Being An Outsider

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her made her always feel inferior.
Her first memories of herself are those looked at through eyes that enabled her only to see the outer shapes of things. Having such bad eyesight was one of the first instances where she notices her difference from others around her outside of her family. In her story where she tells of losing the glasses, she likes the fact that nothing is exactly perfect and all she really sees is the colors of lights and the shapes around her. Her eyesight set her apart from her classmates, having to sit at the front of the room, and reveals her once again she is different. This is also a minor factor in her outsider status.
The first major factor illustrating Lorde as an outsider is the fact that she is a woman. IT is not shown often by itself in her story, but in one particular case where she first notices the differences in gender and how they are perceived in society. This happened when she was running for class elections. She wanted to be president ...

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they remained friends. She noticed the racism of the faculty and in many of the students, and came to understand she was different from them, “ not because I was Black, but because I was me,” (Lorde, 82).
She found that being Black was hard when she had friends that were white and whose parents did not accept it. Like her own parents not trusting the white people, many of her white friend’s parents did not trust the black person. One friend, who invited her to dinner, had parents whom not only disapproved of Lorde because she was black, but because she lived alone. According to this lady “no nice girl left her mother’s house before she was married, unless she had become a whore, which ...

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