The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House

by Audre Lorde

From the self-described 'black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet', these soaring, urgent essays on the power of women, poetry and anger are filled with darkness and light.

Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

Genres: Nonfiction, Feminism, Essays, Politics, Race, Classics, Poetry

64 pages, ebook

First published February 22, 2018

About the author

Audre Lorde was a revolutionary Black feminist. Lorde's poetry was published very regularly during the 1960s — in Langston Hughes' 1962 New Negro Poets, USA; in several foreign anthologies; and in black literary magazines. During this time, she was politically active in civil rights, anti-war, and feminist movements. Her first volume of poetry, The First Cities (1968), was published by the Poet's Press and edited by Diane di Prima, a former classmate and friend from Hunter College High School. Dudley Randall, a poet and critic, asserted in his review of the book that Lorde "does not wave a black flag, but her blackness is there, implicit, in the bone."

Her second volume, Cables to Rage (1970), which was mainly written during her tenure at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, addressed themes of love, betrayal, childbirth and the complexities of raising children. It is particularly noteworthy for the poem "Martha", in which Lorde poetically confirms her homosexuality: "[W]e shall love each other here if ever at all." Later books continued her political aims in lesbian and gay rights, and feminism. In 1980, together with Barbara Smith and Cherríe Moraga, she co-founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, the first U.S. publisher for women of colour. Lorde was State Poet of New York from 1991 to 1992.

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Reviews

[Olivia-Savannah]

You can tell from the title this is going to be a good one. It’s made up of different essays though, so let me talk about them individually.

Poetry is Not A Luxury – I’d read this one before. I would clarify that it isn’t the beginning and end all of all poetry, but it does describe one of the ways in which I perceive poetry. I could totally relate and agree with her! It really moved me to read about why poetry isn’t a luxury for some people, and what it could mean to them.

Use of Erotic – A well written embrace of female beauty and self. I’ve never read such a clear cut distinction between the definitions of erotic and pornographic before.

The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House – This one was about why we need difference feminism and not equality feminism. It also discussed how there can’t be racism and homophobia in feminism as it then doesn’t include all women. It really begged the question of why some people believe in fighting certain types of oppression and then oppress others. I loved when she talked about how the tools used to given to us by those oppressing help us overcome the issue. It is only serving their superiority complex. We must use our own tools to overcome oppression. And I agreed so much.

Uses of Anger – Can I get an amen to this whole essay? It was about women responding to racism, and how racism is not an issue black people need to solve. It’s not their problem. It’s a problem to those who enact and enable it to happen. It really was about how anger can be channelled and used for good as well, which made me think of Children of Blood and Bone.

This review was originally posted on Olivia's Catastrophe: https://oliviascatastrophe.com/2019/0...

[Emma Angeline]

“Revolution is not a one-time event”

[Ria]

''Revolution is not a one-time event. It is becoming always vigilant for the smallest opportunity to make a genuine change in established, outgrown responses...''

It's a short collection of 5 excellent essays.

[leah]

though only a tiny essay collection, this one packs a fierce and impactful punch, largely focusing on feminism, racism, and sexuality. lorde places an emphasis on intersectionalism, particularly through sharing insights from her life as a woman of colour, a lesbian, and a mother - and how all of these have an impact on her feminism. one of the biggest takeaways is lorde’s argument that progress cannot happen unless we recognise, understand, and support each other’s differences in experience, along with the reminder that “revolution is not a one-time event”.

other standout quotes:

“i am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own. and i am not free as long as one person or colour remains chained. nor is any one of you.”

“within each of us there is some piece of humanness that knows we are not being served by the machine which orchestrates crisis after crisis and is grinding all our futures into dust.”

everyone should read this.

[Tara]

i need to read everything audre lorde has ever written, this was brilliant

[Sarah]

I can’t recommend Audre Lorde strongly enough😌
So glad she has been included in this collection because she should be much more well-known than she is

[Aimun]

I mean. What is there to say. Should be compulsary reading for everyone. Yeah.

(I will not rate this. Because that feels like a toddler with her first crayons attempting to compliment Van Gogh.)

[Smriti]

"If I participate, knowingly or otherwise, in my sister's oppression and she calls me on it, to answer her anger with my own only blankets the substance of our exchange with reaction. It wastes energy."

"What woman here is so enamoured of her own oppression that she cannot see her heel print upon another woman's face?"

I haven't read enough intersectional texts (anyone who wants to recommend any, do comment), and this short series of essays only brought into focus the social media culture of debating our differences without seeing them through as possibilities of change. What is the point of debating our personal oppressions and priveleges and calling others out when we cannot use these for change? Can't wait to read more of Lorde.

[Samuel]

“I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own. And I am not free as long as one person of colour remains chained. Nor is any one of you”

[Lisa (NY)]

A collection of powerful speeches Lorde made in the late 70s and early 80s on racism, poetry and feminism, lasering in on issues surrounding Black women. Lorde was a brilliant pioneer whose insights inspired a generation of writers and activists - each piece is relevant today.

Penguin Modern Classics
#1 - Letter from Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King, Jr.
#2 - Television Was a Baby Crawling Toward That Deathchamber by Allen Ginsberg
#3 - The Breakthrough by Daphne Du Maurier
#4 - The Custard Heart by Dorothy Parker
#5 - Three Japanese Short Stories (3 authors)
#6 - The Veiled Woman by Anais Nin
#7 - Notes on Nationalism by George Orwell
#8 - Food by Gertrude Stein
#9 - The Three Electroknights by Stanislaw Lem
#10 - The Great Hunger by Patrick Kavanagh
#11 - The Legend of the Sleepers by Danilo Kis
#12 - The Black Ball by Ralph Ellison
#13 - Till September Petronella by Jean Rhys
#14 - Investigations of a Dog by Franz Kafka
#15 - Daydream and Drunkenness of a Young Lady by Clarice Lispector
#16 - An Advertisement for Toothpaste by Ryszard Kapuscinski
#17 - Create Dangerously by Albert Camus
#18 - The Vigilante by John Steinbeck
#19 - I Have More Souls than One by Fernando Pessoa
#20 - The Missing Girl by Shirlely Jackson
#21 - Gazdanov & Others
#22 - The Distance of the Moon by Italo Calvino
#23 - The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House by Audre Lord

[⋆˚°✩*˖ Gohnar23 (•˕ •マ.ᐟ ˚⟡˖ ࣪(inactive)]

#️⃣5️⃣3️⃣6️⃣ Read & Reviewed in 2025 🍩🧁
Date : 🗓️ Thursday, October 2, 2025 🎁💐🍝
Word Count📃: 17k Words 🎉🍬✨

— !! 𖦹「 ✦ 🍪 Happy Birthday🎂 ✦ 」✮ ⋆ ˚｡𖦹 ⋆｡°✩

My 11th read in "IT'S MY BIRTHDAY MONTH!!! :DDDD 👏🍭🍨" October.

5️⃣🌟, stared at the ceiling too long cuz im supposed to sleep right now but i spent it visibly shocked and gagged with the events that just happened part 1.
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This is probably one of the shortest but most impacful essay collections that i've read in my entire life. It talks about feminism and homosexual rights and also solving racism as the author is a lesbian black woman who monster speak about these issues in society. It really opened my eyes because the very first essay which is Poetry is not a Luxury. It really talks about the emphasis of prose to women in literature and how people can be connected with these forms of art and literature in a high degree. The second essay is also a highlight since it talks about Eroticism, (u know me, i will forever hate smut and forever will be) but it does have a point on people's erotic and sexual needs. I mean at least i learned that it's important to other people but when it comes to me its just.....a very u uhhhh nono nooo 😤. Aaaand last highlight is the fourth essay which wow. Anger really do be a great call to action. When people show this intense emotion and people generally have the same side and has the same reaction as that, anger WILL have some societal change that shows how the power of united anger can be.

[Emma Wallace]

I adore Audre Lorde, and this small collection reminds me why. Although this initially took me a little bit longer to get into, since I have not read theory in well over a year, parts of this came back to me; whilst dense at times and loaded with some heavy, theoretical ideas, Lorde's writing drew me in and I found myself nodding along to so much in this. So much of what Lorde writes remains true to this day and her judgement and criticisms are as sharp and insightful now as they were when they were first enunciated. I particularly love her insight into what it is like as a WOC, a lesbian and a mother and the way that she touches upon and begins to articulate the idea of intersectionality. I could never hope to match Lorde's eloquence when it comes to feminism but I love falling into Lorde's work and finding the words to justify its existence and why it is necessary.

[Jessi ❤️ H. Vojsk [if villain, why hot?]]

For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.
They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.
And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the masters house as their only source of support.

Short, but extremely interesting text from a black, lesbian feminist.

[Jo]

In a similar way to James Baldwin's Notes from a Native Son which I read last year, I started reading the first essay in this collection with a sinking feeling that I just didn't have the mental chops to take it all in - I have subsequently been told by friends who have also read Audre Lorde that having to read sentences three times is normal ;) As with the Baldwin though, either the essays became easier to read or I just got accustomed to the writing style and I found myself more and more engaged as they went on to the point that it felt like there was more highlighted text than that left bare!

As such there is way too much in these five short essays to go into detail but they are powerfully and passionately written and utterly relevant to today. Audre Lorde was very aware that feminism was leaving black women behind and that they didn't need guilt or anger against them because of this but listening and for their voices to be heard. She was aware that division is a tool of further oppression because if we are so busy hating one another we can't look to the top where the real problems are. She looks at someone like Malcolm X, how his vision changed and how it could be capitalized on in the 1980's, how putting passion, 'the erotic' and creativity back into life after having it suppressed would empower black people and how as a black, lesbian female her fight to be heard had to be fought on three fronts. There is so much more in this little book but needless to say you should go out and read it for yourself.

[luciana]

storygraph |instagram |

One of the most thought-provoking book i've ever read.

RTC.

[Fede]

Should be required reading for anyone who calls themselves a feminist.

[gloria .☆ﾟ.]

➥ 5 Stars *:･ﾟ✧

Fantastic writing and message!! I'll definitely be looking into more of Lorde's work. I think this will linger in my mind for a while.

━━━━━━━━━━━ ✰ ━━━━━━━━━━━

✰ "For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power is rediscovered."

✰ "For difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. (...) Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged."

✰ "The failure of the academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. Divide and conquer, in our world must become define and empower."

━━━━━━━━━━━ ✰ ━━━━━━━━━━━

[Sherald]

It's astonishing the impact a tiny volume of 50 pages can have. Every intellectual, aspiring or abiding, who ever had the idea of going into academia to effect just and lasting change should read this. On this question, Audre Lorde makes her stance abundantly clear:

"The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those who still define the master's house as their only source of support."

As an intellectual, I find this endlessly profound. Lorde is not telling me to stop being an intellectual. Rather, her essays are a poignant reminder that academia is and always will be a bourgeois institution. No amount of decolonization, equity, diversity, and inclusion can change this material and historical fact. To effect genuine change, intellectuals must look and go beyond the academy—to the streets, to the toiling masses. There is no other way.

[Liam O'Leary]

Crash course on the new frontier for intersectional feminism, how do we think about LGBT identities with respect to race and sex?

I find it hard to engage with the poetry, and am not sure how angry integrationism works (feels like MLK and Malcolm X at the same time), but this was an interesting read and there are some powerful words here.

[Marie S.]

Classic case of "It's not you, it's me". I couldn't get into the essays, I felt that there were too many ideas and no clear point so I was lost most of the time.

[rach]

fantastic essay collection! i didn't know about lorde's work, but i'll look for more stuff from her for sure.

[omi]

51 pagine di un libro stravolgente, potente e necessario. audre lorde, con questa saggio che raccoglie i suoi discorsi e interventi pubblici, ci ricorda la necessitá del parlare con se stessi e con gli altri, di esprimere la propria rabbia e di continuare a lottare per i propri diritti e con la consapevolezza che il nemico vero e proprio è solo uno: chi detiene il potere nelle proprie mani e lo usa a discapito della maggioranza.
la grandezza di questo libro sta proprio nella sua attualità, le parole di questa grande scrittrice spiccano ancora di più e risuonano in maniera assordante.
l’esperienza di vita di audre lorde l’ha portata a focalizzarsi fortemente sul femminismo, razzismo, l’omosessualità, la maternità, la lotta e il disagio sociale.
non necessariamente questi temi devono toccarvi perchè leggiate questo libro e abbiate maggiore consapevolezza perché fin quando non sarà la libertà garantita a tutti, nessuno di noi sarà realmente libero.
c’è tantissimo da dire, ma voglio che il resto lo dica lei stessa, attraverso le sue parole.
qua sotto troverete le mie frasi preferite e che mi hanno colpita di più.

“Any discussion among women about racism must include the recognition and the use of anger. This discussion must be direct and creative because it is crucial. We cannot allow our fear of anger to deflect us nor seduce us into settling for anything less than the hard work of excavating honesty; we must be quite serious about the choice of this topic and the angers entwined within it because, rest assured, our opponents are quite serious about their hatred of us and of what we are trying to do here.”

“This hatred and our anger are very different. Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers. and its object is change. But our time is getting shorter. We have been raised to view any difference other than sex as a reason for destruction, and for Black women and white women to face each other's angers without denial or immobility or silence or guilt is in itself a heretical and generative idea. It implies peers meeting upon a common basis to examine difference, and to alter those distortions which history has created around our difference. For it is those distortions which separate us. And we must ask ourselves: Who profits from all this?”

“Anger is an appropriate reaction to racist attitudes, as is fury when the actions arising from those attitudes do not change.
To those women here who fear the anger of women of colour more than their own unscrutinized racist attitudes, I ask: Is the anger of women of colour more threatening than the woman hatred that tinges all aspects of our lives?”

“if I fail to recognize them as other faces of myself, then I am contributing not only to each of their oppressions but also to my own, and the anger which stands between us then must be used for clarity and mutual empowerment, not for evasion. by guilt or for further separation. I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own. And I am not free as long as one person of colour remains chained. Nor is any one of you.”

“We do not have to romanticize our past in order to be aware of how it seeds our present. We do not have to suffer the waste of an amnesia that robs us of the lessons of the past rather than permits us to read them with pride as well as deep understanding.
We know what it is to be lied to, and we know how important it is not to lie to ourselves.
We are powerful because we have survived, and that is what it is all about - survival and growth.”

“Can any one of us here still afford to believe that efforts to reclaim the future can be private or individual? Can anyone here still afford to believe that the pursuit of liberation can be the sole and particular province of any one particular race, er sex, or age, or religion, or sexuality, or class?
Revolution is not a one-time event. It is becoming always vigilant for the smallest opportunity to make a genuine change in established, outgrown responses; for instance, it is learning to address each other's difference with respect.”

“We who are Black are at an extraordinary point of choice within our lives. To refuse to participate in the shaping of our future is to give it up. Do not be misled into passivity either by false security (they don't mean me) or by despair (there's nothing we can do. Each of us must find our work and do it.
Militancy no longer means guns at high noon, if it ever did. It means actively working for change, sometimes in the absence of any surety that change is coming. It means doing the unromantic and tedious work necessary to forge meaningful coalitions, and it means recognizing which coalitions are possible and which coalitions are not. It means knowing that coalition, like unity, means the coming together of whole, self-actualized human beings, focused and believing, not frag mented automatons marching to a prescribed step. It means fighting despair.”

“You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other. I do not have to he you to recognize that our wars. are the same. What we must do is commit ourselves to some future that can include each other and to work towards that future with the particular strengths of our individual identities. And in order to do this, we must allow each other our differences at the same time as we recognize our sameness.”

“If our history has taught us anything, it is that action for change directed only against the external conditions of our oppressions is not enough. In order to he whole, we must recognize the despair oppression plants within each of us - that thin persistent voice that says our efforts are useless, it will never change, so why bother, accept it. And we must fight that inserted piece of self-destruction that lives and flourishes like a poison inside of us, unexamined until it makes us turn upon ourselves in each other. But we can put our finger down upon that loathing buried deep within each one of us and see who it encourages us to despise, and we can lessen its potency by the knowledge of our real connectedness, arcing across our differences.”

[Kemunto Books]

Well, this was perfect! 💗 Highlighted almost every line, ha! Audre Lorde. Wow.

“For within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets. And there are no new pains. We have felt them all already. We have hidden that fact in the same place where we have hidden our power. They surface in our dreams, and it is our dreams that point the way to freedom”

Excerpt From
The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House
Audre Lorde

[Mars]

This was my first time reading Audre Lorde’s work and I’m so glad I picked this up.
She talks about academic arrogance and the racism and homophobia within feminism/feminist theory.
I liked her writing style and found a lot of her core themes in the essays to be truly thought provoking. Particularly the idea that guilt is a response to one’s lack of action and mode of protection for ignorance.

[Diz]

This is a collection of five essays by Audre Lorde. All of the essays were powerful, but my favorite was "Learning from the 1960s." It stresses the need for people to work together to create social change, which is a message that a lot of people need to hear these days.

[Michael Bagnoli]

There is a lot here, but the following are two takeaways in the top of my mind:

1. Poetry is language on steroids. “Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought…We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into a language so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives.”

2. Emancipate Eros from the bedroom. “Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy. In the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, heartening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether is it dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea.”

Thus the erotic life, in the Ancient Greek sense rather than in the perverse modern sense, is The Good Life.

[Naia Pard]

A couple of essays that are worth while.
They are concentrated on subjects concerning feminism and racism. Perhaps this description of mine niches them too much.

I lack this author`s power at rendering subects that may seem to concern just the minority as a real problem that has to worry the majority, too. She points the cracks in the society not to wedge them into valleys, but to invite the readers into finding a solution that goes to mend them.

Her call to unity is polished by the assurance that unity does not mean uniformity, it does not mean losing one`s individual traits.

“I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.”

Instagram\\my Blog\\

[som ꒰ᐢ. .ᐢ꒱₊˚⊹]

القراءة الثانية
فتحته الحقيقة لأني كنت أحس بإحباط شديد يوم الثلاثاء الماضية … عطاني الدفعة إللي كنت أحتايها وأتوقعها منه :] أحب أودري وأحب وأقدر كلماتها والقوة اللي يحتوينها جداً جداً … أتمنى أقدر أكون بالشجاعة والقوة المطلوبة لعيش حياتي بشكل كلي وكامل فيوم من الأيام ! !

القراءة الأولى
أحاول أعرف إيش أكتب عنه كمراجعة غير إني أترجى كل بنت/afab انه يقروه......... بيغير تفكيركم ! أفكارها ثورية وقوية ومقنعة جداً !!! ولغتها جميلة جداً...... سعيد إنه هالمقالات الخمس كانوا تجربتي الأولى معها، ومية بالمية مارح تكون الأخيرة !

[Dylan]

"Revolution is not a one-time event. It is becoming always vigilant for the smallest opportunity to make a genuine change in established, outgrown responses; for instance, it is learning to address each other's difference with respect."

[Milena.Reads]

5 starts for writing
5 starts for content
and a freaking billion starts for blowing my mind!!