Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

During this talk given at the Malcolm X Weekend at Harvard University in 1982, Lorde discusses the lessons in the 1960s liberation efforts as they continue into the 1980s. Lorde believes the change in Malcolm X’s vision in the last year of his life indicates his “confrontation with the question of difference as a creative and necessary force for change” (135). The lesson from the 1960s, then, is the complexity of any movement for liberation; activists must face not only externally imposed oppression but also the ways that they themselves have internalized that oppression (135).

Due to the differences in activist vision among the Black community—particularly different identity interests beyond Black identity—1960s Black liberation efforts often involved Black anger being expressed horizontally rather than vertically (135-36); i.e., a Black person might be justifiably angry at oppression but take out that anger against other Black people—due to their differences in sex or class, for example—instead of against the shared enemy, racism. Thus, the Black community of the 1980s must learn from the 1960s that it is possible to detrimentally oversimplify oppression to a single issue (138). Survival and growth require recognizing the interconnectedness of oppression and that there is no hierarchy of oppression (139).