In 1961 James Baldwin, perhaps the greatest American essayist of the twentieth century, stated the following in a recorded panel discussion:
To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious, is to be in a rage almost all the time. So that the first problem is how to control that rage so that it won’t destroy you. Part of the rage is this: it isn’t only what is happening to you, but it’s what’s happening all around you all of the time, in the face of the most extraordinary and criminal indifference, the indifference and ignorance of most white people in this country.
Baldwin wasn’t lying. I have become very intimate with anger.
It is rage inducing to be told that we can do anything we put our minds to, when we work at companies and ministries where no one above middle management looks like us. It is rage inducing to know my body is being judged differently at every turn—when I am late to work, when I choose to eat lunch alone, when I am expressing hurt or anger. I become either a stand-in for another Black female body—without distinction between our size, our hair, our color, our voices, our interests, our names, our personalities—or a stand-in for the worst stereotypes—sassy, disrespectful, uncontrollable, or childlike and in need of whiteness to protect me from my [Black] self.
These indignities follow us home, too, when we open the newspaper or turn on the TV. Gross references to Serena Williams’s body as animal-like. The reinforcement of Black inferiority as when The New York Times publishes a piece saying Viola Davis is not “classically beautiful.” The media often seem gleeful when given the opportunity to tear down Black women, and if not careful, these attacks can chip away at our self-esteem. But words are hardly the worst of it. If we look at statistics and standards of living, we find a host of racial disparities that have persisted over decades—wages, home ownership, job accessibility, health care, treatment by law enforcement, and the list goes on. For us, these aren’t just statistics—they are the facts of life for us and our mothers, our sisters, our friends and neighbors.
Meanwhile, whiteness twiddles its thumbs with feigned innocence and shallow apologies. Diversity gets treated like a passing trend, a friendly group project in which everyone takes on equal risks and rewards. In the mind of whiteness, half-baked efforts at diversity are enough, because the status quo is fine. It is better than slavery, better than Jim Crow. What more could Black people possibly ask than this—to not be overtly subject to the white will? “Is there more?” white innocence asks before bursting into tears at the possibility that we would dare question its sincerity.
It’s hard to be calm in a world made for whiteness.
I’ve met a number of white people who adamantly resist thinking of themselves as a community, but I cannot imagine resisting my identity as a member of the Black community. I feel kinship and responsibility, pride, belonging, and connection with people simply because of a shared racial and cultural background.
When I pass a Black person being pulled over by the police, I wonder if they are innocent. I wonder how often this happens to them, and I wonder if they need help. Even in my childhood years, when I thought police officers pulled over only guilty people, I would think, Shoot! Why does the Black person have to get pulled over? I am not proud of this, but it speaks to how even when the feeling was shame, I still felt connected to random people I didn’t know and would never meet, simply because of Blackness.
When we win the award, I feel something.
When we get the promotion, I feel something.
When we break barriers, I feel something.
But I also feel something when we are dying in the streets. When we are derided for our bodies even as white women try to imitate them. When feminism is limited to the needs of whiteness, or when Blackness is used for profit without acknowledging the brilliance of the creators.
I feel something when a white woman mocks the body of Serena Williams by stuffing padding in her skirt and top. When First Lady Michelle Obama is called a monkey. When nine men and women are murdered in a church because they are Black.
I feel anger.
Even more frustrating, there are so few acceptable occasions for my rage to be expressed. Because I am a Black person, my anger is considered dangerous, explosive, and unwarranted. Because I am a woman, my anger supposedly reveals an emotional problem or gets dismissed as a temporary state that will go away once I choose to be rational. Because I am a Christian, my anger is dismissed as a character flaw, showing just how far I have turned from Jesus. Real Christians are nice, kind, forgiving—and anger is none of those things.
Though I knew these interpretations to be ludicrous, dealing with these reactions to any hint of my anger was enough to prevent me from speaking it. The boldness I possessed in school melted away in the face of supervisors, performance reviews, benefits packages, and the backlash that came from expecting more out of my Church.
In moments when I was angry, I used to wish I was that Black girl. You know the one. The one who snaps her gum. Who claps out every word when angry. The one who rolls her eyes and you feel it in your bones. The one who always says what she thinks—who begins her sentences with “First of all…” and then lists what you ain’t gon do. I wanted to be the Black girl who white people are afraid of making angry.
But that Black girl wasn’t me. I longed for the immediate release of rage, but my mild-mannered nature would not allow me this luxury.
I wished I was Zora Neale Hurston, genuinely confused by any white people who would deny themselves her company. I wanted to be Nina Simone, quick to check anyone who would underestimate the beauty of her Blackness. I wanted to be Angela Davis, intellectual and bold, speaking truth to power about society’s treatment of Black people.
I wanted to be anyone but mild-mannered me.
And so my anger would boil, below the surface. I was launched right back into Dunbar’s poem. Austin wears the mask that grins and lies.
Instead of anger, I would try to communicate other emotions that I thought might receive an audience—pain, disappointment, sadness. I would roll up my sleeves and reveal the scars, cut myself open and hope the blood that emerged would move my listeners. I believed that I was taking Baldwin’s advice, that I was working to not be destroyed by my own rage. I thought I was getting to the bottom of it, but really I was denying it, covering it. All those years ago, on a bus in the South, I had watched a young Black woman state her rage with clarity and calm, despite how anyone else on that bus felt. But I couldn’t do it. I was more afraid of my own rage than I realized.
I tried to be the wise, patient teacher, the composed one. I tried to wear an air of unbotheredness, standing on something akin to moral superiority. But ultimately, these were attempts at self-restriction. I left my humanity at the door.
Then Audre Lorde saved me. In her book Sister Outsider, Lorde wrote an essay entitled “The Uses of Anger.” She writes that anger is not a shortcoming to be denied, but a creative force that tells us when something is wrong.
Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change…Anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification.
A sense of freedom fell over me as I read her words. Anger is not inherently destructive. My anger can be a force for good. My anger can be creative and imaginative, seeing a better world that doesn’t yet exist. It can fuel a righteous movement toward justice and freedom. I don’t need to fear my own anger. I don’t have to be afraid of myself. I am not mild-mannered. I am passionate and strong and clear-eyed and focused on continuing the legacy of proclaiming the human dignity of Black bodies.
Once upon a time I was mad that I wasn’t that Black girl. But I am not her. I am not the gum-snapping, head-rolling, don’t-think-I-won’t-make-a-scene Black girl. So who am I? That is the question I had to ask in order to make use of my anger.
I am not Zora, but I can decide not to measure my effectiveness in the ebbs and flows of white affirmation. I am not Nina, but I can defend Black dignity through writing and preaching. I am not Angela, but I am learning to speak truth to power in ways that are equally invitational and challenging.
It was hard at first, trusting my voice of anger. But Black life is full of opportunities to practice. And so I did. I wrote. And I spoke. And I engaged with others, and then I wrote some more. Just like Lorde promised, my anger led to creativity, to connections with others who were angry, too. My anger didn’t destroy me. It did not leave me alone and desolate. On the contrary, my anger undergirded my calling, my vocation. It gave me the courage to say hard things and to write like Black lives are on the line.
It shouldn’t have surprised me. I serve a God who experienced and expressed anger. One of the most meaningful passages of Scripture for me is found in the New Testament, where Jesus leads a one-man protest inside the Temple walls. Jesus shouts at the corrupt Temple officials, overturns furniture, sets animals free, blocks the doorways with his body, and carries a weapon—a whip—through the place. Jesus throws folks out the building, and in so doing creates space for the most marginalized to come in: the poor, the wounded, the children. I imagine the next day’s newspapers called Jesus’s anger destructive. But I think those without power would’ve said that his anger led to freedom—the freedom of belonging, the freedom of healing, and the freedom of participating as full members in God’s house.