Your Silence Will Not Protect You, Audre Lorde, 2017.
This collection offers essays and speeches from the late 1970’s through the early 1980’s but reads as if it were written today. Not much seems to have changed since Lorde wrote these marvelous pieces. Lorde is primarily addressing black women in this work but her message is clear and clarion for all willing to read and listen.
My favorite quote from the collection, a collection full of valuable statements and suggestions, is the following from a transcribed talk called Learning from the 1960’s:
“Within each one of is there is some piece of humanness that knows we are not being served by the machine which orchestrates crisis after crisis and is grinding all our futures into dust.”
In the collection she speaks against politics, racism, sexism, heterosexism, and homophobia and her words are inspirational, encouraging, and anger-producing. She cautions, as the title suggests, that silence is dangerous and serves no purpose than to perpetuate oppression.
This is an incredible collection and an amazing introduction to such an astute thinker. I loved her efforts to empower oppressed people and to educate others to work sincerely across groups and differences to battle the vertical axis of power and abuse. Though I am not naïve enough to think that her words could have a positive impact on today’s cruel power structures I take to heart these words that it is worth engaging in the battle:
“It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths.” (from the essay The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House)
