Tolerance will never be enough — true change requires embracing difference

**Citation Note: The citation for this text is at the bottom of the blog post

Audre Lorde (1934–1992) is perhaps best described in her own words: “Black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, mother, warrior, poet.” Her writings are politically and emotionally charged, animated by injustice and a radical call to action. Lorde urged readers to confront and dismantle oppressive systems, particularly those rooted in race, gender, and sexuality.

Her iconic statement, the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house, was not initially a written text, but rather a speech delivered on a panel titled “The Personal and the Political” at the Second Sex Conference, held on October 29, 1979. Named after Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal work The Second Sex (1949), the conference was a landmark feminist event. Lorde’s remarks resonated far beyond the panel, and her speech has become a foundational text in feminist and critical theory classrooms across the country.

She begins her speech by stating:

I agreed to take part in a New York University Institute for the Humanities conference a year ago, with the understanding that I would be commenting upon papers dealing with the role of difference within the lives of american women; difference of race, sexuality, class, and age.

For the absence of these considerations weakens any feminist discussion of the personal and the political.

Lorde opens her remarks by clearly stating her purpose at the conference: the necessity to include race, sexuality, and other identity categories into discussions surrounding the life of women. She emphasizes the importance of acknowledging the intersections of these identities, arguing that without including them in the conversation, any discussion of “the personal and the political” would be incomplete. For context, the concepts of “the personal” and “the political” are central to feminist theory, highlighting the connection between individual, embodied experiences and the larger political structures that govern them. With this framing in place, Lorde states:

It is a particular academic arrogance to assume any discussion of feminist theory in this time and in this place without examining our many differences, and without a significant input from poor women, black and third-world women, and lesbians.

Feminist theory must incorporate the differences of women rather than homogenize their struggles universally through the lens of woman. If academics fail to account for the experiences of women — including poor, Black, women from the Global South, and so on — then this perspective is arrogant and upholds the hegemonic notion of what a woman is (white, affluent, etc.). She says:

And yet, I stand here as a black lesbian feminist, having been invited to comment within the only panel at this conference where the input of black feminists and lesbians is represented. What this says about the vision of this conference is sad, in a country where racism, sexism and homophobia are inseparable.

The form of the conference is just as important as the content it produces. Lorde highlights that throughout the entire event, only a single panel includes the input of Black feminists and lesbians — despite the fact that these women are deeply embedded in the struggle for gender equality while also confronting unique forms of oppression that white, heterosexual women do not face. For this reason, Lorde critiques the structure of the conference itself, which reproduces the very exclusions it claims to dismantle.

Not only does this conference exclude discussions pertaining to Black feminism, lesbianism, and so on, but it fails to consider how racism, sexism, and homophobia are intrinsically related to sexism. She explains:

To read this program is to assume that lesbian and black women have nothing to say of existentialism, the erotic, women’s culture and silence, developing feminist theory, or heterosexuality and power.

Lorde’s criticism is pointed, isolating how the conference implicitly assumes that Black and lesbian women are divorced from theories of existentialism, eroticism, and so on. However, this is a practical error on behalf of the conference; as we see with Lorde’s work, these concepts and identities intersect and influence one another.

She continues by asking two important questions:

And what does it mean in personal and political terms when even the two black women who did present here were literally found at the last hour? What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy?

Lorde questions how the concepts of “the personal” and “the political” are reflected in the structure of the conference itself. Why, she asks, were the only two Black women on the program invited just an hour before they were set to speak? Where is the due diligence? While some may dismiss this as coincidence, Lorde identifies it as symptomatic of a deeper epistemological failure within feminist movements. How can patriarchy be meaningfully interrogated without addressing its entanglement with racism? The problems with the conference are not confined to its schedule or logistics — they spill outward, revealing a broader patterns of exclusion that compromise the integrity of the feminist project:

It means that only the most narrow perimeters of change are possible and allowable.

The absence of any consideration of lesbian consciousness or the consciousness of third world women leaves a serious gap within this conference and within the papers presented here.

It is obvious that Lorde is committed to material, structural change. She critiques the limited scope of transformation that the conference makes possible. Her argument is not that the conference fails to benefit women altogether, but that the kind of benefit it offers is narrow — and may even come at the expense of those it excludes, particularly lesbians and women from the Global South. She offers an example of this issue in a paper presented at the conference:

For example, in a paper on material relationships between women, I was conscious of an either/or model of nurturing which totally dismissed my knowledge as a black lesbian.

In this paper there was no examination of mutuality between women, no systems of shared support, no interdependence as exists between lesbians and women-identified women.

Lorde explains how a paper at the conference dealt with the “material relationships between women” in the context of nurturing. Without going into detail on this concept, Lorde identifies that this paper disregarded the experiences of Black lesbian women and their unique conceptualization of nurturing. The paper, unfortunately, homogenized the experiences of women and treated the white heterosexual woman as the standard. She continues:

Yet it is only in the patriarchal model of nurturance that women “who attempt to emancipate themselves pay perhaps too high a price for the results,” as this paper states.

For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power is rediscovered.

According to Lorde, the paper presented forwards a “patriarchal model of nurturance” that is highly reductive. For Black lesbians, nurturing is not viewed as a weakness but a source of power and mutuality.

Lorde continues:

It is this real connection, which is so feared by a patriarchal world. For it is only under a patriarchal structure that maternity is the only social power open to women.

Interdependency between women is the only way to the freedom which allows the “I” to “be”, not in order to be used, but in order to be creative. This is a difference between the passive “be” and the active “being.”

Patriarchy confines women to motherhood as the only socially sanctioned form of power — the “only social power” available to them. Yet Lorde insists that mutual, interdependent relationships between women must be recognized as an empowering praxis. Under patriarchy, women are permitted only to “be” in a passive sense — defined, acted upon, and instrumentalized. But when women are affirmed as active subject, they can live freely on their own terms. This discussion of “being” is uniquely existentialist and relevant given the themes of this conference. Lorde explains:

Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives.

For difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.

Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening.

The idea that tolerance is sufficient to bridge the gap being discussed is deeply flawed — it is what Lorde calls the “grossest reformism.” The issue is not about simply coexisting or putting up with difference, but about actively embracing the generative power that difference offers. For Lorde, the difference is not a barrier but a source of creative possibility — more akin to a dialectical process, through which new insights and deeper truths emerge in the encounter between distinct perspectives. This framework points toward a model of interdependence, where individuals engage in mutual care for one another, rather than settling for the shallow gesture of tolerance. Lorde expands upon this:

Only within that interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways to actively “be” in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters.

Within the interdependence of mutual (non-dominant) differences lies that security which enables us to descend into the chaos of knowledge and return with true visions of our future, along with the concomitant power to effect those changes which can bring that future into being.

The model of interdependence Lorde advocates is fundamentally concerned with forging new ways of existing and relating in the world. When women’s struggles are no longer homogenized, and when the boundaries between us — sustained by the shallow notion of tolerance — are dismantled, new modes of being become possible. This allows for new forms of knowledge production that refuse to reduce ‘the woman’s experience’ to a single, normative identity. Instead, the collective can “descend into the chaos of knowledge,” embracing difference in order to think about how to improve the future. This is what prompts Lorde to say:

Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged.

Unfortunately, social conditioning has limited the ability to think through difference:

As women, we have been taught to either ignore our differences or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change.

Without community, there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression.

But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.

Women are taught — whether it in the home, school, church, or elsewhere— that differences should be ignored, minimized, or even feared. This socialization fosters isolation, undermining the possibility of community. When difference is treated as a threat, those most vulnerable are prevented from forming the coalitions necessary to resist injustice. Lorde rejects the notion that community or interdependence requires sameness, or that it can be built on a shallow foundation of tolerance.

Lorde continues:

Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference; those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are black, who are older, know that survival is not an academic skill.

It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those other identified as outside the structures, in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish.

Many individuals in society do not fit the normative mold of what is deemed an “acceptable woman.” Lorde specifically references women who are not white, heterosexual, affluent, or young — those excluded from the dominant feminist narrative that the conference largely caters to. For many white, heterosexual woman, survival can be treated as an academic concept, something to theorize. But for those “forged in the crucibles of difference,” survival is not a theoretical exercise — it is a lived, daily necessity. Lorde critiques how this academic framing of survival leads to a kind of liberal individualism, disconnected from the collective struggle. Instead, she calls for a deeper engagement with those who exist outside normative definitions of acceptability — those whose experiences are ignored in feminist discourse.

Lorde strikingly states:

It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths.

For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.

They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.

And this fact is only threatening to those Women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.

One of the most brilliant and enduring lines in Lorde’s speech is: “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” With this, Lorde critiques the academy for attempting to separate theory from lived experience — for disembodying the very struggles it seeks to analyze. Academic papers that flatten difference, universalize “woman,” and seek recognition through polished interpretation rather than material change are, in her view, simply the master’s tools. They reinforce the very structures they claim to critique, offering piecemeal reform instead of genuine transformation. She states:

Poor and third world women know there is a difference between the daily manifestations and dehumanizations of marital slavery and prostitution, because it is our daughters who line 42nd Street.

The Black panelists’ observation about the effects of relative powerlessness and the differences of relationship between black women and men from white women and men illustrate some of our unique problems as black feminists.

When the academy divorces itself from the lived experiences of impoverished women and women in the Global South, it fails to account for the material conditions that shape their realities — conditions in which many women’s daughters engage in (coerced) prostitution. These are not abstract issues — even though they are profoundly different from some of the issues that white feminists might face. The disconnect between white feminists and Black, lesbian women reveals a power imbalance in the academic sphere: the tools in these spaces often exclude those most impact impacted by injustice.

Lorde continues by asking two important questions:

If white american feminist theory need not deal with the differences between us, and the resulting difference in aspects of our oppressions, then what do you do with the fact that the women who clean your houses and tend your children while you attend conferences on feminist theory are, for the most part, poor and third world women?

What is the theory behind racist feminism?

Lorde’s questions are largely rhetorical, aimed squarely at the audience of the conference. While the white feminist theorists at the conference engage with theorizations pertaining to white, middle-class womanhood — rarely acknowledging the struggles of women of color and women of the Global South — their own children are being cared for by nannies, many of whom are women of color. Lorde delivers a striking provocation: Where is the feminist theory that accounts for this racist feminism?

Lorde continues:

In a world of possibility for us all, our personal visions help lay the groundwork for political action.

The failure of the academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson.

Divide and conquer, in our world must become define and empower.

At no point does Lorde suggest that individual lived experience is unimportant — in fact, she argues the exact opposite. Every person’s experience matters, which is why any serious theorization of gender must include those whose lives fall outside normative categories. When feminist discourse erases or marginalizes women who are not white, heterosexual, affluent, or Western, it reproduces the very structures it claims to resists. Lorde critiques academic feminists who fail to center difference in their work, identifying this refusal as a replication of patriarchal logic.

Following this, Lorde asks a series of questions:

Why weren’t other black women and third world women found to participate in this conference?

Why were two phone calls to me considered a consultation?

Am I the only possible source of names of black feminists?

And although the black panelist’s paper ends on a important and powerful connection of love between women, what about interracial co-operation between feminists who don’t love each other?

Once again, Lorde’s questions are largely rhetorical, meant to expose the structural failures of the conference itself. She highlights the absence of Black women and women of the Global South, drawing attention to how little effort has been made to include them. Lorde pointedly asks why no one else seems to know other Black feminists — and why she alone is expected to serve as the bridge to that knowledge. She writes about the typical response to these questions:

In academic feminist circles, the answer to these questions is often “We did not know who to ask.”

But that is the same evasion of responsibility, the same cop-out, that keeps black women’s art out of women’s exhibitions, black women’s work out of most feminist publications except for the occasional “Special Third World Women’s Issue,” and black women’s texts off of your reading lists.

When academic feminists respond with something along the lines of “we just do not know any other Black feminists,” Lorde finds this to be an “evasion of responsibility.” She finds this to be the cause of why Black women’s work is left out of various exhibitions and publications — other than the token specials pertaining to this specific category. She states:

But as Adrienne Rich pointed out in a recent talk, white feminists have educated themselves about such an enormous amount over the past ten years, how come you haven’t also educated yourselves about black women and the differences between us — white and black — when it is key to our survival as a movement?

Lorde references a prominent white feminist scholar Adrienne Rich, whose influence and prolific body of work are undeniable. By invoking Rich, Lorde acknowledges that white feminists are highly educated and have made significant theoretical contributions. However, she uses this very acknowledgement to highlight a striking contradiction: despite their intellectual achievements, white feminists have remained largely undereducated when it comes to the experiences of Black women. This critical failure is a matter of life and death which prompts Lorde to emphasize that white feminists have not done enough.

Furthermore:

Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance, and to educate men as to our existence and our needs.

This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns.

Lorde criticizes the tendency within feminism to prioritize educating the oppressor as a strategy for empowerment. She warns that this approach often backfires — serving not to liberate the oppressed, but to keep them focused on and dependent upon the oppressor’s recognition and approval. For Lorde, liberation does not come from seeking validation from the oppressor: it must stem from new tools created among one another. She explains:

Now we hear that it is the task of black and third world women to educate white women, in the face of tremendous resistance, as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival.

This is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought.

The inverse is also erroneously argued; there is the common notion of Black women and women in the Global South bearing the burden of educating white women. However, the same criticism above applies: there should not be a dependence upon the white woman for liberation. To me, this carries a level of irony considering that Lorde is speaking to white women at this conference, but I believe she is warning against white woman solely relying on this kind of speech from a Black woman to learn.

Lorde continues by quoting de Beauvoir:

Simone De Beauvoir once said:

“It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for acting.”

Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and this time.

Given that the conference was centered around The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, it is fitting that Lorde engages with de Beauvoir’s work in a critical way. Like de Beauvoir, Lorde urges us to confront the material conditions of women’s lives — but she insists that this must extend beyond the individual to encompass the full range of lived experiences across race, sexuality, class, age, and so on. We must consider the collective struggle because racism, homophobia, sexism, are all intrinsically related and real structures that shape reality.

Lorde concludes her speech in a profound manner:

I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there.

See whose face it wears.

Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.

This conclusion allows us to fully conceptualize the personal and the political.

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• Moraga, Cherrie, and Anzaldua, Gloria. This Bridge Called My Back. Writings by Radical Women of Color. Women of Color Press. New York. 1983.