"The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot"
About this Quote
Learning, for Audre Lorde, is not self-improvement with a tasteful glow-up filter. Its closer to civil unrest: loud, contagious, and threatening to whatever order has been sold as natural. The doubled verb - "incite, literally incite" - reads like a hand on the lapel. She is insisting on heat, not metaphorical warmth. Learning is not passive intake; its a provocation that can spill into the streets.
The line works because it hijacks the language of authority. "Incitement" is a word the state loves: used to criminalize protest, to mark certain bodies as inherently dangerous, to frame dissent as disorder rather than argument. Lorde flips that script. If institutions treat awakening as a public safety risk, she implies, maybe thats because it is - for them. Education becomes a destabilizing force aimed at the lies that keep power intact: racism dressed up as common sense, sexism as tradition, silence as civility.
The subtext is also personal and communal. Lorde wrote and spoke as a Black lesbian feminist who kept arguing that survival requires turning experience into insight and insight into action. In that context, "learning" is not just reading and reflection; its consciousness-raising, naming what has been unnamed, recognizing patterns of harm, then refusing to cooperate with them. A riot isnt tidy, and neither is the kind of learning she champions. It crowds out polite neutrality. It demands consequences.
The line works because it hijacks the language of authority. "Incitement" is a word the state loves: used to criminalize protest, to mark certain bodies as inherently dangerous, to frame dissent as disorder rather than argument. Lorde flips that script. If institutions treat awakening as a public safety risk, she implies, maybe thats because it is - for them. Education becomes a destabilizing force aimed at the lies that keep power intact: racism dressed up as common sense, sexism as tradition, silence as civility.
The subtext is also personal and communal. Lorde wrote and spoke as a Black lesbian feminist who kept arguing that survival requires turning experience into insight and insight into action. In that context, "learning" is not just reading and reflection; its consciousness-raising, naming what has been unnamed, recognizing patterns of harm, then refusing to cooperate with them. A riot isnt tidy, and neither is the kind of learning she champions. It crowds out polite neutrality. It demands consequences.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning |
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