use the master's tools to dismantle the master's house

English

Etymology

From Audre Lorde's essay "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House".

Verb

use the master's tools to dismantle the master's house

1. (chiefly in the negative) To use the tools and framework of an oppressive (e.g. racist or patriarchal) system to end that oppression.

   You'll never be able to use the master's tools to dismantle the master's house.

   • 2009 December 30, Wendy Lynne Lee, Contemporary Feminist Theory and Activism: Six Global Issues, Broadview Press, →ISBN, page 29:

     We are, in fact, trying to use the master's tools to dismantle the master's house by appealing to the same binary logic that undergirds SB 1250. As Butler points out, however, this is a strategy that is destined for trouble: the […]

   • 2011 January 4, Derrick Jensen, Endgame, Volume 2: Resistance, Seven Stories Press, →ISBN:

     […] , and I'm not sure mother grizzly bears would agree that love implies pacifism, nor mother moose, nor many other mothers I've known. You can't use the master's tools to dismantle the master's house.

   • 2012 December 6, Mark P. Leone, Parker B. Potter Jr., Historical Archaeologies of Capitalism, Springer Science & Business Media, →ISBN:

     Can we, indeed, use the “master's tools” to dismantle the “master's house?” Says Audre Lorde (1984: 112), in Sister Outsider:
     ... the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to [win].

   • 2014 August 26, Kate Cregan, Denise Cuthbert, Global Childhoods: Issues and Debates, SAGE, →ISBN:

     Ho Chi Minh, Mahatma Gandhi and Lee Kuan Yew, all of whom used the master's tools to dismantle the master's house, are cited as compelling examples of the empowerment gained through European education.

   • 2017, Kristen Lillvis, Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination, University of Georgia Press, →ISBN, page 95:

     Initially, though, Tahneh and Diut appear to use the master's tools to dismantle the master's house. In order to prevent Diut's capture, Tahneh uses her influence to persuade her Rohkohn community and Diut, as well as his two Tehkohn […]

   • 2019 February 4, Janet Alsup, Millennial Teacher Identity Discourses: Balancing Self and Other, Routledge, →ISBN:

     In other words, this integrative discourse, most often in the form of narrative, allowed them to “use the master's tools to dismantle the master's house,” as described by poet and feminist activist Audre Lorde in her original 1984 essay].

   • 2020 July 28, D.A. Wood, Epistemic Decolonization: A Critical Investigation into the Anticolonial Politics of Knowledge, Springer Nature, →ISBN, page 176:

     On the other hand, the statement under consideration functions normatively, implying that one should never use the master's tools to dismantle the master's house. The Haitian Revolution, like all others, did not produce a perfect […]