Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

Lorde speaks to academic feminists at The Second Sex conference of 1979. She argues that their exclusion of women of color and lesbians—i.e., the exclusion of women different from themselves—indicates that they still operate according to a racist patriarchy. No consideration of differences among women and what they have to offer “weakens any feminist discussion of the personal and the political” (110). Difference serves a creative function in women’s lives, although they have been socialized to ignore it or see it as a threat. White and academic feminists must learn to take differences and turn them into strengths, and they can learn this from the women who, already outsiders, have had to use their differences to create a common cause with other outsiders.

While using the “master’s tools”—the tools the oppressor uses against the oppressed to maintain power—may offer temporary reprieve, it does not bring about lasting change. The paucity of women of color at the conference is a concern, and when white women are questioned about it, they evade responsibility for how they uphold racist patriarchy (113). Straight and white women also expect to be educated by lesbians and women of color in the same way that men expect women to educate them, which is a “tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed concerned with the master’s concerns” (113).