The Master’s Tools?
PCC’s current administration is encouraging us PCC teachers to take to heart Audre Lorde‘s statement that “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”
I wonder why Lorde ever said this; I think it is a breathtakingly wrongheaded hypothesis for the managers of any college to emphasize in the year 2021.
Consider Lorde’s claim in the light of uncontroversial history: We know that, along with running toward free territory, among the most dangerous things for enslaved Americans to have done in our nation-state’s long era of legally-sanctioned human chattel bondage was to attempt to acquire and use tools like print literacy, to say nothing of what Marxists would call “the means of production.” Learning how to read and write, to name one very famous example, is precisely what got Frederick Douglass sold back “down the river.”
And who — least of all teachers — would belittle the huge benefits of Frederick Douglass’s print literacy — a tool elites had always (and perhaps still do) tried to hoard — in the stream of subsequent human affairs?
So, with all due respect to Audre Lorde, the master’s tools damned sure could have — and would have — dismantled the master’s house, as they eventually did. The masters knew all this and took great pains to keep it from happening. One has to wonder, then, how somebody like Audre Lorde could arrive at a place where this elementary point was no longer obvious.
As to the question of running a modern college, the issue is whether reason, science, history, and literature are somehow “the master’s tools.”
That is certainly a debatable and debated topic.
As for myself, I do not concede that science, print literacy, and the 100,000-year record of the human race are any group’s exclusive property or tools. They belong to — and challenge — us all.
The fact that such precious things have been used (and distorted) to exploit and oppress people does not mean we ought to toss them aside — even if we could.
As citizens of the 21st century, our job is to learn from it all, and to refine and share the best things we human beings have done. I’d go so far, in fact, as to assert that this is the only way we’re going to finally figure out how to make and keep the tools we all want and need.
That, I would suggest, is very much our main ongoing struggle.