There's always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself - whether it's Black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc. - because that's the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the pressure to conform to a single aspect of one's identity while disregarding the complexity of the whole person.
Audre Lorde's quote emphasizes how society often prompts individuals to define themselves by a singular identity trait, such as race, gender, or role, while ignoring the multifaceted nature of a person. This pressure can lead to feelings of being diminished and misunderstood, as it reduces the richness of oneβs experiences and attributes to a mere label that others can consume or utilize for their own understanding.
In practice
In a speech about diversity and inclusion, you could use this quote to highlight the importance of recognizing the whole person.
The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.
There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.
There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.
I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.
I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.
The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.
I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background........Beside the waters of the Hudson" I feel my race. Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again." How It Feels to Be Colored Me
Part of me always felt like the other, the outsider, the observer. My father had two sons with his second wife, who I didn't meet until my late 20s. I was always on the periphery. In Madrid, I was the only Turk in a very international school, so I had to start thinking about identity. All these things affected me.
It was very hard for me, for most of my life, to feel American, or call myself American, and that is a very complicated topic that would require a very long conversation.
I don't really know what feeling Japanese or Haitian or American is supposed to feel like. I just feel like me.
I never learned how to be adequately black. I never learned how to be black at all.
Even though I'm a hairdresser and I love doing hair, I feel like I don't look like a groomer. When I think of how a groomer would look in relation to the first version of 'Queer Eye,' I feel like I don't fit in that box.
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