Celebrate Black History Month with Audre Lorde

Happy Black History Month! Each week during February, I’m going to feature a different revolutionary black woman from history. This week is Audre Lorde.

This queer womanist writer and civil rights activist described herself as a “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.” In fact, Lorde’s 1984 collection of nonfiction prose, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, has become a canonical text in women’s studies, Black studies, and queer theory. It was reading her that first opened my eyes to my own white privilege and the ways I’ve contributed to women of color feeling like outsiders.

Lorde dedicated her entire life and all her writing and creative talent to confronting the intersecting injustices of racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia. She earned a BA from Hunter College and MLS from Columbia, serving as a librarian in the New York public school system throughout the 1960s. It was here that she met her husband, a white, gay man with whom she had two children. Living more fully into her authentic self, she met her long-time partner (wife was not a term afforded to her during her lifetime), Frances Clayton.

She taught poetry and writing, and created a pedagogy based on her experience as a black, queer woman in white academia. Her essay, “The Master’s Tools Will Not Dismantle the Master’s House” remains a foundational text in my own classroom, and in countless classrooms grappling with critical theories addressing gender, sexuality, and race. She is often quoted within the recent self-care movement for claiming, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation and that is an act of political warfare.” And, while this statement stands solid on its own, I think it's imperative to utilize her work on self-care through the lens of her Sister Outsider status. She wasn’t just talking about self-care as bubble baths and a spa day. She was talking about radical self-care for collective liberation.

This month, how will you create spaces for radical self-care for collective liberation?