When we talk about real power, I think we have to talk about anger, too. So for the reading today, I chose Audre Lorde’s essay The Uses of Anger. It’s one of the clearest expressions, to me, of what power can look like when rooted in truth and community.
She writes:
“I am a lesbian woman of colour whose children eat regularly because I work in a university. If their full bellies make me fail to recognize my commonality with a woman of colour whose children do not eat… or the woman who chooses silence instead of another death… then I am contributing not only to each of their oppressions but also to my own… I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own. And I am not free as long as one person of colour remains chained. Nor is any one of you.”
When Morgan said, We ain’t our sisters’ keepers. We are our sisters. I was like YES! Because we hear Audre’s quote about not being free when others are unfree often, but we don’t often expound on it or hear her words surrounding that quote. So aligned, right?
She goes on to say:
“We use whatever strengths we have fought for—including anger—to help define and fashion a world where all our sisters can grow… where our children can love… and where the power of touching and meeting another woman’s difference and wonder will eventually transcend the need for destruction.”
And then she gives us this truth, raw and unflinching:
“For it is not the anger of Black women which is dripping down over this globe like a diseased liquid. It is not my anger that launches rockets, spends more than sixty thousand dollars a second on missiles and other agents of war and death, slaughters children in cities, stockpiles nerve gas and chemical bombs, sodomizes our daughters and our earth. It is not the anger of Black women which corrodes into blind, dehumanizing power, bent upon the annihilation of us all—unless we meet it with what we have: our power to examine and to redefine the terms upon which we will live and work; our power to envision and to reconstruct, anger by painful anger, stone upon heavy stone, a future of pollinating difference and the earth to support our choices.”
Our power ain’t just in policy. It’s in presence. And poetry. It’s in speaking. It’s sitting in a literal manmade chair when the oppressors refuse you a seat. It’s refusing to let our anger be twisted into something ugly or shameful. Our anger is fuel and it’s sacred. And we should use it to build a better world for ourselves and each other. That’s the kinda leadership Ella Baker stood for.