Summary
Lorde begins by announcing that "every Black woman in America lives her life somewhere along a wide curve of ancient and unexpressed angers." She describes her own anger through a series of metaphors: a "molten pond," a thread woven into her. Though other Black women are not primarily responsible for her anger, she says, she nonetheless ends up directing it at them disproportionately. Hatred, directed at Black women by society as a whole, is internalized. This hatred emerges as anger directed from one Black woman to another, though it is rarely talked about openly. Lorde recalls being treated with disgust as a child and concluding that she herself must be worthy of hatred. If she can acknowledge and understand the source of this self-hatred, Lorde says, it can no longer be weaponized against her. Lorde then tries to recall some of the instances that contributed to these feelings in herself. These include a childhood encounter with a white woman on the subway who disgustedly moved away from Lorde, being laughed at and disciplined for her hairstyle at school, and being leered at by a job interviewer in high school. She remembers her family's attitudes toward Blackness— she was darker-skinned than her sisters and mother and also more rebellious, and wonders now if she and others had subconsciously associated darker skin with misbehavior. At school boys harassed her and teased her for her lightness, causing Lorde to remark to readers that skin tone is always relative. Lorde's mother survived and taught her children to survive by staying silent about issues of race and color. Lorde empathizes with her lack of tenderness, believing it to be her mother's way of expressing love, but realizes that she internalized this harsh treatment and proceeded to treat other Black women similarly.
Lorde then sketches out just a few historical instances of this hatred. These include a Black woman in New York made the unwilling subject of a medical experiment, a South African woman forced to live on a reserve away from her husband, and the four young girls killed in a church bombing in Alabama. She asks "What other human being absorbs so much virulent hostility and still functions?" However, Black women have often used their power to care for one another: Lorde gives examples from Africa and the Americas. Digressing, Lorde defines both anger and hatred, noting that they are different because anger is often unpleasant but not necessarily destructive, while hatred is inherently destructive. Since anger can be energizing and constructive, and since being hated makes one feel angry, some people even come to value hatred more than love because it makes them angry and thus energized. But anger has limited potential as a revolutionary tool, since it is inextricable from the hatred that breeds it. Only by rejecting superficial mimicries of solidarity and being truly honest and vulnerable will Black women be able to disrupt the cycle of hatred. Lorde confesses that, for her, anger is the easiest, most familiar response for her to any minor annoyance from a fellow Black woman. She recounts an unpleasant encounter with a Black woman staffing a library, and wonders what inspired the other woman's evident fury and disgust. She then switches to the second person, asking either the woman from the library or Black women in general why she feels such visceral anger towards them, and why they cannot live harmoniously together. She then remembers an occasion on which her sister coldly informed her that she did not care to listen to what she had to say. Lorde mourns but rationalizes: how, she writes, can Black women love one another if they do not love themselves? In fact, being the objects of hatred makes it hard to halt the cycle, since the pain of hostility begins to feel normal. Accusations of naiveté are then used to dismiss women who do not project hostility to other Black women. As a result, Lorde says, even attempting to have a conversation about this anger feels harsh and painful—but this is the only way to solve it.
In part two of the piece, Lorde speaks about her daughter's feelings of torment at university, where she is treated with disgust and dismissal: Black mothers, Lorde says, must either "kill (their children) or eventually send them into...the white labyrinth." She means this literally, and references mothers killing their children on slave ships out of desperation. Her daughter seemed to feel angry with Lorde herself, she says, because Lorde could not work through the complex problems her daughter was enduring. While all mothers and daughters fear parting from each other, this fear is far more potent and intense in Black families. Remembering a woman she knows sobbing after her mother's death, Lorde wonders if her mourning was based on the fear that no other Black woman would ever understand her—the "romance" between Black mothers and daughters, she speculates, is partly based on the fact that Black women outside of this relationship tend to treat each other with suspicion. If only Black women could treat themselves and each other with the acceptance they experience from their mothers, they might be able to speak more honestly. Instead, Lorde laments, Black women—including herself— avoid closeness and even interaction with one another, fearing the anger they might meet. They are hardened and protected by the very hatred they have internalized. Lorde resolves to view other Black women more clearly, without greeting each one as "my mother or my killer"—that is, without stressful, emotionally charged assumptions. Next, Lorde lists a few occasions on which she has felt justified fury, starting her list with a general trend: the way in which Black women are told that they are either inferior or superior to others, but never simply equal. Lorde then includes the text of a letter she has written to a Black female therapist named Leora, describing the challenges of two Black women engaging in a therapeutic dynamic when so few societal models exist for such a relationship. In addition to challenges, Lorde says, they will have shared experiences and histories, which Lorde has never experienced with a white therapist.
In part three, Lorde confesses that she has recently experienced so much loss that she feels stuck in an angry, suffering mode. In some ways it is easier for Black women to interact with white women, who are less likely to be stuck in this cycle of anger and loss and with whom it is easier to achieve superficial harmony. However, Lorde says, this is untrue with her lover Frances, who is white but with whom she has worked to refuse easy or superficial solutions. Black women in all contexts must seek out these deep, uncomfortable relationships with one another in order to move forward collectively. Lorde wonders if her crusade against racism in white society is sometimes a way to avoid confronting the even more painful alienation and loss between Black women—for instance, the everyday pain of watching her daughter grow up. In a series of rhetorical questions, Lorde asks herself and the reader again why it is easy for her to demand of other Black women what she is unable to give even herself, and whether this harshness is a result of having no Black women "goddesses" or "heroines" as a child. Exhibiting the vulnerability she urges in others, Lorde admits that she is "hungry" for the presence and love of other Black women. Instead, Lorde says, she has been taught to shut herself off from others, especially by her mother, who told her not to trust either white people or anyone darker than herself. How, Lorde asks, can such messages be recognized as harmful and abolished?
In part four, Lorde reflects on cultural narratives about Black women supporting and sustaining each other. These cause her pain, she says, and must do so for many others, because in many cases Black women are afraid of one another. This anger and fear can emerge unbidden in any number of everyday situations. Knowing that this rage is unfair, women often conceal it or even disguise it as righteous anger about external racism and sexism. She describes a hypothetical meeting between two Black women, in which one criticizes every choice the other makes, and then feels injured by the second woman's sadness and hurt. In part five, Lorde describes three of the cultural myths that cause women to perpetuate these harmful behaviors. The first myth is the idea that Black women should avoid all interactions with each other, even kind ones, for fear of insulting each other. The second is the assumption that Black women, because they defend one another to outsiders, needn't treat one another kindly in private. The third is that Black women can become "perfect," which is in fact impossible because the white world's standard of perfection excludes Black women—thus causing Black women to become angry with one another for not meeting an impossible standard.
In part five, Lorde posits that Black women compete with each other in order for each to demonstrate that she is different from other Black women and therefore better. Women refuse to acknowledge this problem for fear of setting back political advances. Activism and political work, meanwhile, won't solve the problem, which is internal and personal, rooted in childhood humiliations and even traditional games of verbal sparring like "The Dozens," which Lorde believes is merely a way for Black children to practice insulting and being insulted. Indeed, Black girls are never allowed to have a true childhood— sometimes literally, in the case of the many whose deaths go unsolved. For this reason, Black people ignore and repress their emotions, says Lorde, leading to a stereotype that feelings are a luxury or even weakness available only to white people. But ignoring feelings only increases the power they hold—and reliving traumas hurts, but no more than experiencing them for the first time. Returning to the memory of the woman's glare on the subway, Lorde notes that childhood experiences of racism are recorded but not understood at the time: unable to become pain or confrontation, they are stored away and become long-term suffering, which results in self-hatred and anger at undeserving others. Black women must halt this process, learning to accept themselves as their own mothers once did, and then extending that acceptance to others. Through this process, they will come to treasure the recognition they receive from one another.
Finally, in part 6, Lorde critiques the growing movement to proclaim that "Black is beautiful": while she calls this a "good start," it does not confront underlying suffering. Instead, Black women must consciously work to treat each other with kindness and tenderness in order to expel deeply rooted harmful practices. The process won't be easy or quick, she says, but it begins with an attainable step—honest confrontation—from which real change will spring.
Analysis
The first sentence in this essay reveals a great deal upon close reading. Lorde's claim that Black women live "somewhere along a wide curve of ancient and unexpressed angers" implies that Black women's anger is both individual and shared. On the one hand, in this metaphor, each woman is situated in a particular place on this curve, and her experience and perspective are unique. On the other hand, each woman occupies the same curve, meaning that every Black woman bears shared experiences and emotional realities. This metaphor, then, is very much in keeping with Lorde's philosophies about wholeness and completeness. In one piece of writing after another, Lorde urges openness and connection as a way to abolish the scourges of division, binary thinking, and individualism. She does so here as well, urging deep connection over superficial unity at every turn. In her opening sentence, Lorde essentially argues that each Black women's individual experience is a link on a chain, distinct from but related to each of her peers' experiences. Therefore, only by clearly seeing one's individual traumas and private thoughts as part of a shared struggle can Black women be liberated.
This argument is carried out in the essay's form as well as its content. Lorde demonstrates the relationship between her own traumas and biases, then links them to historical examples. For instance, early on, Lorde describes in vivid, novelistic detail her own humiliations at the hands of both strangers and family members. She then includes examples of crimes committed against Black women from throughout history, as well as examples of Black women offering one another love and support. By building from her own personal history into a broader historical recounting, Lorde reinforces the idea that each Black woman's feelings and past are shared. Indeed, she argues, only by talking about one's own worst moments can one learn how many others have experienced similar ones. In this sense, Lorde's own willingness to admit that she feels both anger towards and fear of other Black women is an instance of the radical, even painful vulnerability she encourages. Here, and in so much of her writing, Lorde takes the first plunge into the openness and honesty she urges. By rejecting defensiveness in the pages of this essay, Lorde makes doing so appear doable for others.
Furthermore, by quoting passages from the I Ching, Lorde suggests that the individual and communal struggles of Black women are in some ways universal. The I Ching is an ancient Chinese text that has long inspired writers and philosophers. By incorporating it into highly specific personal narratives about, for instance, her relationship with her daughter, Lorde relates overwhelming and private feelings to a millennia-old tradition. Lorde is careful not to imply that other groups face identical struggles to Black women—she speaks a great deal here about the uniquely brutal hostility to which Black women are subjected—but using an ancient text to describe and comment on contemporary pain implies that such pains are, to an extent, eternal and universal, and therefore de-stigmatizes them.
