The Brooklyn Rail

If you are reading these words, then you probably already know all this and more. You know that, in the 2024 US presidential election, 53 percent of white women voted for Donald Trump, a rapist who stacked the Supreme Court to deny women’s reproductive choice, who countered the #MeToo movement with claims that men were the real victims, who ordered incarcerated trans women into men’s prisons, and who stated during his campaign: “I’m going to do it, whether the women like it or not. I’m going to protect them.” Trump’s re-election is on white women, who voted for him because of all the ways women’s solidarity has been eclipsed by white supremacy. I’m writing now to try to understand how we can do better.

I want to think about the lessons Audre Lorde left us, specifically the powerful collection of essays in Sister Outsider (1984). Lorde all but predicted that we would end up here if women couldn’t build solidarity with one another. Our division has provided the perfect opportunity for the patriarchy to steadily seep into our consciousness and daily interactions, undermining our autonomy, our safety, and the strength of our alliances. These fissures go even deeper when white feminists center their own experience as that of all women; expect Black women to do the labor of educating them about their own racism; and feign surprise at or outright deny their own biases. White women’s refusal to recognize Black history, tradition, and accomplishment, much less do anything substantial to address ongoing systemic violence against women of color, is still very much the problem. We couldn’t vote in a Black woman for president even though our lives depended on it.

Lorde’s 1977 essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” describes poetry as the light that gives shape to our experiences so we might name them, and then, through language, move from feeling into thought into action. She says so much in this short, dense essay to inspire and affirm women’s power, to illuminate a way forward by drawing on our deepest inner resources. I’m reminded of the work of artists I love, like Pamela Sneed, whose every poem and painting resounds with the force of deep feeling that Lorde recognizes as a catalyst for radical change. Sneed’s work commemorates ancestors, celebrates visionaries and activists, grieves for those we lost to AIDS, and mourns the many Black people taken by police violence and white supremacy so we might take up their fight. When Lorde writes of the hidden place where our true spirit resides, I think of Keisha Scarville’s speculative collages reinterpreting her father’s first passport photo, which make up her series “Passports” (2012–ongoing). Scarville transforms a bureaucratic document into a portal opening onto spiritual realms and temporal zones. The permission Lorde gives us to honor our feelings reminds me of my own work too, and the difficulty I encountered as a student because I cared more about telling women’s stories than about canonized traditions of photography. The revelatory part of her essay is the premise that feelings birth ideas. For me, feelings and ideas have always been diametrically opposed, fighting against each other. My feelings are raw, bloody things scratching against the hard door of my rational brain, which is forever trying to discipline them.

For the last year I’ve been obsessively cutting images of women from multiple copies of the same book of female nude photographs. I’ve memorized their bodies, their hand gestures, the arch of their backs, the kick of their legs, the styles of hair on both head and pubis. I’ve imagined myself emancipating these women, lesbianating them, claiming them for my own pleasure and political cause through the act of collage. The collages are an orgy of body parts. The women are often birthing each other, melding into many-limbed Frankensteinian monsters, or, as my father called my sister when we were teenagers, “a vagina with legs.” But what of their complicity, their willingness to be Stepford wives, soldiers of the patriarchy, to not rock the boat in exchange for proximity to power? Every one of the eighty-four plates in this book depicts a white woman. No matter how much my collages transform them, I’m still left with the horror of their whiteness, of my own, of the 53 percent’s.

I unconsciously defended my own racist biases during my seven-year relationship with my former partner, a woman who was born in Vietnam during America’s war. This was before I fully absorbed that my reactions were the problem itself. I didn’t want to think of racism as something that lived inside me; I was sure that the heat of my rage against it and my desire to protect my partner from it was proof that it wasn’t coming from me. But in fact, the insidious ways it showed itself were the most profound betrayal, as they brought the enemy closest to her—in her bedroom, against her skin. Lorde’s partner of twenty-one years was a white academic named Frances Clayton; the father of her children was white as well. I believe these relationships matter, not to suggest that love solves racism, but because the commitment to bridge the divide is a good start. My ex gave me something deeply healing by allowing me to try again and again to undo the entrenched hold of white privilege. We eventually arrived at a place where I could accept our differences and take pleasure in our common cause.

Women are pulled in so many ways except toward each other. We have been sold a model of scarcity—the idea that I can only eat if someone starves, that helping others means taking something away from me, my freedom is dependent on the unfreedom of others, and I must climb over the dead bodies of anybody who is in my way so I can serve myself. But Audre Lorde teaches us that if we could only listen to each other’s poetry, we might feel each other’s fear, rage, and hope and realize the beauty of our interdependence and interconnection.