“False Consensus”
Lucinda J. Garthwaite, ILI Director
Audre Lorde was a well-known and highly regarded poet and activist when she was invited to speak on a panel at the New York University Institute for Humanities Conference in 1979. Her talk was just under three pages long, but is remembered widely for one short sentence, “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” **
As the rest of her talk makes clear, Lorde’s reference to enslavers was meant as a metaphor for all systems that limit social equity and liberation, oppressive systems. Beyond that, much has been written, especially since Lorde’s death in 1992, about the meaning of those words.
Very often though, those ten words are used as what activist and writer Micah White calls, “the atomic bomb of discussion enders.” White’s concern is the seemingly endless list of strategies for change that get labelled as the master’s tools, including for example language, art, and commerce. “If the master’s tools cannot be appropriated,” he continues, then, “in an age [when] capitalist masters claim ownership over everything, only resignation is possible”.
“It is tragically ironic,” White writes, “that a saying originally intended to be a revolutionary tool has come to play a reactionary shutdown role [that] limits our options to act boldly.”
In his discussion of this misinterpretation of Lorde’s intent, Micah White introduced me to the term “false consensus.” It’s a useful term, I think, for a compelling idea or opinion hardened into a widely held belief so cherished that any digression is met with disdain and dismissal at best, and violence at worst.
For me, every activist decision has got to be based on what will most likely get the job done in the context of history, vision and the current moment. And here’s the thing about history, vision and even the current moment: they’re subject to change. There is always more to learn about the past; every current moment reveals new understanding; and the irrepressible fact of change constantly unfurls an emerging future.
So any consensus is also subject to change, and potentially false in the light of careful thinking. But consensus is born of community and certainty, and community and certainty promise rest and safety, and human beings require both. So it makes sense, the common retreat to false consensus and even its fierce defense.
To be clear, Audre Lorde was serious about the need to watch out for the master’s tools, warning that, “They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” She was also clear, in this piece and in other writing, about the need to examine assumptions, and misunderstanding the role of community, which, she wrote, “must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.”
Lorde was speaking in this instance to white feminists who were resisting, dismissing, and attempting to silence Black women’s challenges to the feminist consensus of the day. But her words apply, I think, to any rejection of a new way forward on basis of consensus only.
I can’t see a way out of the requirement of careful thought in response to every new understanding, every turn of the moment, every gift of insight from an emerging future. Thought is a threat to certainty, yes, but thoughtlessness is the enemy of liberation.
By way of introduction to her ten now famous words, Lorde said, “survival is . . . learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths”.
Standing outside of consensus, making common cause with others, making our differences strengths, those too will call consensus and certainties into question. As frightening as it may be to step out of those retreats, I think it’s the only path to the creativity, collaboration and courage required to act boldly for “a world in which we can all flourish.”
** A note : since I finished writing this piece, many have invoked Lorde's famous phrase in discussions of the GOP response to President Biden's 100-day address earlier this week. That affirms, I think, what Micah White calls, "the uncanny intuitive [and, I would add, enduring] force" of Lorde's thinking.
Links to Audre Lorde’s and Micah White’s biographies, and their writing reference here, can be found in the April 30, 2021 issue of Intersections: The ILI Newsletter