It's time for some Audre Lorde. (It's always time for Audre Lorde.)

"My fear of anger taught me nothing. Your fear of that anger will teach you nothing, also."

"Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change."

"And when I speak of change, I do not mean a simple switch of positions or a temporary lessening of tensions, nor the ability to smile or feel good. I am speaking of a basic and radical alteration in those assumptions underlining our lives."

"I have seen situations where white women hear a racist remark, resent what's been said, bc filled w/fury & remain silent bc they are afraid. That unexpressed anger lies w/in them like an undetonated device, usually to be hurled at the first woman of Color who talks abt racism."

"But anger expressed & translated into action in the service of our vision & future is a liberating & strengthening act of clarification..in the painful process of this translation we identify who are our allies w/whom we have grave differences, and who are our genuine enemies."

"If I participate, knowingly or otherwise, in my sister’s oppression & she calls me on it, to answer her anger with my own only blankets the substance of our exchange with reaction. It wastes energy.

And yes, it is very difficult to stand still and to listen to another woman’s voice delineate an agony I do not share, or one to which I myself have contributed."

"Mainstream communication does not want women, particularly white women, responding to racism. It wants racism to be accepted as an immutable given in the fabric of your existence, like evening-time or the common cold."

"We cannot allow our fear of anger to deflect us nor seduce us into settling for less than the hard work of excavating honesty; we must be serious abt the angers entwined within it; our opponents are quite serious about their hatred of us and of what we are trying to do here."

We have been raised to view any difference other than sex as a reason for destruction; for Black women and white women to face each other’s angers w/o denial or silence or guilt is in itself a heretical and generative idea... & we must ask ourselves: Who profits from all this?

To those women here who fear the anger of women of Color more than their own unscrutinized racist attitudes, I ask: Is the anger of women of Color more threatening than the woman-hatred that tinges all aspects of our lives?

It is not the anger of other women that will destroy us but our refusals to stand still, to listen to its rhythms, to learn within it, to move beyond the manner of presentation to the substance, to tap that anger as an important source of empowerment.

I cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt, nor hurt feelings, nor answering anger; for to do so insults and trivializes all our efforts. Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action.

The angers between women will not kill us if we can articulate them with precision, if we listen to the content of what is said with at least as much intensity as we defend ourselves against the manner of saying.

Black women are expected to use our anger only in the service of other people’s salvation or learning. But that time is over.

My anger has meant pain to me but it has also meant survival, and before I give it up I’m going to be sure that there is something at least as powerful to replace it on the road to clarity.

What woman here is so enamoured of her own oppression that she cannot see her heelprint upon another woman’s face? What woman’s terms of oppression have become precious and necessary to her as a ticket into the fold of the righteous, away from the cold winds of self-scrutiny?

I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own. And I am not free as long as one person of Color remains chained. Nor is anyone of you.

We use whatever strengths we have fought for, incl anger, to help define and fashion a world where all our sisters can grow, where our children can love, where the power of touching & meeting another woman’s difference & wonder will eventually transcend the need for destruction.

For it is not the anger of Black women dripping down over this globe like a diseased liquid. It is not my anger that launches rockets, spends over $60k a second on missiles and other agents of war and death, slaughters children in cities, stockpiles nerve gas and chemical bombs..

We welcome all women who can meet us, face to face, beyond objectification and beyond guilt.

This is all from “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism”, 1981. http://www.blackpast.org/1981-audre-lorde-uses-anger-women-responding-racism