Audre Lorde The Uses Of Anger Summary

Composed and delivered in 1981, Audre Lorde’s “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism” speech to the National Women’s Studies Association Conference emerged as a poignant rhetorical artifact in the climate of prevalent racism and the relative social, political, and economic uncertainty of late twentieth-century America. Facing increased backlash for the civil rights movement by the white majority, the African American minority was largely devastated by the widespread loss of urban jobs due to overseas expansion, curtailed government spending on social services, and by “laissez faire racism” that pervaded veritably all aspects of social interaction and livelihood—from education to jobs and consumerism ("Amistad Digital Resource."). It

is within this blighted social and political atmosphere that Lorde formulates her rhetorical response to a perceived exigence regarding the stratification of peoples—and specifically women—along lines of race and class due to the subsistence, and even revival, of racism as an imbedded social construct in the foundational matrix of American majority culture.

As such, Lorde forwards her compelling argument of the merit of communication of anger in the combating racism by constituting a unified audience of educated white and colored women through the appeal to broad and transcendent motifs, explicitly anger and historical context, as well as a pervasive female victimhood narrative to establish multiple tracks of affinity within her audience as to pursue an ultimate common interest in the crusade against racial bigotry.

Presented to the National Women’s Studies Association Conference in Connecticut, “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism” addressed an audience of “the nation's largest network of feminist scholars, educators, and activists” ("About."). A self-recognized informed “citizenry,” this audience crucially consisted of both black and white women typically retaining high degrees of education and social standing whose main objectives included “promoting and supporting the production and dissemination of knowledge about women and gender through teaching, learning, research and service in academic and other settings” ("About."). In a conventional context, such an

audience of women assuredly embodied an informed public of intellectuals and experts well versed in the nuances of academia; however, in the frame of the subject of Lorde’s speech, the true extent of the audience’s understanding and cognizance of a racist reality is less certain. As members of an elite community of well-educated and typically upper-class women, Lorde’s audience likely lacked the basic social context necessary for comprehension of the reality of racial prejudice faced by most African American women who archetypically did not receive a prestigious university education and who did not belong to the wealthy minority. Ergo, as a lesbian African American woman, and thus an absolute minority in the United States during the twentieth-century, Lorde faced the challenge of communicating her speech’s intention and its justification in a manner that was accessible and relevant to her specific audience. In a similar manner, throughout her career as a writer and poet, Lorde “fought the marginalization of such categories as ‘lesbian’ and ‘black woman’ ” and bore a theme of “anger” in her works directed towards racial injustice and male privilege that became a hallmark of her writing style and social voice (Poetry Foundation). Lorde’s speech thus retains many of her traditional compositional tropes and was written, arguably, at the zenith of Lorde’s social and political activism as she helped found within the decade both “Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press” and the political committee “Sisterhood in Support of Sisters in South Africa” (Poetry Foundation). This relative culmination of Lorde’s social and political efforts in advocating for equality for women and minority groups was paralleled by a similar respective apogee of socioeconomic conflict within the African American community. African American blue collar workers were largely impoverished by the loss of U.S. -based industries to overseas operation and “in 1982, over 30 percent of the total black labor force was jobless at some period during that year” ("Amistad Digital Resource."). The reduction of government spending on urban development and social services under the Reagan administration also undermined inner city black communities, contributing to class stratification and widespread destitution within the African American population that led to illegal drug trafficking involving the infamous and widely sought crack cocaine product ("Amistad Digital Resource."). Such, coupled by blatant or serpentine racism from much of the white majority, including the escalation of terror campaigns initiated by the Klu Klux Klan, spawned the ideal stormy backdrop for a social and political utterance on which Lorde capitalized ("Amistad Digital Resource."). Buttressing her cry for communication and collaboration between white and black women upon the unfortunate social and political reality of her time, Lorde extricated the frame of an imposing exigence that provided the support and vindication for her educating a mixed audience of the expression of anger as an “important source of empowerment” among women (Lorde).
At the exordium of her speech, Lorde proclaims her argument’s precis and rationale simply and forthrightly: “Women responding to racism means women responding to anger” (Lorde).

Countering the common social impression that anger in response to a perceived wrong is met with a sense of guilt and fear for dread of fueling conflict by propagating intense self-aware emotional reaction, Lorde makes a cogent argument by elucidating the utter essentiality of anger expression as a means to gain multi-faceted insight into conflict. Lorde realizes this argument regarding the use of anger in a social context to combat racism through the essential and fundamental appeal to such a universal and potent emotion as rage of injustice. Anger effectively transcends race, gender, and class distinctions through its ubiquity to the human experience, and thus provides an initial and embracing commonality to all members of Lorde’s audience. Rather quickly within the delivery of her speech, Lorde provides her audience with a series of concrete anecdotal examples of her many encounters with racism as to avoid her speech “becom[ing] a theoretical discussion” (Lorde). Lorde’s use of these pithy stories of the “harshness of Black women” (Lorde ) and their “self-serving” role in the perpetuation of the issue of racism remedies the common problem of an audience “unacquainted with [orator] provocation, [who] cannot bring [the orator’s] case home to [themselves], nor conceive anything like the passions it

excites” (Smith). Such pragmatic and appalling examples of modern racial prejudice afford explanation and justification of the rage Lorde so openly expresses and provide her audience an illuminating context and thus inkling of comprehension of Lorde’s personal motivations for unabashed anger at the protraction of modern racism.