Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

In these two essays, Lorde speaks specifically to Black people about how they can approach each other as they move forward in the struggle against oppression. Progress requires learning from the survival strategies of predecessors, and the clarity and insight of retrospection and introspection.

Retrospection plays a prominent role in both “Eye to Eye” and “Learning from the 60s.” A significant portion of “Eye to Eye” is Lorde’s recollection of her childhood, and she uses this recollection to trace Black women’s anger to it source: the racist and sexist hatred that has been directed towards them all their lives. For example, she recalls a white woman on the subway who looked at her with terror; white doctors in the clinic who call her “simple” and patronizingly pat her on the cheek before making her wait outside; a librarian at story hour reading Little Black Sambo; white girls at Catholic school ridiculing her hair; the server at the luncheonette serving her water in a paper cup while giving her white friend a glass; and a white store clerk looking at her teenage Black body with both terror and lust (147-49). She also remembers colorism in her family that fostered differential treatment towards her and her lighter-skinned sisters (149). In addition, she talks about the gift of survival that her mother gave her:

My mother taught me to survive from a very early age by her own example. Her silences also taught me isolation, fury, mistrust, self-rejection, and sadness […] And survival is the greatest gift of love. Sometimes, for Black mothers, it is the only gift possible, and tenderness gets lost (149-50).

In “Learning from the 60s,” Lorde reminds her audience of young, Black activists what took place in 60s Black liberation efforts. She writes, “[P]olitical correctness became a guideline. A small and vocal part of the Black community lost sight of the fact that unity does not mean unanimity” (136). She goes on to say:

In the 60s, white america—racist and liberal alike—was more than pleased to sit back as a spectator while Black militant fought Black Muslim, Black Nationalist badmouthed the nonviolent, and Black women were told that our only useful position in the Black Power movement was prone. The existence of Black lesbian and gay people was not even allowed to cross the public consciousness of Black america. We know in the 1980s, from documents gained through the Freedom of Information Act, that the FBI and CIA used our intolerance of difference to foment confusion and tragedy in segment after segment of Black communities of the 60s (137).

These examples of looking back in both “Eye to Eye” and “Learning from the 60s” share two interrelated aspects of Black people’s efforts at survival: first, decisions made by Black people within the limits of oppression; and second, oppression as the source that elicited certain misguided responses from Black people. When Lorde talks about her childhood, both the hatred she perceived coming from white people and the self-protective and survival mechanisms handed down by her mother, she touches on these two aspects interacting. Her mother is not the source of the hatred, but her survival tactics are a response to it. Thus, her parenting decisions are made within the limits of the oppressive systems she wishes to protect her daughter from. In other words, she did what she could. Similarly, the Black community’s attempt at unanimity was a response to a white supremacist society that rejected difference in the first place. Black people therefore worked within that white-imposed limit, deciding that a unified front meant a homogenized vision of Blackness.

Furthermore, respectability plays into the factions within the Black liberation movement. Each group either relied on a particular vision of what would make them acceptable and respectable in the eyes of white people, so they encouraged the rest of the community to align with that vision—or, they wholly rejected the respectability model, believing this rejection to be a better strategy with which the entire Black community should align. The same is true for Black women and the pressure to appear a certain way for white and male acceptance: “One Black woman sits and silently judges another, how she looks, how she acts, how she impresses others” (167). Lorde encapsulates the interaction between Black women thus:

‘Why don’t you learn to fly straight,’ she says to the other woman. ‘Don’t you understand what your poor showing says about us all? If I could fly I’d certainly do a better job than that. Can’t you put on a more together show? The white girls do it. Maybe we could get one to show you how’ (167-68).

This anecdote illustrates a self-defeating survival: Black women are pressured to survive the white heteropatriarchy by internalizing and enforcing its narrative—even while that narrative degrades them. Thus, these essays’ retrospection demonstrates that working within the oppressor’s narrative framework is not only ineffective but harmful: Such survival comes at the cost of human dignity. An entirely new framework is required.

These new frameworks cannot emerge, however, without oppressed people examining and eradicating their internalized oppressive values. Lorde demonstrates such introspection in both essays. In “Learning from the 60s,” Lorde encourages her audience to ask themselves, “In what way do I contribute to the subjugation of any part of those who I define as my people?” (139). She also says:

If our history has taught us anything, it is that action for change directed only against the external conditions of our oppressions is not enough. In order to be whole, we must recognize the despair oppression plants within each of us —that thin persistent voice that says our efforts are useless, it will never change, so why bother, accept it. And we must fight that inserted piece of self-destruction that lives and flourishes like a poison inside of us, unexamined until it makes us turn upon ourselves in each other (142).

In “Eye to Eye,” she makes the same point to Black women about the need to introspect and eradicate the seeds of oppression and self-loathing:

America’s measurement of me […] was a barrier which I had to examine and dismantle, piece by painful piece […] It is easier to deal with the external manifestations of racism and sexism than it is to deal with the results of those distortions internalized within our consciousness of ourselves and one another (147).

Examining internalized distortions and self-destruction is a requirement in the struggle against oppression. Lorde also posits, “Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me” (147). Thus, in addition to recognizing one’s own wholeness, self-acceptance allows Black people to accept each other, and this need not mean homogeneity; they can embrace differences and multifaceted experiences while still recognizing common struggles and common goals. Looking back and looking inward to gain clarity, as well as seeing oneself and one’s predecessors with grace, are the path forward for Black liberation.