10
Rage
To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost, almost all of the time—and in one’s work. And part of the rage is this: It isn’t only what is happening to you. But it’s what’s happening all around you and all of the time in the face of the most extraordinary and criminal indifference, indifference of most white people in this country, and their ignorance.
—James Baldwin
So there’s nothing I can do about my rage, is that what you’re telling me, Jimmy Baldwin? It’s a part of me because I am Black, I am living in America, and I am conscious of being Black and living in America, as he said in a 1961 conversation with Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hansberry, Emile Capouya, and Alfred Kazin.
But the people I see most often in a constant state of rage in this country are not Black and are debatably conscious. I know my rage comes from being thrust into a system where I’m subject to any number of historical and societal inequities that are deliberately in place to impede my success. I have rage against my oppression—but white people done stole that, too. Black people have been saying the system is rigged for generations, with proof being the state of their very lives, but now white people can cite minor inconveniences and blatant lies as reasons for their righteous indignation over the system. The same system that has been rigged for them. That their lives are unsatisfactory or disappointing is the result of the system also being rigged against anyone who isn’t rich enough to buy their way out of it.
No, to live in America, period, is to be in a state of rage almost all of the time. Strife is the national pastime. But more than anything, American rage is fueled by the bloody, destiny-manifesting history of America—one can never downplay the importance of history to what is happening now. It’s simply everywhere. To be an American, to live in America, is to be angry. To be an American, to live in America, and to be at any social disadvantage—whether it be race, gender identity, sexual orientation, immigration status, religion, or what have you—is to embody and inspire rage, as well as to experience it wholly while having it visited upon you constantly.
This rage is fueled by entitlement to, and often the subsequent denial of, the American Dream. It is fueled by the denial of reparations, both financial and spiritual, made for centuries of enslavement enforced upon Black people. It is fueled by the machinations of the rich and powerful to maintain their wealth and power by keeping the lower classes distracted from said machinations. It is fueled by ignorance, it is fueled by “fake news,” it is fueled by the unrelenting clip at which news and media are produced and consumed.
Our politicians have become clowns and fascists and hypocrites, beholden, regardless of party affiliation, to money and not to their constituents. America has never really had much of a moral leg to stand on, going back to the exploitation of indigenous people and then hundreds of years of slavery, followed almost immediately by Jim Crow, the internment of Japanese Americans, not to mention the myriad atrocities committed abroad, and way too many other things to list here. But the moral rot at the core of this country is eating us all alive.
Making it worse is the white indifference and white ignorance Baldwin mentions. White liberals are often accused, by the more radical on the political spectrum, of being indifferent to the capitalist excess at the root of nearly every problem in America. Instead, they choose to focus on appearing, rather than actually being, altruistic, in favor of their own comfort. Meanwhile, white conservatives are often accused of being ignorant by anyone who’s not a white conservative. White liberals have a dogged determination to be affirmed in their own thinking, no matter how wrongheaded or racist. Traditional media and social media only serve to amplify tensions that are already running high. And next thing you know you got a bunch of white folks storming the Capitol.
Because of course they did. White people can do anything with their rage. They don’t fear consequences, not the way Black folk do. The minute I saw what was going down on January 6, I knew if those rioters had been Black, the streets of DC would be running red with blood. Black people know they can’t win in a war against this country. But we don’t want war. Most of us don’t; some of us would love to drive a tank right through Mar-a-Lago. We mostly just want to be treated fairly. But America has a way of treating fairness as an undue burden. Reconstruction, the only real and substantive attempt to reckon with the impact of slavery in America, lasted a good five years before the whites got tired of conceding anything and the Blacklash began in earnest. Those salty white treasonous bastards called it the Redemption. The historical lack of any sense of irony among white people would be hilarious if it weren’t so atrocious.
Black rage has to be confined, to oneself, to one’s home, to one’s community, whereas no one is safe from white rage. White rage mows down kids in school, old ladies in church, random folks in supermarkets. White rage kills Black people with impunity. And so Black rage is also a product of impotence in the splotchy, pockmarked face of white rage. Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent approach in the civil rights movement might have been effective, to a degree, but not all Black people have been satisfied with passivity.
Black nationalist movements date back to the mid-nineteenth century with renaissance man Martin Delany. They reached their peak in the early twentieth with Jamaican-born activist Marcus Garvey and found powerful voices in Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and Huey Newton during the midpoint of that century. But before the white clown show stormed the Capitol in 2021, Black Panthers demonstrated at the California state capitol in 1967, armed to the teeth. They were there protesting, get this, a gun control bill, but their show of force inspired then governor Ronald Reagan to sign that bill into law, backed by, of all people, the National Rifle Association. Literally the only thing that can inspire the NRA to back gun control laws is Black folks with rifles.
In response to the obvious camaraderie between white militias and police officers, a Black nationalist militia formed in 2017 called the Not Fucking Around Coalition, or NFAC. They mostly showed up and marched, peacefully, at protests for racial justice, while defending their right to bear arms, the hill America will happily die on. Of course, a group of well-trained, heavily armed Black people can’t go unchallenged for long. Delany is all but forgotten to history, Garvey was deported, Malcolm X was assassinated, the FBI discredited Carmichael, and America just broke Huey Newton. In 2022, the NFAC’s leader, John Jay Fitzgerald Johnson, aka Grand Master Jay (not of Furious Five fame), was sentenced to seven years in prison for allegedly brandishing his gun at federal task force officers at a protest. Reader, please know that while typing that last sentence, my right hand paused out of instinct to mime a lazy hand job.
It’s surprising there haven’t been more Black militias, honestly. Well, it would be surprising if the FBI weren’t so good at its job. Of being racist. Not that I’m calling for a race war, but Black people have every right to be angry, to arm themselves, to storm the fucking Capitol, and not because some power-drunk asshole told them to. It’s the daily indignities, the historical atrocities, the generational trauma, the economic theft, and the refusal to apologize for any of it. Apology in the form of reparations, something that should’ve happened decades ago, but an idea that keeps regaining traction every few years. But America—its greedy politicians, their implicitly and explicitly racist white constituents, and the small-thinking white liberals who can’t conceive of a way of not being on the hook for said reparations—doesn’t believe in handouts, even when that money is owed, with hundreds of years of interest.
This indifference to Black trauma—you say sorry when you fucked up; that’s just the human thing to do—will always foster rage in Black Americans. That they’ve had to fight tooth and nail for every right they have is beyond insulting when the entire economy of this wealthiest nation in the history of the fucking world was built on the broken backs of their ancestors. Their ancestors were each promised forty acres and a mule, but they were given 160 years and counting of institutional discrimination. It’s barbaric. The Black rage that erupted into the streets in the summer of 2020 was about more than George Floyd or Breonna Taylor or the countless Black people killed with impunity by police. It was a primal howl for finally! fairness, finally! acknowledgment, finally! reparations, finally! A reckoning.
And then, as always, there was the Blacklash. Trump was the Blacklash to Obama, January 6 was the Blacklash to the previous summer’s Great Reckoning. Whiteness refuses to accept any form of comeuppance, and as a result it’s dragging us down into a hell of its own making. White people are like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, just lost and high on amphetamines (RIP Judy), running around with a bunch of questionable friends trying to solve a problem they’ve had the answer to all along. It’s like, you’re the assholes voting these other assholes into office off your grievances, who then do nothing to address those grievances. They just offer more grievances to keep themselves in power. Fix your mistakes, whites! But first, you have to admit you made them in the first place.
The American Condition is one of perpetual rage, which is why the most dangerous creature on the planet is an angry white American man. His power, his privilege, his predilection toward violence. Why is he angry? I’ve given up caring because the source of his rage no longer concerns me. We’re all angry now. Visibly, palpably, as if we’ve been given permission, where, for so many years, white men took the permission without ever asking for it. The angry white man has been a trope through wars and movements in which he was the center of the story. White male rage was righteous, whereas every other kind of rage was destructive, hysterical, primal.
Todd Phillips’s 2019 film Joker is among the most prominent, and popular, “angry white man” films of the past decade. There have been fewer and fewer of these kinds of films because there are more people of color and women behind and in front of the camera and so white men aren’t the only ones who get to be angry anymore. Which makes white men angry. Joker spoke to the anger of the post-Trump white man, whether he was a Trump supporter or not. As a gay man, I’ve always been far more interested in Catwoman, Michelle Pfeiffer’s peerless performance in 1992’s Batman Returns, putting nearly all subsequent superhero film acting to shame. But while Catwoman slinks in the shadows waiting for her own movie (and the 2004 schlock fest starring Halle Berry does not count…and I saw it in theaters), the Joker pops up again and again—just recently, three actors portrayed him on film, in big films, within a six-year period.
Heath Ledger’s iconic performance in The Dark Knight—the only performance to come close to Pfeiffer’s—spawned an army of imitators who menacingly asked, “Why so serious?” Jared Leto had big shoes to fill in 2016’s Suicide Squad, and he did not fill them. Joaquin Phoenix, however, won a Best Actor Oscar for his acclaimed turn in Phillips’s Joker. The film was an amalgamation of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, both superior films, both starring Robert De Niro acting the shit out of the screen. Both are also about angry white men, with 1976’s Taxi Driver perhaps being the ultimate example. 1982’s The King of Comedy is a bit more mercurial, less why-so-serious.
In Taxi Driver, De Niro stars as Travis Bickle, a young, lonely, insanely hot (I’m sorry, ’70s De Niro was…it) cabdriver who becomes more and more disconnected from society and takes it upon himself to rid New York’s filthy streets of the “scum” that disgusts him. He’s like Batman but poor. Which makes him a criminal. But also an antihero. Because he just wants to help, in his own way. And that way is intensely violent. On the other hand, De Niro’s King of Comedy character, Rupert Pupkin, has no savior complex; he just wants to tell jokes. He, too, is a lonely, white, hot (’80s De Niro could still catch it) man, but his anger is less obvious. Still, his entitlement—to fame and fortune, the late-twentieth-century American Dream—is strong. Pupkin eventually resorts to kidnapping his idol, Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis), and forcing his way onto Langford’s late-night talk show to do his routine.
Joker takes a similar premise: a would-be stand-up comedian obsessed with an older would-be mentor, Murray Franklin, played, in a meta move, by De Niro. But Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck is more Travis Bickle than Rupert Pupkin, and De Niro gets his aging but still hot head blown to pieces in the final act. On live television. And audiences, mostly white men, fell in love with this character. Joker was a huge box office hit and was nominated for and won multiple awards, with Phoenix particularly, and rightfully, singled out for his performance.
Still, some felt that Joker, like all movies about angry white men who turn to violence, often on a massive scale, glamorized and sympathized with the murderous and mentally ill Fleck. His profile was too close for comfort to the angry white men who shoot up public spaces IRL. And of course it glamorized him. Sure, it’s up to the audience whether they choose to sympathize with a character, but the filmmaker made the choice to paint Arthur Fleck cum the Joker as a victim. Another poor white man abandoned by society, whose mental illness went unchecked by a failing system. The profile of every mass shooter in America.
The Joker is not an antihero. He’s just a straight-up irredeemable villain. And he’s Batman’s boyfriend or something, because the two of them have a serious hard-on for each other. The Joker is a psychopath, but he’s dressed as a clown and does ridiculous, comical stunts that still kill people. Catwoman is an antihero because she had reasons, sometimes altruistic ones, for the bad things she does. Antiheroes seek justice, their own idea of justice, outside of traditional means. The Joker just seeks chaos. And people love chaos. Well, white men love chaos—because they’re the only ones who benefit from it.
Chaos represents tearing it all down, burning it to the ground, destroying the order of things, and that always hurts the most vulnerable in society. White men, however, would remain (or at least assume they will remain) at the top of the social hierarchy amid this chaos, just as white men now reign over the chaos of modern-day America. The Joker is wish fulfillment, the ability to have it all come crashing down and making a quip about it at just the right moment. A dozen people were fatally shot at a Home Depot. Why so serious?
Movies like Joker fetishize violence just in the casualness with which someone gets their fucking head blown off. When people are shot in TV shows or movies or video games, it’s just bang bang and you move on to the next. You don’t see the victim struggling for life for minutes on the ground, lying in a pool of their own blood, their intestines collapsing out of their rapidly dying body before they shit themselves. And even if you do, it doesn’t register because it’s just a TV show or movie or video game. It’s not real.
But when it is real, I can’t bring myself to look. Movies can make a killing so visceral, so up close, and in such high definition—but blurry dashcam footage is a bridge too far. I can’t watch Black people being hurt or killed in real life, not only out of sensitivity to it, but because of the sensitivity of it. I don’t want to watch it so often that it loses meaning, like violence has in every other corner of our society. Though sometimes I think it might behoove the public to release footage of mass shootings just so people can see what it means, so that it’s not just a flurry of headlines and numbers and places: Six Dead in Gainsborough, Eight Slain in Anaheim, Thirteen Slaughtered in Burlington. But they happen so often, what’s to keep us from getting inured to this damning footage just as easily?
The angry white man has given way to the angry other. Rage is no longer the sole domain and privilege of white men. In the 2023 Prime Video series Swarm, co-created by multihyphenate Donald Glover, Dominique Fishback stars as Dre, an obsessed fan of a Beyoncé-like superstar who kills offenders who have slighted her queen online. Serial killers are overwhelmingly white men, and television about white male serial killers has frequently been criticized for, again, sympathizing with brutal murderers. But I liked sympathizing with Dre.
I’m not a card-carrying member of the Beyhive, but I’m like a two-step away from that level of standom. Standom devotion is blind and unquestioning, like religion, and I’ve never been a fan of religion. But as a gay, I ride hard for my divas and don’t take kindly to anyone talking shit about them. Would I murder for Janet or Whitney or Bey? Probably not. We’ll see where life takes me, but. Probably. Not. Beyond her motives, I sympathized with Dre because she was Black, a Black woman on top of that. Black women are usually the victims in most murderous narratives—Zazie Beetz was the object of Joaquin Phoenix’s deranged attention in Joker, though she avoids a grisly end—and there Dre was killing folks with impunity like a white man. Equality, y’all!
Glover and his Swarm co-creator Janine Nabers had seen years of blameless white so-called antiheroes on television—Tony Soprano, Don Draper, Walter White—and they wanted to create a character in that similar archetype but as a Black woman. Dre is an antihero because she has a reason for her murders and we get to know her before she becomes a killer. So much of being an antihero is having a backstory. Once they’re a fully fledged character, it’s hard to condemn their actions outright. Dre is guilty over the death of her foster sister, who also loved their idol Ni’Jah, Swarm’s Beyoncé surrogate, and killing Ni’Jah’s detractors is her way of preserving her sister’s memory. Both Nabers and Fishback insist Swarm is a show, ultimately, about sisterhood. But it comes in bloody packaging, which is brilliant.
In a television landscape overcrowded with too much damn content, not nearly enough of it any good, Swarm broke through in a way most shows cannot because it understood the landscape into which it was entering. Stunts were pulled. The show had Malia Obama in the writers’ room; guest stars like Paris Jackson and Billie Eilish, the latter in her acting debut; and enough Beyoncé parallels to prompt a lawsuit. But above all, Dre was unlike any character seen on television. An angry Black woman who got away with it. She isn’t punished for her rage; if anything, she’s rewarded for it, which is something that never happens in America.
I chose to sympathize with Dre because as a Black person in America, I understand the urge to want to kill, and so for me, she was my wish fulfillment. White boys get Soprano, and Draper, and White, and Joker, and Joker, and Joker, as surrogates for their rage, and with Swarm I got mine. What does it say that we all apparently want to murder one another, though?
After his whole “in a state of rage almost, almost all of the time” observation, Baldwin went on to say something that hit particularly close to home: “To be a Negro writer,” he began, “at some point you have to decide that you can’t spend the rest of your life cursing out everybody that gets in your way.” To be a writer, he continued, you have to decide that “the suffering of any person” is “universal.” Even though I am in a constant rage, I’ve developed an empathy as a writer that keeps me from being fully consumed by that rage. I can understand why a rich white man might be angry—change, fear, guilt—but that doesn’t mean I have to agree with him. People, when you deal with them one on one, are mostly reasonable. It’s when you get them in a group, and get ’em all worked up, that nuance flies out the door. Is thrown out of the door, really. Fresh Prince style.
I know I’ve had challenges as a poor Black queer immigrant, that my life has been harder than most, but I think when you’ve suffered a lot, you tend to have more empathy for the suffering of others. That’s part of the reason why Black people have had a wealth of patience for white people. The Black church and its promise of glory in the afterlife is the other part. White man’s religion has kept Black people docile since the days of slavery, while also providing a respite from the turmoil and tragedy of their lives inflicted by white men. The white man, then, is both savior and persecutor, god and devil. But he is only human and vulnerable to lies, to fear, to ignorance. I can hope that even the worst among them can be changed when shown the error of their ways. As I’m not religious, however, I only hope for the best in people. I don’t blindly believe in it.
This hope, however, is what prevents me from cursing out everybody who gets in my way. Not just hope for the best in people, but hope for the best in myself. I stopped cursing people out (and I really used to do so…a lot) because I hated the way it made me feel. Any sense of victory or accomplishment is almost immediately replaced by guilt. It doesn’t feel good to hurt someone else’s feelings. Not when I’m fully aware that this person might be having a shit day, that this might not be the best version of themselves, that they’re probably experiencing their own pain. As a moody bitch, I know I’m not always my best self and that a warm smile and friendly greeting can go a long way. I can go into a situation expecting the worst, just ready to fight, but disarm me with kindness and I’m as harmless as a kitten. Sometimes all we really need is for someone to be nice to us.
Simply put, when I realized the world didn’t revolve around me, to my great chagrin, I also realized that not everyone is feeling what I’m feeling or knows what I’m feeling. Therefore, I can’t blame them for that. I can’t blame them for not knowing my innermost thoughts. And as a writer my mind tends to wander, so that I observe people and wonder what they’re going through, what they’re thinking. I accept the fact that others have an interior life to which I am also not privy. And who am I to assume anything about them?
Now don’t get me wrong: When I’m on my Michelle Obama kick and go high when they go low, sometimes I still wish I had cursed someone the fuck out. But ultimately I’m glad I didn’t. What if I see them again? Then we’re permanent enemies based on one unfortunate, and probably so fucking stupid, interaction.
In all stoned seriousness, the world would be a much chiller place if everyone just smoked weed. I started when I was around eighteen and that in turn started the very long process of my calming the fuck down. I’m high all the time. At this point, it’s a public service. Not-high me would for sure be cursing everybody out, throwing hands and shade out in these streets. Weed not only helps me keep calm and makes me less anxious, but it also helps with my writing. My flights of fancy are operated by Blunt Airlines on the Bong 7420. Is being stoned a crutch? Of course it is. So is religion, but who doesn’t need a crutch in life? This bitch’ll kick the legs right from under you.
If only weed could replace guns as America’s favorite vice. You want guns off the street? Set up a weed-for-guns buyback program. For every gun someone turns in, they get an ounce of weed—maybe a pound for automatic rifles, as added incentive. Mass shootings would drop, vibes would increase exponentially, and think of all the tax dollars from federally legalizing weed. That could pay for, like, a universal basic income or some shit. But then again, I’m high and I am also giving the US government far too much credit. UBI? In this economy?
…Yeah, come to think of it, that’d actually be pretty awesome.
Even though I’m stoned all the time, my rage hasn’t disappeared. It’s still there, resting under billowing clouds of blunt smoke, dormant but easily stirred. My rage has become something like a low, discordant chord always humming in the back of my head, threatening to crescendo at the most inopportune moments. The weed and my rage intermingle in the strangest ways, so at times I’m just pissed and high, quietly fuming and getting the munchies. I really don’t think there’s any getting rid of my rage, just managing it or, as Baldwin wrote in 1955’s Notes of a Native Son, learning “to live with it, consciously.” But as an artist, I have another option, something Black artists have been doing for decades, centuries, and that’s to channel my rage.
Baldwin’s good buddy Nina Simone wrote “Mississippi Goddam,” which she christened her first civil rights song, in under an hour. She later recalled that the song “erupted out of me quicker than I could write it down.” She wrote it in response to the killing of four Black girls in the 1963 bombing attack of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. “At first I tried to make myself a gun. I gathered some materials. I was going to take one of them out, and I didn’t care who it was,” Simone said after hearing of the Birmingham bombing. “Then Andy, my husband at the time, said to me, ‘Nina, you can’t kill anyone. You are a musician. Do what you do.’ When I sat down the whole song happened. I never stopped writing until the thing was finished.”
Having heard Simone recall the time she pulled out a gun and shot at a record company executive while demanding her money (she missed, but she was “sorry I didn’t get him”), I’m sure that Ms. Simone wasn’t kidding about taking “one of them out.” That act might’ve been cathartic, but it would’ve only served to end her life, or at least end her freedom. But “Mississippi Goddam,” which was also inspired by the murders of Emmett Till and Medgar Evers, both in Mississippi, had a much larger impact than what one act of violence in response to another could possibly hope to achieve.
The song didn’t end racism; it didn’t make sense out of the senseless deaths of those little girls or that little boy or that young man. But it expressed a shared outrage. It highlighted injustice. She performed and recorded it in 1964 at Carnegie Hall in front of an audience of mostly white people who didn’t know what to make of it. Some folks, particularly in the South, protested the song. “We got several letters where they had actually broken up this recording and sent it back to the recording company, really, telling them it was in bad taste,” Simone said in a 1964 interview on The Steve Allen Show. “They missed the whole point.”
They sure did, Nina. The outrage was at the song, not at the events that had inspired it. So often, particularly amid our social media frenzy, people get caught up in how something is said rather than what is being said. Because it’s easier that way, and, more important, it avoids having real and necessary conversations. Writing and performing “Mississippi Goddam” may have been a way for Nina Simone to channel her rage, but it didn’t lead her to finding any peace. She wrote in her autobiography about how lonely she felt being part of the civil rights movement, just like she “had been lonely everywhere else.”
Her whole life, she sometimes thought, had “been a search to find the one place I truly belong.” That sounds familiar. She felt betrayed by America and the stagnant pace of change. She would eventually abandon America, her husband, and her child, and she fell out with her father and refused to visit him on his deathbed. Plagued by a ceaseless rage—and, it must be said, mental illness; she had bipolar disorder—Simone alienated fans and friends alike, but her rage is her greatest legacy.
Sure, every car commercial, TikTok, and karaoke night has taken the joy out of “Feeling Good” and the charm out of “I Put a Spell on You,” but Nina Simone continues to inspire because of the fervor of her genius and how she used it to spark a light in the dark. “She never stopped speaking out against injustice,” Simone’s daughter, Lisa, told her biographer Alan Light (via a 2022 Vanity Fair article). “I think that Mom’s anger is what sustained her, really what kept her going. It just became who she was.”
That also sounds familiar…sorta like a low, discordant chord humming in the back of my head. Rage can, of course, be destructive. But whenever I’ve felt as if I had nothing, I knew I always had my rage, my rage at being denied what I thought was owed to me and the rage exacerbated by my persistent loneliness and poverty. I would channel that rage into my writing or into my workouts; it would fuel my drive to be better, it would ignite my will to survive, not just survive but to thrive!
So then I might have a certain reluctance to fully let go of my rage even if I could, for fear that if I didn’t have that old reliable hum in the back of my head, I wouldn’t have anything when times inevitably got hard. Rage is a fire. It’s not just uncontrollable anger, but a manifestation of passion. It’s forever a part of me, not just because I’m Black but because I am alive and I have an unrelenting passion for this life. I know what was sacrificed so that I might be here today, and I don’t take that sacrifice lightly. I have to live for my mother, as either penance or benediction.
It’s not that I love being alive or that I’m in love with the world and all its wonders! Being alive sucks a lot of the time. “I hate it here” has been a favorite mantra of mine for the past few years especially. But I consider this life a gift, and being alive a miracle; that you or I should exist at all in this cold, vast universe is extraordinary. In all that vastness, my rage is beyond insignificant, but that very rage is my lifeblood. In a way, rage is the lifeblood of the universe. Rage is atoms exploding and molecules crashing into one another; it’s the hearth fires and holocausts banked down inside of stars and inside of me.
To simply be alive is to be in a state of rage all the time! The world rages around you, always, just as thoughts and ideas, wants and desires, rage inside of you. Always. Rage, then, doesn’t always need to be uncontrollable or destructive; it can be propulsive, restorative. Revolutions are born of rage. Change is forced through rage. Progress can be made through rage. But that requires a focused, controlled rage. When rage is unfocused, or focused on the wrong thing, that’s just a precursor to chaos.
When Baldwin made his comments about being in a rage almost all the time, in 1961, the racial climate was slightly worse than it is now. Okay, it was much worse. I can admit that sixty-plus years have made some difference in the way Black people are treated in this country, but it’s still only sixty years. That’s a very short amount of time to completely upend the social order. Too short. That “we’ve come a long way, but there’s a long way to go” isn’t surprising, when you put sixty years in the context of four hundred years.
Despite having the style, disposition, and bedtime of an eighty-year-old widow, I was not, in fact, alive sixty years ago. But I know for a fact that it’s better now being a Black man than it was back then. Truly, I’m living in the best time in American history to be a queer Black man. I can be gay. Openly. Out in these streets. Tits out, cheeks flapping. I can, in theory, get married, but in reality—good luck, sis. I can kiss a white boy in public and not get stoned to death or lynched. Well, at least not in New York. I mean, that is a comforting thought…I guess.
I have an illusion of freedom my forefags couldn’t even dream of. But it’s still an illusion, because the apparatuses that oppressed those who came before me are still very much intact—white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism. Not until those systems are dismantled can any of us truly be free. I’m not saying to “tear it all down.” Just tear down the really terrible parts that are, you know, killing the planet. Nor am I saying I know how to go about making any of that change. Like, if I did, throw a Nobel Peace Prize in my face. But the first step in destroying an enemy is identifying it. As minorities gain more power, the threat of the destruction of those systems grows and becomes more and more a reality. And that terrifies white people, particularly those desperately clinging to power. I fear they would rather see America implode than relinquish their death grip on this country.
And that’s where rage comes in handy.
What I’ve learned is my rage isn’t just unfiltered anger, but rather a logical reaction to having seen too much of the world too soon. To be young, gifted, Black, queer, and containing multitudes is to know your place in the world before you’re able to fully understand the why of it all. Despite this knowledge, I love America, even though it seems to abhor me from time to time. I know my love might not seem evident since I criticize this country as constantly and harshly as a stereotypical Jewish mother, but like a Jewish mother, I do it out of love.
I loved learning about American history, the way all these people worked together for a common idea and changed the course of the world. I loved the fantasy of America I was sold by Schoolhouse Rock, “The Great American Melting Pot,” a country made great by our differences, that welcomed everyone to its shores. I guess that was a popular fantasy all around the world. But that’s all it was. Fantasy. America is still the land of opportunity; it’s just that opportunity is scarce and not everyone is “deserving” of it.
Yet look at me. Take a good long stare, I don’t mind. I came to this country when I was four, lost my only parent ten years later, went through any number of hardships and setbacks, and now you’re reading my book. That’s America, folks. It’s also luck, and talent, and tenacity, and any number of other factors, but I couldn’t be leading this life I lead back in Guyana. Or in many other places on this planet. I remember joking with my friends during Michelle Obama’s 2016 Democratic National Convention speech, about the part when she says, “America is the greatest nation on earth.” We were like, Is it, though? Maybe at the exact moment when she was speaking that was true, but at any other time, maybe top ten. And that’s a big maybe. But greatest? America doesn’t have the range for that.
I wonder about other places, though. Now more than ever I feel the need to get out of America. All signs point to “Fall of the Roman Empire.” I don’t know if that means leaving permanently, but I want to be somewhere else for a while. While I still can. Maybe Michelle Obama was right—she usually is—and America is the greatest nation on earth, but I’d like to see that for myself. I’d like to see other ways of living, perhaps find a country that more aligns with my values and finally quenches my dire thirst for love. The Black expat has always carried a romanticism for me: Josephine Baker, Nina Simone, James Baldwin. They, and so many other Black and queer American artists, found that they had to leave the confines of their own country in order to truly be free.
Free from the burden of expectation America places on you, on your work, on your body. Free from the stress of existing on land that broke the bones of one’s ancestors. Free to define who you are, free to find who you might be and have been all along. This freedom, too, is an illusion because of course Black folks are discriminated against on multiple continents and in multiple languages. But the whole world can’t be awful. Can it?…No!…Well, let’s hope not.
I guess I’m struggling with my faith in America, in the world. In the broadest, most general terms. As if America is one thing, as if the world could be easily reduced to a single idea. I struggle sometimes with defining what it is I’m mad at because it feels like everything is terrible. I’m mad at injustice in all its forms, and I’m mad at Americans’ increasing indifference to the truth, and I’m mad at indifference toward climate change. I’m mad at war, at microaggressions, at macroaggressions. I’m mad at white men for existing, mad at white men for not wanting me, at white women for being complicit. I’m mad at Black people for not rising up and taking what is ours, I’m mad at myself for not doing more, for not caring more, for not wanting to be better. I’m mad because I can’t get the boy I want, or the recognition I want, or the body I want. I’m mad because this rage is all I’ve ever known and because I know that if I wanted to, I could scream as easily as taking a breath. I’m mad because I don’t know what else to feel when everything feels too much and not enough. I’m mad that I have also grown numb to the way things are and will always be and there’s nothing I can do about it. It’s all so big and so much to consider and so overwhelming.
But I don’t have to face these issues all alone. I couldn’t if I wanted to. And none of us should have to face the problems of the world alone because we all live in the world, together. It is in the best interest of everyone to see that this ship doesn’t sink. We have to shake ourselves free of apathy and despair and get mad at the assholes keeping us from a healthy planet, from robust education, from healthcare, from a living wage, from universal housing, from a world free of poverty and hunger, from basic needs and wants that we can almost all agree on but are led to believe are impossible. Collective rage is our only chance for survival.
In 2008, diva shaman Erykah Badu came out with her third studio album, New Amerykah, Part One: 4th World War, a rumination on the American Dream’s failures for Black people. On the seventh track, “Twinkle,” Badu modernizes Peter Finch’s prescient monologue as mad-as-hell anchor Howard Beale from 1976’s Network: “I want you to get mad!” Beale originally says. “I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot. I don’t want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first, you’ve got to get mad. You’ve gotta say, ‘I’m a human being, goddammit! My life has value!’ ” Badu’s version repeats Beale’s speech nearly word for word because it remains far too prescient, even nearly fifty years later.
To be angry is to be aware. On the following track, “Master Teacher,” Badu coined the term “woke,” as in “I stay woke.” Rage effectively leads to an a-wokening. “Woke” has since been co-opted by ruddy-faced racists turned fascists—congresspeople, governors, former presidents—as the symbol of everything they’re fighting against, which is true: they detest, they fear enlightenment. Those ruddy-faced racists want to keep their followers ignorant and dim to maintain their own power. They want you to be angry, too, but at one another, not at them. They want us to be mad at superficial differences, at stupid things that don’t matter, rather than at the deep institutional flaws they ignore to our great detriment.
Politicians know the power of rage. They are imperfect vessels for change, but they should not be mistaken as the agents of change. They are merely people charged with doing a job, and if they suck at it, they shouldn’t be doing it. But the job is to serve the will of the people, not to serve their own whims. And the people have very basic needs—food, shelter, healthcare, and education that’s actually affordable and maybe a planet that’s not trying to actively get rid of us because we’re killing it—that are not being met. So what are we doing about it? While it’s imperative that we hold our elected officials accountable, moreover, we have to resist the stubborn human desire for a savior.
No one person can save us. No one person has the answers. We have to give enough of a damn to save our fucking selves. We can’t ignore our rage or succumb to it, but we must live with it consciously. We have to get mad as hell and refuse to take it anymore, as Howard Beale instructed all those decades ago. The only thing is, rage without direction or purpose just creates more chaos. Focused rage, though—that’s some scary shit. Focused rage can topple institutions, demolish ideologies, rally revolutions, step on the gas of progress, or simply destroy us all. In order to survive on this planet together, we have to believe we’re in this together and channel the ever-present rage and anxiety and angst of living in this world in this time into the only thing that matters today: the promise of tomorrow. Without which there’s no will to change, no hope for anything better…there’s…nothing.
So in the words of every rapper faced with the ubiquitous specter of haters: Stay mad. It might be the only thing that saves us.