Life & Wisdom Quote by Audre Lorde

Boredom is doing sharp political work here. Lorde isn’t shrugging off racism; she’s refusing to let it monopolize the imagination. The line pivots on “on the other hand,” a deliberately casual phrase that undercuts the solemn script racism demands from Black writers: testify, explain, bleed on schedule. By saying she gets “bored,” Lorde signals fatigue with a culture that keeps asking for the same story - not because the story is finished, but because the audience’s appetite is predictable. Racism becomes a loop: endlessly discussed, rarely dismantled.

Then she swerves to desire and intimacy, insisting that interracial love in a racist society is not a simple emblem of progress. “Still many things to be said” rejects the tidy liberal narrative where love “solves” race. In Lorde’s world, love is complicated by surveillance, fetishization, family history, and institutional power. The couple doesn’t float above society; they move through it, absorbing its scripts and resisting them in real time. She hints at the unglamorous questions: Who is read as dangerous or disposable? Who gets public legitimacy? Whose pain is treated as an educational resource?

Context matters: Lorde wrote as a Black lesbian feminist who saw how racism, sexism, and homophobia braid together, and how mainstream conversations flatten that complexity. The intent is twofold: refuse the spectacle of racial suffering as the only acceptable subject, and demand a richer language for love that acknowledges power without letting power be the only plot.