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.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the pressure to conform to a single aspect of one's identity while disregarding the complexity of the whole person.
Audre Lorde's quote emphasizes how society often prompts individuals to define themselves by a singular identity trait, such as race, gender, or role, while ignoring the multifaceted nature of a person. This pressure can lead to feelings of being diminished and misunderstood, as it reduces the richness of one’s experiences and attributes to a mere label that others can consume or utilize for their own understanding.
In practice
In a speech about diversity and inclusion, you could use this quote to highlight the importance of recognizing the whole person.
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.
The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.
Even though I'm a hairdresser and I love doing hair, I feel like I don't look like a groomer. When I think of how a groomer would look in relation to the first version of 'Queer Eye,' I feel like I don't fit in that box.
The American society around me looked at me and saw Japanese. Then, when I was 19, I went to Japan for the first time. And suddenly - what a shock - I realized I wasn't Japanese; they saw me as American. It was an enormous relief. Now I just appreciate being exactly in the middle.
Being South Asian in the U.K. is like being Latino in the U.S., I would guess. It's a bit more hood. You see things; things happen. I was bouncing between worlds. You're acting from a very early age, when you have to code-switch like that. I'm a hybrid, a mongrel. I think many people live that life.
I'm an actor. Since I was a teenager, I have had to play different characters, negotiating the cultural expectations of a Pakistani family, Brit-Asian rudeboy culture, and a scholarship to private school. The fluidity of my own personal identity on any given day was further compounded by the changing labels assigned to Asians in general.
I want people to see my color and my culture written all over me, because I am proud of the skin I'm in. It is an important part of my identity. What I don't want them to do is mistreat me because of it.
Blackness remains the coat you can't take off.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.