Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

Throughout Sister Outsider, Lorde reiterates that battling oppression is not solely external but requires attention to how oppression becomes internalized. Drawing on Paulo Freire’s The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Lorde is adamant that:

The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which knows only the oppressors’ tactics, the oppressors’ relationships (123).

Thus, any revolutionary or lasting change requires the oppressed to recognize and eradicate the seeds of oppression within themselves. As she discusses in “Eye to Eye,” Black women wage two battles against oppression: First, the external war against white racism; second, the internalized racism that fuels the anger they direct towards each other (163). For Lorde, this second battle is much more difficult because it requires the oppressed to hold a mirror up to themselves to confront their own self-loathing and how they may be complicit in others’ oppression.

Likewise, Lorde encourages white women and Black men to confront the oppressive tactics they’ve adopted. For example, in reference to Daly’s exclusion of Black goddess figures and myths, Lorde warns, “When patriarchy dismisses us, it encourages our murders. When radical lesbian feminist theory dismisses us, it encourages its own demise” (69).