The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House by Audre Lorde

Author:Audre Lorde
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241339732
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2017-12-27T16:00:00+00:00

Learning from the 1960s

Malcolm X is a distinct shape in a very pivotal period of my life. I stand here at Harvard for the 1982 Malcolm X Weekend – Black, lesbian, feminist – an inheritor of Malcolm and in his tradition, doing my work, and the ghost of his voice through my mouth asks each one of you here tonight: Are you doing yours?

There are no new ideas, just new ways of giving those ideas we cherish breath and power in our own living. I’m not going to pretend that the moment I first saw or heard Malcolm X he became my shining prince, because it wouldn’t be true. In February 1965 I was raising two children and a husband in a three-room flat on 149th Street in Harlem. I had read about Malcolm X and the Black Muslims. I became more interested in Malcolm X after he left the Nation of Islam, when he was silenced by Elijah Muhammad for his comment, after Kennedy’s assassination, to the effect that the chickens had come home to roost. Before this I had not given much thought to the Nation of Islam because of their attitude towards women as well as because of their non-activist stance. I’d read Malcolm’s autobiography, and I liked his style, and I thought he looked a lot like my father’s people, but I was one of the ones who didn’t really hear Malcolm’s voice until it was amplified by death.

I had been guilty of what many of us are still guilty of – letting the media, and I don’t mean only the white media – define the bearers of those messages most important to our lives.

When I read Malcolm X with careful attention, I found a man much closer to the complexities of real change than anything I had read before. Much of what I say here tonight was born from his words.

In the last year of his life, Malcolm X added a breadth to his essential vision that would have brought him, had he lived, into inevitable confrontation with the question of difference as a creative and necessary force for change. For as Malcolm X progressed from a position of resistance to, and analysis of, the racial status quo, to more active considerations of organizing for change, he began to reassess some of his earlier positions. One of the most basic Black survival skills is the ability to change, to metabolize experience, good or ill, into something that is useful, lasting, effective. Four hundred years of survival as an endangered species has taught most of us that if we intend to live, we had better become fast learners. Malcolm knew this. We do not have to live the same mistakes over again if we can look at them, learn from them, and build upon them.

Before he was killed, Malcolm had altered and broadened his opinions concerning the role of women in society and the revolution. He was beginning to speak with increasing respect of the connection

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