How do we use our energy to confront overwhelming dehumanization and force? I am excited to announce a series of community-based courses that I will offer beginning in September which will address this question and other topics to help sustain healing and social justice work.
This idea that we learn to suffer skillfully might be heard as a way of accepting it. Like ‘that’s okay, it’s justifiable. It’s something that is part and parcel of what it means to be Black in this country and we’ll just go along with it.’ That’s not what James Baldwin and Audre Lorde were talking about.
Advice for rising scholars, writers, healers and artists: if you can hold a strong sense of purpose in front of you, you can “make a way out of no way.”
Evoking the lava at the center of Mother Earth is such a significant metaphor, one that Audre Lorde too brought forth in her essay “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger.”
Lorde wrote: “My Black woman’s anger is a molten pond at the core of me, my most fiercely guarded secret. I know how much of my life as a powerful feeling woman is laced through with this net of rage … How to train that anger with accuracy rather than deny it has been one of the major tasks of my life.”
For Audre Lorde, daring to dream in the face of despair is a matter of survival, and a way to create a better future.
At the time of writing, there is great peril in our country; there is also great promise.
The level of state violence against immigrants and the protestors supporting them provokes an undeniably just rage.
As Audre Lorde taught us, it is healthy to give this rage oxygen.
It is communicating something important: an urgency, a need to stand against injustice, a need to insist upon safety and protection for all.