BGF named that tune

[jesse_the_k]

I was perplexed when I saw the title of the WisCon31 panel I eventually moderated on Monday AM: But the Master Has a Black & Decker Cordless Drill. How can we question literary standards that support the patriarchy/establishment/Man without ending up suppressing critical judgment, and while maintaining a common critical language? with Catherynne M. Valente, Micole Iris Sudberg, and Jennifer Dunne and myself as moderator

I recognized the title as a play on Audre Lorde's mind-opening essay, "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House." (It appears in Lorde's collection Sister Outsider, as well as the anthology This Bridge Called My Back). In hopes of understanding how to frame the discussion, I reread the essay. In four pithy pages, Lorde calls white feminists to account for excluding black and lesbian women from the panel at a 1979 conference.

But her essay goes much further, challenging feminists to recognize that women don't come in tidy one-issue slices, that we are interdependent beings who must cherish our multiplicity as our strength.

begin quote For difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening. Only within that interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways to actively “be” in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters. quote ends

As a well-read white daughter of the ruling class, the importance of difference and interdependence had been mostly theoretical. The truth of Lorde's passionately expressed opinion became clear to me when I became visibly disabled in 1993. Suddenly others could see only one possible me--a stereotype with no relation whatsoever to my life, my opinions, my goals. I no longer "looked like a feminist."

I was bummed that the title of Lorde's essay was well-known enough for a play on words, but the substance seemed unrelated to the panel's description. As moderator, I had some discretion in how the conversation would unfold.

Still and yet I didn't think it through. Even though I had Lorde's tools, and some experience using them, I didn't use my power to challenge this cultural appropriation. I could have said, "Nope! Ain't doing that panel. It's based on a misunderstanding of one of our fundamental theorists' ideas, and it just shouldn't be here."

Fortunately, the blogger I know only as BGF at And we shall march points out how infuriating it is that a WisCon panel would appropriate Lorde's rhetoric for a discussion that didn't address race, difference, or "the courage to act where there are no charters."

Thank you BGF for showing me another way to recognize my racism.

Comments

[buggery.livejournal.com]

That is an excellent apology, and because you took the extra step of explaining what you did wrong in such a way that other ignorant white people who consider themselves well-meaning could understand that it *was* wrong, I am bookmarking this for times in the future when I will point just such ignorant white people here.

If you don't mind the linking.

Honored, link away!

[jesse_the_k]

Glad to be helpful, really, in any way.

Know you of any resources on "why guilt is a time waster"? Seeking same, not finding any great ones yet.