Rhetorical Analysis Of The Sisters Of Color By Lorde

In fashioning her ideal audience, Lorde directly addresses both “white women” and her “sisters of Color” while also subsuming both under the broader category of “women” (Lorde). Lord thus acknowledges the existence of two distinct publics within her cohesive audience, assuming the anger of African American women—who, somewhat paradoxically in regards to historical stereotypes, may comprise Lorde’s “informed” audience—and presuming the relative ignorance of white women, who largely include the portion of the audience in need of “education.” Through constitutive rhetoric, Lorde provides each group an identity and due acknowledgement within her speech while also unifying them universally as women against the social construction of racism. For

example, Lorde cites the need for “a world where all our sisters can grow […] and where the power of touching and meeting another woman’s difference and wonder will eventually transcend the need for destruction” (Lorde). The latter declaration relies on ideological implications of sisterhood and rhetoric identifying an ideal public that interpellate “subjects through a process of identification in rhetorical narrative that ‘always already’ presume[s] the constitution of subjects” (Charland).

It is such rhetorical social identification of the audience that forms a unified public through “discursive effects that induce human cooperation” (Charland) and that serves to not only unify black and white women, but also the African American community itself, which had experienced class stratification due to the national socioeconomic shift of the late twentieth century. Lorde further defines and bolsters her ideal audience by positing the fact that “mainstream communication does not want women, particularly white women, responding to racism” (Lorde). Lorde thus designates her constituted audience as retaining a certain potent potential in the recognized prominence and power of collaboration of white and black women as a sweeping force in the realm of social and political attitude concerning racism. This appeal to eminence serves to almost “legitimize” the coalition of Lorde’s ideal public while providing a certain motivation and purposiveness in the realization of her argument and in the promotion of the communication of anger as an essential means to combat ignorance and misconception of racial

injustice.
Lorde makes a second, crucial appeal to anger to further inform and unify her audience. She emphasizes the marked distinction between the hate so long simmered between white and black societies and the present anger of black women regarding modern racialism, stating: “Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction [while] anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change” (Lorde). Lorde thus defines rage as a mode of potential constructive action and marks the conveyance of anger between women of different races and classes as the means by which to gain context and insight of other's ideologies and social realities. Crucially, Lorde reinvents “anger,” eclipsing its traditionally masculine designation by transforming feminist rage—a historical “weakness”—into a modern strength and faculty for the empowerment of women. Thus, instead of enabling anger to divide and alienate women, Lorde vitally fashions the emotion of rage as a veritable "glue" that binds women within a shared emotion regarding a common interest. Anger thus assumes the form of a communicated symbol equating possibility for social change that “present[s] new ties [and] convert[s] a conjoint community into a community of interest and endeavor” (Dewey) whose “consequences are appreciated as good by all singular persons who take part in it” (Dewey). Through her discussion and argument of tolerant discourse expressing anger at racial injustice, Lorde forwards a primary personal ideology asserting belief that communication between peoples functions as a critical means to reach fundamental stasis and approach conflict resolution. Lorde molds this ideology neatly in the frame of her argument, suggesting that discourse regarding and sharing “anger” is easily achieved, maintained, and conducive to the reinforcement of feminist ideals.
In dissecting the empirical faculty of free and tolerant discussion of anger harbored between peoples, Lorde theorizes the existence of the social and political reality in which fear and guilt are closely associated, if not essentially synonymous, with the entertainment and expression of anger.

Primarily, she cites a tropic history of patriarchy and “male construction of brute force” as the reasons why women so often fear and suppress anger—whether projected from others or their own—for “there was nothing to be learned from it but pain” (Lorde). Conceivably, Lorde thus fashions and presents a female victim narrative to her audience that bears “facet [in] community building, community-member aggregation and remedying internal fissures” (Saleh). As such, Lorde provides a certain pathos appeal—and perhaps even ethos appeal in referencing humanistic traditions—that further amalgamates her audience by designating male dominance as representative of a common shared “antagonism” demanding amalgamated rebuttal from both black and white women. Lorde thus importantly bridges the racial chasm in citing a larger discrepancy necessitating immediate remedial action within the inclusive category of

“women.”
In her oration addressing an educated audience, Lorde formulates a cogent argument that constitutes an inclusive public of American women while informing them of the productive discourse and collaboration necessitated in the confrontation of the social and political issue of racism. She posits her speech’s cardinal consideration that anger leads to intimate understanding frankly, and relies on the ubiquity of the emotional appeal to reveal the underlying structures of association that relate her audience comprehensively as “women”—ignorant to categories of race or class—against male dominance and pervasive bigotry. Also essential to her argument’s success, Lorde forwards several blatant examples of her own unpleasant experiences with racist majority ideology, thus actualizing her declaration that “if women in the academy truly want a dialogue about racism, it will require recognizing the needs and living contexts of other women” (Lorde). Overall, Lorde’s intention in the delivery of her speech is not primarily to afford a blazing denunciation of racism, but rather to speak boldly of the reality of racism in social context and to parse the necessary social interaction between white and colored women to “orchestrate [a symphony of] furies” to overcome and rectify centuries of hurt and misconception between white and African American communities (Lorde).