Audre Lorde: "You cannot dismantle the master's house with the master's tools" (1984)
Throughout the Civil Rights era and in the 1970s, the decade in which the struggle continued, feminists and other progressive thinkers demonstrated a higher consciousness of how language operates: how language can be used to create legal barriers to equality and dignity, and how language is intimately connected to the pursuit of freedom. Writer, feminist thinker, and lesbian Audre Lorde famously wrote in her collection of essays Sister Outsider that "you cannot dismantle the master's house with the master's tools." Here is Patricia Corbett, a kindred spirit, reading and memorializing that passage . . .
