Black History Month & Queer History Month
The history of Black people and the history of LGBTIQ+ rarely finds its way into German school textbooks or historical documentaries on educational television. They are made invisible and ignored. In February, it is precisely these stories that are to be made public and their history remembered.
"Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet" is how Audre Lorde (1934 - †1992) described herself. As a writer and activist, she campaigned against racism, sexism, classism and homophobia. As she mainly worked in the USA, her work in the German feminist movement is less well known.
Audre Geraldine Lorde was born in New York City on February 18, 1934. She graduated from Hunter College in 1959 with a bachelor's degree and two years later from Columbia University with a master's degree in library science. While her early writing revolved around romance, as tensions grew in the 1960s with the civil rights movement, she began to address more issues of racism and sexism in her work and emerged as a political activist. In her poetic texts, she campaigned for the implementation of social justice.
In her essays, she points out the urgency of an intersectional perspective, emphasizes the lack of inclusion of diverse life realities and advocates a reflection of privilege and dominance structures. In The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House, for example, she criticizes a particular academic arrogance in feminist debates (Lorde, 1984). According to Lorde, the perspectives of black, lesbian or poor women are missing and do not find space in the discussions, which also applies to the academic world. In her works, she calls on people to reflect on and talk about different realities of life and experiences. The aim is to overcome divisions that arise as a result and turn them into strength. She says:
Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference-those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older-know that survival is not an academic skill. It 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. (Lorde 1984: 112)
Her writings shaped the civil rights movement and women's movement in the US, as well as intersectional feminism worldwide. Through her recurring stays in Berlin between 1984 and 1992, she also had an impact in Germany. The book "Farbe bekennen - Afrodeutsch Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte", edited by May Ayim, Dagmar Schulz and Katharina Oguntoye and published with Lorde's help, has become a classic of the Black feminist movement in Germany. The public visibility of the experience of Black women in Germany also led to the founding of ADEFRA e.V. - Black Women in Germany. In Audre Lorde - the Berlin Years 1984 to 1992 director Damar Schultz documents Lorde's formative years in Germany.
Sources
Lorde, Audre (1984): Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. New York: The Crossing Press