On Audre Lorde's "The Master's Tools..."
The audience of this blog is largely academics, technologists and data scientists working in the tech industry. Generally a smart group of people, but in my experience one that can sometimes be shockingly ignorant on issues of race and difference. My advice to aspiring data scientists and statisticians is always to be comfortable with feeling stupid as this is when you most open yourself up to learning. This is even more true when it comes to learning about people rather than just probability. In this post I want to share with you a piece of writing that was incredibly impactful for me when I was a young English major and still very much ignorant about the politics of difference and power. Just like I am always learning about probability, I always try to continue learning learn about power, society, and the structures that shape our lives and the lives of those in our community.
The paper is Audre Lorde's The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House. If you want to skip the rest of this post and just read that paper (it’s only 3 pages long) I will be more than happy, but I would like to provide some notes that can help readers, especially those from a technical background, get the most from this phenomenal text.
“The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”
The context paper is this: In 1984 Audre Lorde, establish poet and Black lesbian feminist, is asked to speak as part of a panel at the New York University Institute for the Humanities conference. The focus of the conference is feminism, but Lorde observes that even in this context she belongs to a marginalized group. Lorde's audience is here is a largely white, politically liberal audience of feminist academics, but what Lorde sees here is that the force of racist, patriarchal power structures are still the ones controlling the narrative.
I know many of the readers of this blog, myself included, fall into a similar audience as the one that Lorde is speaking to. We care about Black Lives Matter, the murder of George Floyd, and broader social inequality. The trouble is that many of us are deeply wrapped up in the power structures that cause this very oppression, even if we're not entirely aware of it. Lorde asks this question of us:
“What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy?”
The major point of Lorde's essay is that we cannot solve problems of oppression working with the tools of a system of oppression. Academics cannot rely on the tools of academia to combat racism, technologists cannot hope to fight racism by relying on the tech industry or startups for the solution. Instead we must understand and embrace the true power of difference.
Questioning your own sources of authority
As a current example relevant to the typical content of this blog let's look at something like renaming the The R.A. Fisher Lectureship. The argument seems perfectly clear: Fisher may be the grandfather of statistics but he was also a radical proponent of eugenics and that "by honoring Fisher we dishonor the entire field of Statistics". This is surely a good faith gesture to combat oppressive symbols within the system of higher education. However this remains, nonetheless, a gesture. The trouble is this gesture distracts from the larger questions and insights about the nature of academia itself as a seat of power, authority and ultimately oppression. Which is very clearly articulated in this tweet by @ULTRAGLOSS:
Discussing changing the name of a single lectureship distracts from asking really challenging questions about the nature of power in academia, and most importantly where that power comes from. The challenge of questioning the authority of academia (or of Silicon Valley) is that it quickly brings into question our own authority. What makes a degree confer authority to the person who possess one? It's that ultimately the dominant social power structures affirm that the grantee is capable of communicating, representing knowledge and thinking in a way that they approve of. The trouble with the power of academia is that even when it may allow for forms of diversity of race, gender and sexuality, it reduces diversity in expression and points of view.
I don't mean to overly focus on academia. By and large people that do statistics for a living a working in the tech industry, which has it's own connections to traditional power structures, structures which perpetuate the oppression of difference. The key point here is to ask yourself where your own sources of power and authority come from, and the relentlessly question the authority of those sources.
The Politics of Difference
When I was growing up in an affluent white suburb the view of equality that I was taught in school was this: "Everyone is equal and everyone should be allowed to achieve the same success as you" The canonical example of this of course being the black doctor.
But what this message of equality is saying is really "I want everyone to be equal, as long as we agree with the idea that my definition of success is the correct one. You are free to be who you are, regardless of the color of your skin, as long as who you are is like me". This same thinking is replicated in academia and in the tech industry. Academia wants to be open to all as long as all agree on what is an authority, and how we communicate authority. The tech community is open to all as long as you are a good worker, agree that success is increased annual revenue and that the capitalist power structure is fundamental to your identity. Clearly anyone who has worked in these two institutions knows that 'open to all' is of course, only true in some formal document, but not in practice. This is largely because in this frame work of equality difference is still a problem that can only be dealt with when these institutions limit that difference under a unified set of values.
Sharing values is not the problem, the question is where do these values come from? These are values that are typically established by the a ruling class, values usually consist with a single race, gender and sexuality. In academia the values are those passed on from generations of patriarchal power that determine what is “true” and what is “beautiful”. For the tech industry these values are simply the values of the market. Diversity in these institutions is diversity in name only, the underlying pressure is always reproduction of the existing dominant sources of power.
This is what Lorde is really challenging in her paper, the idea that we can have "equality" or "tolerance" without a genuine and deep appreciation of difference:
“Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. ”
The reformism of my suburban youth was clearly "all black people have the potential to be just like white people". This is a common view of diversity I see in tech and academia: if you agree to our terms, then you are fine... but if you don't, well then you are choosing to be left out. Anyone is welcome at our startup so long as you think and act like us. Anyone can get a PhD as long as you agree that our way to knowledge is the true and only way to knowledge.
In this way gestures that are acts of tolerance do nothing to influence the underlying power structures of these institutions that are at their heart oppressive and destructive of difference. The gestures can even serve to perpetuate these existing oppressive power structures by deluding us in to thinking something has been done, ultimately defending the very source of oppression they seek to subvert.
Why difference?
Lorde's call to accept difference is not one of mere ideology. If you believe we should accept difference simply because it is "the right thing to do" you're enmeshed in a world of dogma. This is why so many white American's struggle with the idea of racism. Ideologically they know, and earnestly believe, that racism is “bad”. This ideology is a staple of American primary education. But these people don't want to question the way their own way of life may be destructive of difference and oppressive to others. Their ideology works in a self preserving way, encouraging them not to the question it, because if they do they might find themselves “bad” people against their own wishes.
If you want to really understand the power structures that our world operates under the very best place to question first is all those things you assume are "right" and "wrong". If you base your fight for equality on the premise of "it's just right!" you have no more ground to stand on that someone who claims "it's just wrong!". So long as you never question the ideologies that drive your life, especially if you work in tech or are an academic, you are always going to be operating in ideologies of a "racist patriarchy". The end result of this is that you end up betraying the very struggle you thought you were fighting with. This is why Lorde, at an academic feminist conference, sees and feels everywhere the power of a male dominated society. As long as you fight for equality based on an unquestioned belief about equality you were told in middle school there will always be a friction in your struggle, a feeling of threat caused by this "interdependency" between different groups.
Lorde continues:
“Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.”
What we are struggling for here is not mere tolerance but an interdependence among different ways of living. The reason we do this is because this is essential to being the creative, complete people we strive to be and we will always be limited when we seek to reduce or eliminate difference.
“Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged.”
When we deny and oppress difference it is not simply "wrong" it is damaging to the person we can truly be, it limits our own individual potential.
The personal as the political
As an object lesson take this very post itself. It's different than all the other posts on this blog (which is typically about probability theory). The rest of this blog's content appeals to a very reliable audience and if I remain faithful to that content I won't lose any subscribers, I won't offend or challenge any readers, and maybe I'll even find a way to monetize it one day. But if I keep this blog exclusively and at all times a probability blog, then I lose the ability to talk about Audre Lorde, who has had a tremendous impact on who I am. If I am afraid of even the difference that this post represents, than I limit who I can be. I'm not writing this post for Audre Lorde, I'm not writing it for George Floyd, or for the protesters. I'm writing this post for me, because if I don't I will feel that I'm limiting part of who I am, and I would be doing so out of fear of difference. By this same logic it is essential to fight for George Floyd, to stand for Black Lives Matter, this is the interdependence that Lorde talks about, when “the necessity for inderdependency becomes unthreatening”. This is why political action in all its forms is not an option but a necessity. So long as difference is denied and oppressed, so too is your own existence limited and oppressed.
So for all of the readers of this blog I urge you to look for difference, look for it in yourself, in your work, find ways to expand and not limit who you are. Find those parts of you that resist difference in everything and challenge them, let your "personal visions help lay the groundwork for political action".
I can think of no better way to conclude this post than with Audre Lorde's closing words:
“Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. 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”