At other times for me as a white reader, I feel like the outsider, as Lorde teaches me about experiences I don’t have because I’m not Black. At times for me as a female reader, she feels like my sister, as we talk about shared struggles of womanhood. In these essays from the late seventies and early eighties, Lorde recounts the tension of being a Black lesbian feminist mother academic-how belonging to these various communities put her at odds with people who insist on reducing her down to a single identity.
Sister Outsider lives up very much to its title.
To be fair, I see why she is so quotable-though I’m not sure the quotations I will share in this review are the ones a white girl would wear on a T-shirt. So after thirty-two years of existence on this plane, I decided I should probably get around to reading something by Audre Lorde, you know? Then I can put a quote of hers on a T-shirt (just kidding). One of the insidious aspects of whiteness is how it appropriates the radical language of oppressed people (just look at the evolution of the word woke) and distorts it. Every time I see a quotation from Lorde or another prominent Black activist on a T-shirt, I cringe. Audre Lorde is one of those people whom we white people find so quotable yet seldom do we stop to listen to her words (we have done this to Martin Luther King, Jr.
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