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Breaking Language: The Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement in Literature Builder Levy, Anti-War Protest Builder Levy, Harlem Peace March to End Racial Oppression, April 27, 1967. The statement "No black man ever called me chink: support the black struggle for existence" was taken from boxer/activist Muhammad Ali's original statement about his refusal to participate in the Vietnam War, "Ain't no Vietcong ever called me nigger." Amitage Digital Resources, Columbia University.

Audre Lorde

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Audre Lorde: "You cannot dismantle the master's house with the master's tools" (1984) Use language created by yourself, not by the master (powerful others):

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 . . .