Battling racism and battling heterosexism and battling apartheid share the same urgency inside me as battling cancer.
Interpretation
The struggle against social injustices is as critical as the fight against disease.
In this quote, Audre Lorde expresses that the fight against racism, heterosexism, and apartheid is of equal importance to her as the battle against cancer. This highlights the urgency and significance of social justice issues, indicating that fighting for equality and liberation is a matter of life and death, much like dealing with a serious illness.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of fighting for civil rights.
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.
I listened, vaguely knowing now that I had committed some awful wrong that I could not undo, that I had uttered words I could not recall even though I ached to nullify them, kill them, turn back time to the moment before I had talked so that I could have another chance to save myself.
When I started, I knew I didn't fit any visual that anyone was going to lie down and take their clothes off about. Work doesn't come to me; I go out and look for it.
A hero does for others. He would do anything for people he loves, because he knows it would make their lives better. I am not that kind of person, but I want you to be. You could give something to her, to me, to those children in the quarter. You could give something I never could ... The white people out there are saying you don't have it-that you're a hog, not a man. But I know they are wrong.
Yes I try to kill myself in small amounts, an innocuous occupation. Actually I'm hung up on it.
You've heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap? There's an animal kind of trick. A human would remain in the trap, endure the pain, feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind.
Listeners, that brings us to the end of another Potterwatch. We donβt know when it will be possible to broadcast again, but you can be sure we shall be back. Keep twiddling those dials: the next password will be βMad-Eye.β Keep each other safe. Keep faith. Good night.
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