On Anger

Today I'd like to talk about black people and our anger.

It's "all right" for all other kinds of folks to be angry - righteously, arrogantly angry, in fact; it's perfectly fine for them to be angry about all sorts of things from gun control to taxes. For white people, anger can even be praised. But with minorities - particularly, I believe, Native Americans - other people tend to suppress it and wave it aside as an "oh well" case and cause and move on. And with black people, other people demonize or even ridicule our anger, though we have more of a right to righteous anger than white people as a whole. We have, after all, been enslaved, caricatured, demonized, defiled, raped (physically, mentally, and spiritually), legally defined as less than human, and now they say we don't have a right to be angry?

Who is anybody else to tell black people when to be angry, and what to be angry about? This problem is one of the many manifestations of other (mostly white) people telling black people what is acceptable by their standards, and vilifying black people when we don't conform.

The only "acceptable" form of black anger is the stereotype and caricature of the "angry black woman." I knew a girl once who was mad about something, but she didn't want to do anything about it because she feared being categorized as just another "angry black woman." This stereotype is acceptable only because people have been trained to think of it as funny.

Why should black anger be funny when white anger about the same things would be lauded and applauded as "doing something about it," or "standing up for yourself"?

Let's talk history for a moment. More than being "all right," it was "grand and glorious" for American colonists to revolt against Britain, for Simón Bolívar to revolt against the Spanish, for the French and the Russians to overthrow their imperial governments. But what about the Haitian Revolution, or the decolonization of Africa? These two grand and glorious processes get ignored, shunted aside, swept under the rug.

America idealizes and romanticizes European anger while largely ignoring the racism, sexism, classism, and overall oppression of those societies; at the same time, it recoils from and reacts with horror toward black anger!

Now tell me: is this reaction right? Is it just? Is it democratic? NO!

So I'd like to say this to black people everywhere: it is not just fine to be angry. It is deserved.*

I wrote of a problem a few lines above. The only solution to this problem is black people deciding for themselves that it is more than "all right" to be righteously angry, and showing white people that we are capable of intellectual anger and not simply the brute, directionless shooting they associate with us.**

So I have a declaration to make: I'm black, and yes, I'm mad as hell!


*Please note that this statement or post does not condone physical violence, or pointless intellectual violence. By "intellectual violence," I mean simply those forceful mental actions that state in no uncertain terms that the doer has a purpose.

**This is not victim-blaming I'm doing here. I am simply saying that it is time for black people to do something about this (personally I think we need a Social Rights Movement), because the white folks sure won't do it for us.