Because in doing anti-racist (etc) work, differences between participants must be acknowledged, respected, honored and negotiated with. And eventually, as an act of solidarity, all those who are different from each other, but committed to each other through their differences, will either burn the damn house down and give the land back to the original inhabitants, or find some new place to build a communal living space together. All those who used to live in the Master’s house will know without fucking asking that inviting slaves to live in the house is not an option, not when there’s only one master bedroom and one master bed.
The market knows that when we need each other instead of it, it’s life will come to an end. It knows this, and thus has a vested interest in preventing that Great Reconciliation from even being imagined.
And:
A person who is not a part of Lorde’s movement, but possibly may *think* she is, is the person who would say there’s no such thing as a master’s house, that the master’s house is big enough to hold everybody, that we shouldn’t be targeting the master’s house because the master will get mad at us and then we’ll never get into the house ourselves, that the master actually really loves us all and will stop whupping our asses if ever we’d learn to get along, that things aren’t really that bad outside the master’s house, that the master only cares about keeping women out of his house and only women’s labor was used to build the damn thing to begin with, that the *real* problem is all the jealous slaves who stand outside the master’s windows staring in, not leaving the poor master alone, that if we could just be *happy* for the master when he has a good crop, things would be so much better for all us. (and no, I am not in any way insinuating, suggesting, or otherwise implying that jessica or amanda et al are ‘the master,’ so chill out).
This person doesn’t recognize that the point has never been the master’s house, except in the most general sense. The point is the slaves. The point is justice for the slaves.
Read it all, absorb it, breathe it in like good clean air.
