The Envoy

“Within the lesbian community, I am Black,” said a white student. 

They were reading from an essay by Audre Lorde in front of a large crowd that had come to celebrate the city naming the crossroads of Lexington Avenue and 68th Street Audre Lorde Way. 

Several students who were part of the Eva Kastan Grove Fellowship Program read parts of Lorde’s essay “There Is No Hierarchy of Oppressions.” The one Black student in the group read last. She was the only Black student who spoke during the whole ceremony, and the words were not even her own. 

My stomach was turning. 

Don’t get me wrong — I appreciate the establishment of Audre Lorde Way. It is meaningful for us to name spaces after people who have dedicated their lives to liberating others. Hopefully, this will serve as a historical break from the city naming spaces after war criminals and colonizers.

Yet, I found that the ceremony – which was said to be organized in celebration of Audre Lorde – opposed what she stood for. Lorde dedicated her work to giving visibility to Black women and queer people in every space she walked into, while the ceremony largely rendered us invisible. 

Famously, Lorde would introduce herself as a “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.” She listed all of her identities to challenge the exclusionary notion that one could not be all of those things at once.

In white heteronormative feminist spaces, she challenged white women to recognize her Black and lesbian identities. In spaces with Black people, she emphasized that one’s queerness does not negate their Blackness and that one could advocate for feminism and racial justice simultaneously. 

Lorde helped pioneer the concept of intersectionality before the term was officially coined. 

While Lorde is beloved by many, she holds significance for Black women and Black queer people specifically. She used her voice to make sure that we are seen and to illuminate the unique oppression that we face.

Hence, I hoped that the ceremony would honor Lorde’s legacy by centering Black women and Black queer people. I hoped that it would incorporate the voices of Black students whose lives were touched by her work and those who supported the initiative to rename the West Building after her. 

I was one of those students. Nearly two years ago, I wrote an editorial with Diana Kennedy and Alexis Fisher in support of the Audre Lorde Initiative. The initiative was proposed by Professor Jacqueline Brown, a former student of Lorde’s, who was one of the few Black people who spoke at the ceremony.  

Following the release of our editorial, we launched a petition that received over eight hundred signatures from students, faculty and supporters. Students sent emails expressing their support to Hunter College President Jennifer Raab and CUNY Chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez.

Scholar and activist Angela Davis wrote a letter addressed to them to give her support, naming student advocacy her primary reason.

Though credited to city officials, Audre Lorde Way is primarily the result of a campaign organized by Black educators and students. For more than a year, people hosted events, sent letters and published editorials in local papers to push for recognition of Hunter’s most notable alumni. 

Yet, the ceremony to celebrate Audre Lorde Way was put together and supervised by Harold Holzer, a white man. 

While I am grateful for Holzer’s leadership as the director of the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute and have enjoyed many events there, this ceremony should have been organized by Black educators and students. 

The failure to prioritize our voices resulted in a ceremony that felt superficial, commercial, and at times, insulting. 

The non-Black students who read from the essay “There Is No Hierarchy of Oppressions” were taking up space that should have been reserved for the people who Lorde sought to give visibility to.

The essay is about what Lorde learned as a Black lesbian and how her intersectional identity taught her that one must fight all forms of oppression at once. There is no reason that a non-Black student should be reciting an essay about the significance of being a Black lesbian when there are countless Black queer students who could have spoken. 

This colorblind approach to highlighting a speech where Lorde demands recognition of her Blackness was insulting to her and to the Black students present. 

“I was disappointed, to say the least, that the students who were part of the effort were not named more explicitly,” said student Sephora Thom, a senior majoring in biochemistry. “They did the very work Audre Lorde asked us to do.”

“I also found it quite strange to not have queer Black women read Audre Lorde’s words, for obvious reasons I hope,” Thom said. 

For the few Black women who were given space to speak during the ceremony, it appeared that their freedom to speak truthfully was limited. 

After the students finished reading, the ceremony’s moderator, Cheryl Wills, who is also a news anchor at Spectrum News NY1, thanked Holzer for putting together the event. She said that she would briefly break away from the script he approved for her to share her perspective on what Lorde’s work means to her as a Black woman. 

“I am so proud of what this woman did and how she reached down and made people listen to her because you know what in this country, people try to tell Black women to be silent,” Wills said. 

The irony of this moment baffled me. Why did a Black woman have to break away from the approved script in order to share her own perspective – when Lorde herself had protested against the marginalization of Black women’s voices? 

Given the focus of Lorde’s work, the perspectives of Black women and queer people should have been centered in this ceremony. They should have made the final decision on what they will or will not say. And they should have been in charge of the programming, so that we could have avoided the insulting moment of non-Black students claiming to be Black.

There were some touching moments. 

Professor Brown spoke about her relationship with Lorde. She discussed “Coal,” a poem that Lorde dedicated to Brown before reading it to an auditorium of students at Stanford. 

At the end of Brown’s speech, she read the poem herself as though she were reading it back to Lorde. 

“Audrey, are you here? This is for you,” she said. 

Brown’s speech caused me to recall my own experience attending a predominantly white high school. Like her, I still cherish the educators who affirmed my value and supported me while I was navigating an environment where I often felt unseen. 

Jacqueline Woodson, National Book Award-winning author of “Brown Girl Dreaming,” also gave a meaningful speech. Her story on how she came to accept her identity as a Black lesbian through reading Lorde’s work mirrors that of so many other queer people of color who have been told that they can not be queer and Black or brown at the same time. 

“I found out that this was a woman who identified as a lesbian,” Woodson said. “Like, you can do that? As a poet, as an activist, as a mother. You can be all those things? I had already wanted to be a writer since I was seven and here was a woman coming with a green light, who I never met, saying, you can do that.” 

Woodson emphasized that she would not have felt safe to tell stories about queer people if it were not for Lorde paving the way. 

“We are safer in this world because of her,” Woodson said. 

After they spoke, I found myself desperate to hear from more people who were also impacted by Lorde’s writing, teaching and presence. I wanted to hear more about what she was like when she was alive. 

I wanted recognition of her critiques of Hunter College and her demands for administrators to do more to protect its Black students from racism. Administrators could have made a public commitment to taking the anti-racist actions demanded by their students, such as hiring more Black mental health counselors and refusing to purchase products made through prison slavery. 

The only way to truly honor Lorde is to continue her work. 

I am glad that people who may not have known of Audre Lorde will now at some point come across her name, discover her work and potentially be moved by her words. Yet, I am still desperate for the day that Black people will not have to ask for permission to take up space and to tell our own stories.