At one point, Lorde laments the generational amnesia that seems to affect activists-and certainly I’ve observed that happen in feminism during my lifetime. Lorde’s words here give me a valuable glimpse into the state of feminism and queer activism just prior to my birth in 1989. Rather, Lorde wants us to stop being reductive-this is a call for intersectionality before Kimberlé Crenshaw coined that term, a call for us to understand that multiple axes of oppression affect people’s lives in different ways, yet we are stronger when we come together in our diversity to fight for our liberation. But Lorde’s message is emphatically not “you can’t understand my struggle because you’re not Black”-she repeatedly says she is tired of non-Black people using this as an excuse to beg off, for example, from teaching Black writers and artists in English classes.

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.

Sister outsider by audre lorde