Politics & Power Quote by Audre Lorde

A line like this doesn’t merely defend Black women’s intimacy with each other; it indicts the reflex that treats that intimacy as betrayal. Lorde is naming a recurring social script: when Black women organize, confide, or love each other with seriousness, that closeness is read as an anti-male bloc rather than a necessary refuge and a political engine. The sentence is built like a correction, almost a courtroom stipulation, because she’s arguing against a charge that shouldn’t have to exist.

The phrasing matters. “Close ties” is intentionally broad: it covers coalition-building, friendship, mentorship, and erotic affiliation without letting the listener file it away as one “lifestyle” debate. “Politically or emotionally” refuses the old split where politics is coded as public, rational, and male, while feeling is dismissed as private and feminine. Lorde insists both are sites of power.

The subtext is sharper: misogynoir inside Black communities is often smuggled in as concern for “unity.” Women are asked to be loyal, but not autonomous; supportive, but not sovereign. Lorde, writing out of Black feminist and lesbian consciousness, is also rejecting the scapegoat mechanism where men’s dislocation under racism gets rerouted into suspicion of women’s solidarity. She’s not arguing against Black men; she’s arguing against the demand that women’s bonds must be secondary, monitored, or sacrificial to be legitimate.

By stating the obvious with such calm force, Lorde turns the accusation back on the accuser: if sisterhood looks like an enemy, what kind of entitlement is being protected?