Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.
Interpretation
To truly understand the fight against dehumanization, one must engage deeply and personally in the struggle.
Audre Lorde emphasizes the importance of personal experience and emotional investment in the fight against dehumanization. She suggests that without living through the realities of oppression and connecting with those affected, it is easy to forget the ongoing nature of this struggle, which requires both courage and compassion.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a panel on social justice to emphasize the importance of empathy.
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.
So instead of acknowledging applause, I stand there unmoving while they take part in the boldest form of dissent they can manage. Silence. Which says we do not agree. We do not condone. All of this is wrong.
Heroes are people who rise to the occasion and slip quietly away.
When I started at the Air Force Academy, I found out that I couldn't be a fighter pilot simply because I had ovaries. That was enough to make me go for it.
I have made speeches urging women to adopt methods of rebellion such as have been adopted by men in every revolution.
It is important not only to have the awareness and to feel impelled to become involved, it's important that there be a forum out there to which one can relate, an organization- a movement.
Obviously, the real issue has nothing to do with fear itself, but, rather, how we hold the fear. For some, the fear is totally irrelevant. For others, it creates a state of paralysis. The former hold their fear from a position of power (choice, energy, and action), and the latter hold it from a position of pain (helplessness, depression, and paralysis).
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