Life & Wisdom Quote by Audre Lorde

That opening clause, "In discussions", is doing sly work: Lorde isn’t narrating a neutral fact, she’s flagging a familiar ritual of institutional talk where power hides behind procedural language. The line aims at a specific campus drama: the moment diversity becomes a zero-sum argument, and Black people are invited to compete for the scarce legitimacy the university is willing to ration out.

The charge she names functions less as an observation than as a strategy. Saying Black women are "more easily hired" sounds like a critique of favoritism, but it often smuggles in two older stories at once: misogyny that treats women as less threatening and therefore more "manageable", and a patriarchal reflex that positions Black men as the default victims worth rallying around. Lorde’s phrasing - "frequently heard", "the charge" - implies hearsay, a rumor that travels because it’s useful. It reroutes anger away from hiring committees and budgets and toward other Black people, especially Black women, who become scapegoats for structural exclusion.

Context matters: Lorde wrote from inside the academy’s contradictions as a Black lesbian feminist who watched institutions embrace token representation while punishing actual critique. The sentence is pointedly incomplete on its own, almost like the beginning of a cross-examination. It invites the reader to ask: hired into what roles, with what security, at what cost? Even when Black women are "hired", they’re often hired into precarity - overloaded service, isolated departments, contingent contracts. The real target isn’t a gendered hierarchy among Black faculty; it’s the university’s talent for turning oppression into an argument about who deserves the crumbs.