While we do not assume full coverage of all creativity notions out there, we consider the ones we highlight to be integral to any discussion of “what qualifies as creative work?”
in critique, one might think of Audre Lorde's for the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house; in considering how designers define creativity, whose voices are amplified and laid as foundational groundwork is imperative to the conversation.
A key point I make is that that the boundary between knowledge and ignorance is not impermeable. It is open to political appropriation by less powerful groups. In other words, calling attention to the problem of strategic ignorance by elite actors – and demanding more accountability from those actors – can lead to a new "war of position", in a Gramscian sense. In my book, I term this argument the Lorde principle, after Audre Lorde, in homage to earlier academic and activist work that my argument builds upon. I suggest that the Lorde principle encompasses the way that unknowing can be a revolutionary force for good.
The Lorde principle is a leverage point for activists representing and from the persecuted masses that can hold people in positions of power who abuse strategic ignorance for personal gain and collective harm.
When we speak, we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak …”
This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else's oppression. In the case of Black women this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves. We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough.We believe that sexual politics under patriarchy is as pervasive in Black women's lives as are the politics of class and race. We also often find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously. We know that there is such a thing as racial-sexual oppression which is neither solely racial nor solely sexual, e.g., the history of rape of Black women by white men as a weapon of political repression.
pls read. u hate neo/liberal representation politics. not identity politics.
There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle, because we do not live single-issue lives” (138). Indigenous identities, much like other identities, simply cannot be separated out in this simplistic way
Indigenous identities are complex and only focusing on one issue alienates people and it fails to address a lot of the struggles that indigenous people may face.
Garrison, although a paternal mentor to Douglass, brooked no deviation from his own doctrines, and he and other while abolitionists apparently wanted little the· orizing from Dougla<;s. His role was to be the eloquent example, literally and figura-tively displaying the scars of the lash to prepare audiences for white speakers who would lay out the abolition philosophy.
Okay again back to Lorde... Her concern was that feminist theorists had coalesced around a consensus that left out the very voices of those whose difference was essential to the project of overturning the patriarchy. Lorde asked, “What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy?” I guess I see a similar flaw in the white abolitionists' dismissal of Douglass, in that oppression cannot be disrupted using the logic that justifies oppression, i.e. the use of Douglass as a black man as "tool" in himself and the exclusion of his very relevant experience from their dialogue; are these not other forms of bondage? Also thinking about how "tool" can be interpreted here, i.e. tool as logic, rhetoric, government, Christianity, whiteness, Douglass himself, etc.
slavery's opponents should have as little to do with this evil government as pos-sible, instead attempting to abolish slavery by persuading iL<; advocates that it was morally wrong.
For some reason I keep thinking of the famous Audre Lorde line, "For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house," even though I think it's application here is fairly flawed. Garrison wanted abolitionists to work outside the politics and economics of government that helped to support slavery as a way of defeating that very system (see: Lorde), but I'm lost as to how "persuading" advocates of slavery of its immorality (especially by using Christian moral tropes as his main source of appeal) is not participating within that system? I guess I'm surprised that Garrison considered persuasion as being rhetorically separate from the political, and I'm curious about what he might consider the distinction of non-political persuasion to be?
In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.
This sentence seems as quotable to me as the one about the "master's tools", and more self-explanatory.
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 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
I've been familiar with the phrase "for the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house" for a while, but had never read it in the original context.
It seems to me that Lorde is talking about any number of structures that enforce or maintain oppressive orders. The most immediate such structure to this context appears to be a discourse that presumes difference must be "other" one against another and thereby systematically overlooks difference to generalize about women — fear of being oppressive counter-intuitively leading to oppression.