So once upon a time, Audre Lorde, an amazing scholar and thinker, said this.
In the process, ironically, someone who was not part of the “Master” construction which she was critiquing (this is something many people seem to lose track of) gave the establishment a blunt-force tool– pun intended– to beat back efforts at radical change.
Much of what I want to say is summarized well in this piece from Micah White, so I won’t labor explaining what many, myself included, believe Lorde actually meant. Instead I want to focus on the argument back against the use of “the masters tools will never dismantle the master’s house” as an argument to shut down discussion and thought by couching it in a second counter-argument, one from a course I took years ago based on a flawed reading (by the majority of the people in the discussion) of Taiaiake Alfred’s Wasáse.
Wasáse is a complex look at the realities of trying to confront colonial mechanisms. I’m not positive I agree with Alfred in every sense, but the discussion we had in this course, someone went super-reductionist on something Alfred said and then convinced almost everyone in the room to use this reductionist position as bedrock for a defeatist view of indigenous studies. There is a point in the book where Alfred insists that the academy isn’t a system that can be used to fight colonial power. He didn’t mean it literally, or if he did, he’s crazy, because he’s an academic. What he meant is that the structure is flawed in powerful ways. But the discussion in the class turned to how futile it was to work in Indigenous studies, as I attempted to argue the counter point.
Then someone did it.
Someone used the cliche argument I hear at least four or five times a year. “Well, we know from Lorde that the masters tools can’t tear down the master’s house.”
When I hear people invoke that quote I cringe, because nine times out of ten it’s meant to shut down whatever is being discussed as “not possible.” Here’s the problem statement response:
- Who decided that white European dudes were the masters of language, of learning, of governance, of social contract, of society? Lorde didn’t. I didn’t. I’m pretty sure it was a white dude who did that. Then he took a lesbian of color’s words and said “oh, look, they know, too.”
- As a Cherokee, I love my metaphors. The imagery of “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” is fundamentally broken because:
A. The master’s tools built the house (on the labor of his slaves), so what else would you use to dismantle it? That set of tools is made only to build and destroy houses. That’s what people think they are for. But…
B. Tools are about use anyway, so it’s a fool’s assertion that a tool can only do the thing the master meant for it to. For example, I can hit a baseball with a violin. I can hammer in a nail with a brick. I can open a bottle with a machete. None of those are the intended/expected use of tools, but “tool” is about utilization before it is about designated function.C. The metaphor implies that the only way to remove the tyranny of the master is to destroy his house. A single tool– a weapon, like a gun– could be used to remove the master from his home and usurp his ownership. It could be used to end the master’s life, too, which means that his house contains a power vacuum. Anyone who denies that is forgetting the history of this country, which I suppose is okay with “the master” since we don’t teach it in their toolshed.
- Using the argument the way many do, this is just a reinforcement of the American binary belief that there’s one good and one bad way for things to go. So if you say “I can use the master’s tools!” someone else can claim that it’s not the best way to do something, ergo for the Republican vs. Democrat, Lex Luthor vs. Superman crowd, that must mean it cannot be done. It’s about having a limited understanding of how anything and everything works. We don’t live in a binary world, as uncomfortable as that might seem to some. We live in more than 50 shades of non-bondage-sex gray. There are subtle nuances to everything around us.
If you’re an academic and you honestly believe a reductionist “oh, we can’t change the structure from the inside or using its methods because the system has all of the control,” you need to do the following five things right now:
- Pack your office. Go ahead. The other four things will wait for you to get back.
- Burn all your theory books in huge bonfire. Try to cook some food or warm up some cold people. Those books will do more creating heat and light than they’re doing on a shelf in your office. You clearly don’t grasp what they are as a “tool.”
- Vow to never write again about anything more complex than a Yelp review or a grocery list, because the era of us needing more of the exact same thinking is over, if it ever existed in the first place.
- Submit your will to the most menial employment you can find and execute it as if you are a mechanical part of the machine who never has to make a choice on your own again. It’ll bring you the comfort you seem to think you need.
- Quit watching any scripted TV, playing video games with narratives, no new books for you since you burned most of yours earlier in this list, and when someone shares an opinion start humming the theme to Night Court. Art, thinking, creativity and innovation are not for you.
I’m going to tell you the truth, the way Morpheus told Neo the truth. It’s not going to be easy, but it’s going to be the actual honest bedrock so-real-you-can-feel-it truth:
Your “masters” never designed a tool in their lives.
So those tools don’t belong to them. The whole reason masters exist is because they’ve realized how to manipulate and control (to own) people and ideas. If they understood how to do things and had the strength of will (and of body and mind) to do things, they wouldn’t need to enslave and acquire. No human being needs anything to survive that she can’t get without oppressing or subjugating someone else. That’s the secret the “elite” don’t want you to know. There’s plenty for everyone on this planet and always has been.
Want to be equal. Just don’t let someone presume to be your master.
Just don’t let them. It’s really simple.
You want to tell me that I can’t change the academy from within the academy because I’m not part of the dominant belief system, because I’m not white and I’m always asked to speak for every Cherokee that ever lived?
How else would I change it? Should I go make my own?
Why would I cede ownership of the ability to think critically, to create art, to utilize logic?
Why does the small group of people who ascended to socio-economic power through violence now, decades later, have descendants who want to tell me that violence won’t work, that they own the system and control the system. We both take a punch the same way. We both eat and digest food the same way. We both breathe the air the same way. We were both born the same way. We will both die and decompose the same way. None of you are better than me.
One of my favorite political thinkers right now is a rapper known best to the “Masters” for his friendship with Bernie Sanders. His given name is Mike Render, but his stage name– and the name you use if you respect him– is Killer Mike. On his most recent collaborative album with El-P, Run the Jewels 3, there’s a “hidden” track (it’s just tacked onto the last song in most instances, since we don’t consume music in forms that has something “hidden” anymore) called “Kill Your Masters.” In the track before it, there’s a single verse that signals what is coming:
Choose the lesser of the evil people/and the devil still going to win/this could all be over tomorrow/kill our masters and start again
Mike’s opening verse in “Kill Your Masters” is:
Mere mortals, the Gods coming so miss me with the whoopty-whoop/You take the devil for God, look how he doin’ you/I’m Jack Johnson, I beat a slave catcher snaggletooth/I’m Tiger Flowers with a higher power, hallelu’/Life’ll get so bad it feel like God mad at you/But that’s a feeling, baby, ever lose, I refuse/I disabuse these foolish fools of they foolish views/I heard the revolution coming, you should spread the news/Garvey-mind, Tyson-punch, this is bad news/So feel me, follow me/Devil done got on top of me/Bad times got a monopoly/Give up, I did the opposite/Pitch perfect, did it properly/Owner killed by his property
And right there is the counter-argument, what Lorde was really driving at years and years ago.
The next time someone tells you that you can’t tear down the master’s house with the master’s tools, simply tell them to kill their master, then reference a boxer who was the first non-master to win a championship, and point out that you’re not going to give up.
People will tell you that anger and rage and violence are these horrible things. The people who tell you that are the descendants of the people who left England in a rage, came to this continent, and killed, enslaved, raped and herded my ancestors. Then they bought the ancestors of others in this nation from slavers and put them to work growing crops and laboring on the land that belonged to the people they violently took America from.
So yeah, you took the resources and tools you have by force. Nice attempt at changing the rules, but I think there’s a real chance your system can be changed from the inside, and I’m not so sure that violence and anger wouldn’t lead to change. You can count on the fact that I’m not interested in killing people to get what I want, but don’t think it’s because you told me it wouldn’t work.
It’s because I am nicer than that, I don’t see destroying you as a win condition. People like me think doing that to you is a net loss. We aren’t going to dress up like white guys and dump all your oil in Boston Harbor (you dump enough of your own oil, honestly). We don’t have diseased blankets for you. We’re not going to herd all of you to the Dakotas and stick you in concentration camps.
But that doesn’t mean you did it and no one else can. You don’t own those techniques. You aren’t all powerful because of those actions.
If that was how it worked, no one would be scared of being nuked, since the Master-in-Chief of his time was the first person to use an atomic bomb. Twice. Don’t think that it was because only America had the power to do it. America was the only nation who thought it was a good idea. Think about that for a second. All our worry about disarming other nations, but it was this nation who used the most horrifying weapons we’ve ever seen utilized. The ones who peddle the fear are the ones who created it.
I love my country, but I’d have voted a strong no to obliterating two cities full of innocent people. That was a bad call. And that’s just true, man.
Maybe a smarter argument would be “The Master is really not someone who thinks carefully, so let’s figure out a way to get a house that doesn’t require being a huge piece of shit.”
I went on a bit of a rant there. My point, though, is that no one gets to own critical thinking. You just don’t. The idea that anyone should quash subversive thought because it somehow can’t work has missed all of history and doesn’t realize that it’s always been subversive thought that, at the key moments, brought change. You can literally disintegrate the master’s house with the master’s tools, then use the master’s tools to be the new master. Some of us might not want to be the master, though. And that’s a thing you have to understand. You don’t own thinking.
And if you think you do, you’re not the master of anything… you’re a fucking tool.