We use them until we don’t need to use them no longer.

“We use them until we don’t need to use them no longer” is Diana Gordon’s blunt maxim for dealing with white men who hold influence. In a conversation with Nella Rogers about Richard Wagner, the phrase offers a strategy of pragmatic dependence; Nella’s inward response exposes how differently the two women have experienced the power that strategy is meant to navigate.

The Phrase in Conversation

Diana invokes the maxim while urging Nella to reconsider her hostility toward Richard. She acknowledges that he was born privileged and needed persuading, but argues that he should not be treated as representative of every white man Nella has encountered. As evidence, she points to what he has done for two Black women few people know. Her invitation for Nella to join her and Richard for a photograph at an event thus becomes part of a wider defense of his usefulness and intentions.

The line is presented as a familiar principle rather than a new proposition: Diana introduces it as something she has always said, then reduces it to a matter of practical calculation. The repeated emphasis on simplicity makes the maxim sound settled and portable, as though the same rule can govern every encounter with a white gatekeeper.

Nella’s Counterreading

Nella silently tests that apparent simplicity against their different lives. Diana earned both her bachelor’s degree and her PhD at Howard University, where she remained to teach; in Nella’s view, that setting kept white gatekeepers less constantly in Diana’s path. Nella, by contrast, feels she has been smothered by them. The maxim’s confident generality therefore conceals a difference in exposure: a strategy that sounds manageable from Diana’s position cannot fully describe what Nella has endured.

Nella does not tell Diana this directly. Doing so would reopen their shared memory of sitting on Nella’s stoop in 1968 with their college acceptance letters and force Nella to concede that Diana had been right: attending somewhere other than Howard or Hampton had been a mistake. Beneath Nella’s silence lies a judgment about her own past choice and the strength she had expected of herself.

Meaning and Tension

The maxim holds together two opposing impulses. It advises using access to power without mistaking the powerful for allies, but its language also turns people and relationships into instruments that can be discarded once their usefulness ends. In the scene, that instrumental logic is Diana’s confident answer to Nella’s distrust; Nella’s private rebuttal shows why the answer does not resolve their disagreement. The phrase’s decisive, matter-of-fact tone cannot make their experiences interchangeable.