When we create out of our experiences, as feminists of color, women of color, we have to develop those structures that will present and circulate our culture.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of women of color creating their own narratives and cultural frameworks.
Audre Lorde highlights the necessity for women of color to actively shape and share their cultural identities and experiences. By doing so, they challenge existing structures that often marginalize their voices and ensure that their contributions to culture are recognized and valued within broader society.
In practice
In a keynote speech about representation in media, one might use this quote to highlight the importance of authentic storytelling.
The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.
There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.
There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.
I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.
I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.
There's always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself - whether it's Black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc. - because that's the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else.
In a lot of ways I think food is starting to take the place in culture that rock and roll took 30 years ago, in that eating has become incredibly political. And just as the street has always dictated fashions on music and other things, itβs starting to happen that way in food.
Miami is a melting pot in which none of the stones melt. They rattle around.
Hip-hop gave a generation a common ground that didn't require either race to lose anything; everyone gained.
Get the culture right, and everything else just falls into place.
Culture relates to objects and is a phenomenon of the world; entertainment relates to people and is a phenomenon of life.
Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life - its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness - conjoin to dull our sensory faculties
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