The Use Of Anger Audre Lorde Summary

Audre Lorde speaks on how anger has affected her throughout her life and how she has dealt with it in her speech “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism”. Lorde is claiming that her anger, which she gets from being oppressed by not only men, but white women too, is her best use of change. She provides many examples of how white woman have completely ignored her struggles and views on racism, which causes her to become angry with them for their lack of awareness. Lorde urges these women to act on their feeling of anger as they are the best avenue to produce change. She doesn’t want these women to keep their anger in check and hide it, but instead harness it and use it as fuel for progression. Lorde concludes her speech by telling these

Racism has been a debated topic throughout the years. There have been many questions about if racism is a communal structured method of categorizing and separating people or if it is a learned or inherited behavior. The word has so many different meaning to each person affected by it. According to Miles and Brown, “The concept of racism is heavily negatively loaded, morally and politically” (3). All the way through history, racism has generated grief for those who fall victim to the problem. “Kindred” by Octavia Butler explains how a black woman is able to take a journey back in time to encounter and witness slavery up close and personal. In Natasha Trethewey “Bellocq's Ophelia”, the reader is able to recognize Ophelia’s yearning to be seen as a white woman opposed to a very fair-skinned black women. both Ophelia and Dana encounter racism and stereotypes. “During both of these women’s journeys throughout the stories, they have to face issues and hardships concerning their race in many different ways.”

“In Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color” by Kimberle Crenshaw talks about the issues women go through, not because of their actions but because of the color of their skin. She mentions that many women of color are racially discriminated and have limited help because of gender, class and race. “Many women of color are burdened by poverty, job skills, beaten and lack of child care responsibilities”. The objective of this article is society overlooks the issue of violence against these women.

Racism, in particular to the African American, can be traced back farther than the days when slavery thrived. After the slaves were freed and the phrase “All men are created equal” was not applied to the African American race. Women continued to experience this even after their gender counterparts received semi equal rights. Jael Silliman, chronicled this struggle in her novel Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organize for Reproductive Justice”. The book opens up with the quote “We’re sick and tired of being sick and tired”(Silliman 1). This quote rings true, even to this day African American women continue to use this quote. These words however, were said by Fannie Lou Hamer as she presented at a gathering of over 1500 African American women. This gathering of thousands of African American women spoke about the inequalities African Americans

Anger, a word you would think would never have a positive outcome does in the book Anthem, by Ayn Rand. Everybody has anger they hold back and they are just like a ticking bomb ready to explode. But anger in this case led to Equality leaving the situation which led him to be happy away from the city. Anger is an emotion and everyone handles it differently and everyone has different

Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change." (129) Hatred intends to destroy, but anger is potentially creative. I think about this and when I hear people minimizing protests about race on college campuses or the demonstrations in that has happen here with some protest we have heard about the past few years. People see, to only want to act in the wake of events and actions that absolutely call for anger, arguing there point which to me is safe to discount these reactions because they are too emotional. Maybe we can get to reasoned and detached, but I do not think it makes sense nor is it healthy to jump right past emotion as though the heart and head aren't part of the same body.

In Claudia Rankine’s Citizen she describes the unsettling existence of being black living in a white world. She demonstrates the dynamics of racism through the anecdote on Serena Williams. Rankine finds in Williams another version of herself: a strong African American woman, playing a white man's game by a white man's rules. Her writing Citizen is certainly written from a place of anger. Rankine is fed up with having her identity gradually erased from her, because of her skin tone. The moment she gets angry, she gets labeled as a stereotype, stripping away a part of who she is. It is very common for athletes to get angry at losing. However, till this day Serena is still defined by her justified anger at a ref making appalling calls over ten

Racism has been an emotional and hard topic that has been occuring in our society. Racism dates back to the Holocaust when jews, blacks, homosexuals and others were taken into camps because of something they cannot control. Although racism was more public in the past, racism is neither solved nor a thing of the past, racism nowadays is more silence and just as deadly. As we move forward in history, the Civil Rights Era was a shocking and important part of history, “Together, but separate.” Whites had more privilege and gave the blacks the, “leftovers.” In Warriors Don’t Cry, an uplifting, motivation and profound book, the main character Melba Pattillo battles integration as she makes her way through an all white school, who they are not happy to have her and eight others. Currently, while racism is not as public, I believe racism is just as bad as the past. Today, in our world, racial profiling and media have all been a way to express racism in a way that is just as hurtful.

During the interview, she mentioned how racism indirectly affected her mother, especially during a company picnic she attended with her mother and brother. “I remember going to her company picnic like ten years ago,” she said, “and all of her coworkers looking at us so funny because she was a single parent, and she’s walking down the street… with two black kids.” She further describes the reaction of her mother’s coworkers as not being related to her and her brother’s race, but states that “they were surprised my mother for procreating with someone who wasn’t white” (personal interaction, August 17, 2015). Her mother’s coworker’s evident feelings of discomfort and aversion agree with the actions that people may use to make other’s feel unwelcome or unvalued. As Johnson (2006) states, people’s reactions to individuals who are different may cause them to “stare as if to say, ‘What are you doing here?’ or stop the conversation with a hush they have to wade through to be included in the smallest way” (p. 55). Oppression and racism can manifest in more subtle forms than violence and outright prejudice, and through behaviors such as those described, individuals from privileged groups can cause both members of subordinate groups and those from dominant groups who stand by them to feel

The development of the “angry black woman” is a result of racism, social, economic, and political stressors

White woman are “helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere,” (8) and black women have “ploughed and planted”, “bear the lash”, and “seen most [children] sold off to slavery,” (11-14). She makes this comparison to connect with a black-woman audience and to enlighten the white women and men on their struggles. This disturbing comparison evokes emotion of sympathy and distress from the crowd, especially because the way Truth discusses her experiences makes her sound proud of these “achievements”. Consequently, by comparing the lives of white and black women, people are able to realize that feminism isn’t just for the white woman, but for the black woman as

In the context of the many worries that Black American mothers must relentlessly carry for their daughters’ safety, you [Emily Bernard] claim that “hope” is what drives you to release your daughters into the world and cease the rage you experience each time you hear about a young African-American being murdered. However, in response to your article “Between the World and Me: Black American Motherhood”, I would say that not only should you continue to carry “hope”, but it is also crucial that you have a desire to incite change. Given that you are a professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of Vermont, you could also initiate serious discussion about race among your students that could then hopefully carry over to the rest

White individuals are in constant fear of losing their dominance in society. Time Wise argues that white privilege “Creates a mental disfunction and emotional anxiety and distress. You’re constantly afraid of who is going to take what you have. You have to get them before they get us. That is what privilege will do because those who have it are constantly anxious” (Wise, 45:15). What sustains the master’s house is by continuously oppressing minority groups by not allowing them to integrate with whites based on their race and sex. White people use the race and sex card in order to separate themselves as people part of the norm and reject minority groups who are not part of the norm. Lorde argues that we must empower one another and expresses, “Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educate men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns” (Lorde, 5). Women, therefore, must strive to have their voices heard and must educate men and prove their existence in order to succeed. Men, however, want to sustain their power and fear the union of white feminists and minority women such as blacks, lesbians, and other minorities because they do not want women to join together and

When black women respond to racism they are responding with anger; the anger of exclusion, of unquestioned privilege of racial distortions, of silence ill-use, stereotyping, defensiveness, misnaming, and of betrayal. Black women may have a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change. —Audre Lorde, "The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism" (1981). The emotion which accompanies the first steps toward liberation is, for most women, anger. Through the exercise strength may be gained.

Although the text, Women: Images and Realities a Multicultural Anthology, has done a wonderful job of showcasing the diversity of women’s experiences, I find Beverly Daniel Tatum’s work “Defining Racism: “Can We Talk?”” to be the most striking. In the essay, Tatum describes how she (and many other feminists) define racism and who can and cannot be racist. Tatum argues that there are important distinctions between prejudice and racism, wherein racism is defined as a ‘system of advantage based on race” or more precisely “prejudice plus power” (388). Through multiple examples Tatum illustrates that if one accepts and uses her definition of racism then only White people (the group of people who ‘dominate’ society) are racist because “people of