The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism

In “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,” Audre Lorde refuses the idea that anger is merely a loss of control to be managed away. She treats it as knowledge about how power is operating. Lorde delivered the address at the National Women’s Studies Association conference in June 1981; the text appeared in Women’s Studies Quarterly that fall. This is not an abstract guide to emotional regulation. It asks how Black women can recognize exclusion, racial distortion, silence, and betrayal—and what that knowledge can make possible.

The essay shifts the question from “Why is she so angry?” to “What relationship has made this anger necessary?” When white women describe racism as a problem belonging to women of color, or mistake guilt for having completed antiracist work, anger exposes the unequal power beneath declarations of sisterhood. Lorde does not romanticize every expression of anger or make it a license to harm. Anger must be understood and converted into accountable action. By contrast, defensiveness and guilt can keep attention on white women’s feelings, leaving those already excluded to do the extra labor of explaining, soothing, and teaching.

Listening, then, does not mean asking Black women to lower their voices or making them responsible for changing the psyche of those who oppress them. It requires others to examine the resources and decisions they control: who is invited into classrooms and organizations, whose experience counts as theory, who sets budgets and agendas, and whether a supposedly shared issue erases racial difference. Lorde’s political hope is not to replace analysis with emotion, but to turn suppressed experience into the power to name a problem, redistribute responsibility, and change institutions. Anger is both an alarm and a source of energy; it cannot guarantee solidarity, but it can make false solidarity harder to sustain.

The address arose in a specific U.S. feminist academic setting and cannot stand for every Black woman’s or every woman of color’s experience. Its force lies partly in refusing to flatten those experiences into a single, undifferentiated “women’s voice.” Read it alongside the Combahee River Collective Statement to trace how lived experience, identity politics, and collective organizing meet. The CUNY journal record documents its publication; Yale’s American Studies Program hosts a scanned copy of the address.