I remember when I first read Audre Lorde’s seminal essay, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House as a sophomore in college. I felt like I was hearing something so familiar, yet revolutionary. In it, Audre Lorde criticizes the white organizers of the conference where she’s speaking for their inability to see the intersections of racial, sexual and gender hierarchies in their activism and in their own practices. She admonished white feminism’s hypocrisy in trying to disrupt patriarchy, while perpetuating practices of marginalizing the voices of women of color specifically/especially as she herself was being tokenized at that moment. Specifically, she voiced the frustrations of being treated as a token conference speaker and I, as the only Black woman in class, knew that practically every time I spoke, my white colleagues were hearing one of the few, if not only, progressive Black voices in their lives up to that point.
I was somewhere on the distant left, basking in the easy authenticity of being a young Black woman with a recently grown afro and working-class ethics. So when I did talk, I had to really challenge the fundamentals of the content and direction of many of the discussions we had in class. For me, speaking up meant speaking to many puzzled white people. Folks who felt challenged just by my presence. They felt I took everything too literally, too…
