Audre Lorde was an American writer, womanist, radical feminist, professor, philosopher and civil rights activist.
Lorde didn’t balk at labels. She was known for introducing herself with a string of her own: “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.” To Lorde, pretending our differences didn’t exist—or considering them “causes for separation and suspicion”—was preventing us from moving forward into a society that welcomed diverse identities without hierarchy.
“Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference—those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older—know that survival is … learning how to take our differences and make them strengths,” she wrote in “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.”
