening in the time era of her life. I will show the time period of her two novels, and her three poems on how Lorde wrote them similar and different from one another. Also will look at, how she changed in her writing. During the close reading of both the text I will bring up the queer theory: gay and lesbian criticism, and a historical survey of literary criticism.

In her essay “The Fourth of July”, Audre Lorde described the enlighteningly awful experience of the reality of racism she had during her first trip to Washington D.C. as a child. While Lorde’s older sister had been rejected by her high school from traveling with the rest of the graduating class because she was black, Lorde’s parents decided to take a family trip to the nation’s capital on their own to compensate for such an injustice. Nevertheless, the reality of racism and discrimination the family felt while on their trip foiled their attempt to ignore and overcome such oppression, and led Lorde to view the trip as a frustrating experience. By employing this personal anecdote of her family’s replacement graduation trip for her older sister, Lorde successfully conveyed the impossibility of pretending to live in ignorance of racism and discrimination, and powerfully presented her anger at her family, the black community, and all of American society at trying to do so instead of addressing these problems.

Since the beginning of its art form rap music has been subject to scrutiny throughout its existence. In a Theresa Martinez reading from the semester, the author describes rap music as a resistance. She builds on a theory of oppositional culture that was composed by Bonnie Mitchell and Joe Feagin (1995). In this article, “POPULAR CULTURE AS OPPOSITIONAL CULTURE: Rap as Resistance”, Martinez explains how African Americans, American Indians, and Mexican Americans draw on their own cultural resources to resist oppression. She states that this very resistance to the dominate culture in

The poem, “A Woman Speaks” by Audre Lorde is a both a confessional and identity poem. She is not only addressing her internal battle and self-suffering, but also discussing the societal inequities African American women were suffering in the United States. The poem’s diction, on the surface, produces a tranquil tone to the poem. This facet of tranquility in the poem is used to express how her battle against inequity will not be fought with violence or hatred, and how she is not blaming any specific party or institution for her personal suffering. She instead plans to use the power and beauty of words to communicate the flaws of the image of women, fight against injustice and racism, and alleviate her internal despair. “A Woman Speaks” by Audre Lorde is an anthem for African American women and uses vivid imagery, ancestral references, and a call to action to connect to the reader and enact a fight against the underrepresentation of African American women.

Audre Lorde, a well-known poet, utilized her poetry to call attention over the political issues of class, feminism, sexism and racism for decades. These political issues are the symbols that transformed her into someone who is not just a woman, but a person whom clarifies these issues using poetry as a voice to define herself as a Black lesbian woman and an individual. The poem “Coal” is a poem that represents her ideals and her feelings towards being a voice among other feminists. It also shows her struggle as an individual that is caught between the issues of feminism coinciding with race, class, and sexism, which is also known as Intersectionality. Because of the attention being called from Lorde’s poetry, people should continue to recognize this political issue and utilize it to spread awareness of the prejudice and marginalization of today’s society.