Excerpts From Audre Lorde's Uses of Anger

And while we scrutinize the often painful face of each other's anger, please remember that it is not our anger which makes me caution you to lock your doors at night and not wander the streets of Hartford alone. It is the hatred which lurks in those streets that urge to destroy us all if we truly work for change rather than merely indulge in academic rhetoric...

This hatred and our anger are very different. Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distoritions between peers, and its object is change. We have been raised to view any difference other than sex as a reason for destruction and for Black women and white women to face each other's angers without denial and immobility or siklence or guilt is in itself a heretical and generative idea. It implies peers meeting upon a commonbasis to examine difference, and to alter those distortions which history has created around our difference. For it is those distortions which separate us. And we must ask ourselves: Who profits from all this?

Anger is an appropriate reaction to racist attitudes, as is fury when the actions arising from those attitudes do not change(my insert: Hurricane Katrina, the Jena 6). To those women here who fear the anger of women of Color more than their own unscrutinized racist attitudes, I ask: Is the anger of women of Color more threatening than the women-hatred that tinges all aspects of our lives?(My insert: the same can be said for racism and anger against racism-or anything else for that matter).

I cannot hide my anger to spare your guilt,nor hurt feelings, nor answering anger; for to do so insults and trivializes all our efforts. Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one's own action or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt, but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence....

For women raised in fear, too often anger threatens annihilation. In the male construct of brute force, we were taught that our lives depended upon the goodwill of patriarchal power.The anger of others was to be avoided at all costs because there was nothing to be learned from it but pain, a judgement that we had been bad girls,come up lacking, not done what we were supposed to do. And if we accept our powerlessness, then of course any anger can destroy us.