Audre Lorde described herself as a “black woman, lesbian, mother, warrior and poet.” It would be impossible to talk about her and her legacy in 2026 without adding a few more words: legendary, powerful and relevant. As one of the dynamic voices whose words drew as much attention at academic conferences as among those who read her poetry, Lorde’s determination to continue speaking about the need for inclusion and community has resonated with people across time.
silver press’ “Your silence will not protect you” is a book that brings together Lorde the poet and Lorde the academic, as it begins with her essays and essays and ends with her poems. Published in 2017, some 25 years after the poet’s death, it still seems to comment on current events and give us advice on how to navigate the socio-political landscape. On the one hand, this is evidence of how timeless her insights are (even if some of the terminology she used is now recognized as problematic), but on the other hand, it is evidence that anyone who says that all the social justice ideas we talk about today are “too new” for older generations to understand or integrate into their value system is essentially erasing history and all the work that marginalized feminists around the world have done to get us to where we are.
Via Wikimedia Commons
About the need to speak out
With governments around the world silencing free speech By both overt and covert means, the popular advice given to marginalized people seems to be to remain silent for our own sake. There’s absolutely nothing new about this – in fact, telling someone to keep quiet is a common way for those in power to continue to oppress and control everyone else. Lorde reminds us of the importance of speaking up. In the first article ‘The transformation of silence into speech and action“She asks us to move beyond fear by telling us that our silence will not stop those who want to oppress us:
“And I keep reminding myself that if I had been born mute or had kept an oath of silence all my life for safety reasons, I would still have suffered and died.” “It’s very good for creating perspective.”
Furthermore, she argues in her essay that if silence were such a good way to defend ourselves, it would essentially banish all fear and anxiety completely from our minds. Instead, those who remain silent when they know something completely wrong is happening still carry that awfulness within them.
“We can sit silently in our corner forever while our sisters and ourselves are wasted, while our children are disfigured and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned; we can sit silent as bottles in our safe corners and still be no less afraid.”
Lorde doesn’t just talk about the importance of marginalized people speaking out but also the importance of actual allyship. She talks about how so many black women’s voices are silenced because white women claim that the experiences are so different from their own that they can’t teach their work – she then wonders how it is possible that they teach figures like Plato and Shakespeare? Her poetry often touches on this theme as well, as poems like “Good Mirrors Don’t Come Cheap” and “Need: A Choral of Black Women’s Voices” speak to the importance of questioning those who intentionally build false narratives and standing loudly and proudly as a community against injustice.
On intersectionality
“Intersectionality” as a word was coined by Crenshaw in 1989, and it is important to remember that the critical race theorist gave a name to what already was, not allowed it to come into being. Anyone who argues that it is something “new” need only look at Lorde’s life and work to see how exclusion affects our experience of the world in different ways. She begins one of her essays by saying, “Black feminism is not white feminism in blackface,” and much of her writing focuses on her lived experience of being excluded from so-called “inclusive” spaces because part of her identity threatened the exclusionary ideals on which those spaces were built. In an open letter to Mary Daly, one of the white philosophers who led the feminist movement, Lorde stood up for herself and her sisters by saying:
“Mary, have you ever really read the work of black women? Have you ever read my words, or have you just skimmed through them for quotes that you thought might valuablely support an already conceived idea about an ancient and distorted connection between us? This is not a rhetorical question.”
Lorde often directly criticized not only overt exclusion but also performative allyship within political movements and academic circles. While on the one hand she was treated as the “other” within the feminist movement because she was Black – not just personally, but as someone with a social identity – she was also often treated as the “other” within black movements because she was a woman and a lesbian. Her essays illustrate that the fact that her black male comrades know the means by which the community rebels against whites means that when she, as a woman and as a lesbian, tries to use the same means against the oppression that comes her way through black men’s misogyny, she is acting against an oppressor who already knows her language of revolt.
Audre Lorde, Meridel Lesueur, Adrienne Rich, 1980 via Wikimedia Commons
When it comes to other black women, she doesn’t see herself as one of them because the fact that she’s a lesbian is seen as anti-blackness (the accusation is based on the idea that lesbians will lead to the extinction of black people – because, you know, lesbians can magically convert everyone around them and no lesbian in the history of the universe has ever wanted a baby). She also talks about how the idea of seeing some people as not “like me” because something about their identity is different, even though we share an oppressed identity, is based on the feeling, “I have to attack you before our enemies confuse us for each other.” Lorde reminds us, “But they still will.”
Other themes explored in the book include the importance of being angry about injustice and hatred, the need for pathos to be part of political discourse, and the vitality of the feminine and love in everything we do and are. This compilation makes it clear that their politics is ultimately a politics of the people – and that will always remain relevant as long as there are oppressors – no matter what they do or who they are.
Khushi Bajaj (she/her) is an intersectional feminist and author who holds an MSc in Media and Communication from the London School of Economics. Her work has previously been published by Penguin Random House, erbacce-press, Metro UK, Diva, Hindustan Times and others. She is passionate about social justice and believes in the revolutionary power of kindness. She can be reached via email (khushi.bajaj1234@gmail.com).
