Revisiting Rage
White folks and Non Black individuals need not read this. I didn’t write this for you.
“My fear of anger taught me nothing.” -Audre Lorde
The closer I’ve come to embracing and cradling my full range of emotions, the more I’ve learned about my inherent worth. This is the same for other Black people, especially femmes and women like me. Anger was the first of my emotions that I knew I needed to observe, sit with, and question.
I
One morning (May 2020) I logged onto twitter, a heavy morning ritual and bad habit, to see yet another hashtag. Another Black person harassed, at best; murdered at worst. A heart crushing sadness overcame my chest. I’ve been longing for another feeling that didn’t resemble my organs burning. A fiery desire to act out of anger sparked in the space between my neck and jawline.
I thought about reposting the tweet, yet I couldn’t. Three thoughts raced through my mind, stopping me in my tracks. 1. I’m not on my personal twitter…what would these diversity and inclusion board members of mine say? 2. If I was on my personal account, would I want to expose my followers, many of whom are Black, to another video, another death… 3. I’m tired.
I brushed my present emotions under the rug of numbness and continued scrolling.
II
Audre Lorde wrote about embracing anger and the work that it does. She said that Black people, but particularly Black women cannot turn their anger off, away, or inward (intracommunally) in hopes that white people will somehow not be uncomfortable with their pain; or recognize their worth.[1]
More importantly, Audre leaned into why the intracommunal diversion of anger never leads to Black women being liberated from oppression. She concluded that we all must see and feel our anger and recognize it in others. Emotionally locate the source of the anger…accepting that pain has been caused.
With being seen and sharing emotions amongst one another, it can be easy to diminish feelings. It’s too facile to reduce our own folks to same stereotypes that we fear will be placed on ourselves.
“Violent”
“Indecent”
“Angry Black woman”
“Loud”
We are afraid of anger, partially, because we fear being a mirror. Being a mirror means we are reflecting what they said was true but understand nothing that white people imagined about us was ever true, complete, or real. Nothing they could ever say as a reproach towards us could ever be a measure of our worth.
What I desire to see is Black people getting to a place where we don’t deny one another or ourselves personhood or the ability to feel everything as is. NO FILTERS.
And know that yes, experiencing anger is exhausting, but holding anger in ain’t gonna solve a muthafuckin thing. We must find a way to process our emotional loads.
Personally, when I began a journey of embracing my rage, I recognized where all my other emotions came from, their conception. My rage spoke to me. It told me that I don’t need to harm or blame myself for the production of it. It isn’t always my fault. The emotional location of my disappointment, my fear, my eventual happiness was clearer when I knew what angered me and I sat in it for a little while.
Over the last decade what angered me the most was my own shame about who I am. I was told a lie. I was told a lie that alerted me to my suggested unworthiness. When I began to claim that I was worthy of existing in the truth of my being, my Blackness, my southernness, my queerness, my self-love which is so radical, family, friends, strangers, abusers, proclaimed otherwise. Intentionally or unintentionally, the harm caused by deep rooted shame placed on me from the world and myself permeated every segment of my life and I was so angry about it. For far too long I felt like I needed to escape this anger. In my efforts of trying to run from it, I harbored the anger against myself.
Begrudgingly, I sat in my pissyness until I couldn’t anymore. Low and behold, shame and anger transformed to rage. I somehow found a way to move.
III
Deciding to understand our rage and where it comes from is when we no longer find ourselves under the paralysis of doubt and shame about who we are and why we matter. However, in order to move (in life and through the waters of life), we must first allow anger to flow its natural course. Sometimes we must bask in the feeling. It’s essential that we do this in community with other Black folks and ensure that we aren’t turning this anger on ourselves or each other, which happens too often.
Lorde discussed this too, she questioned, “Why do Black women reserve a particular voice of fury and disappointment for each other?” She asks later, “…do I ever use my war against racism to avoid other even more unanswerable pain? And if so, doesn’t that make the energy behind my battles against racism sometimes more tenuous, or less clearheaded, or subject to unexpected stress and disappointments?”
What Audre gets at here is seeing how the pain of pressing anger towards one’s own people only creates issues around our movement work, around moving. That kind of pain and rage has an emotional location too.
So, what becomes of grief when it isn’t fully processed? Anger, yes but know that anger and rage as an energy force is powerful when it mobilizes people. The decolonization of our care, grief, sadness, despair, and anger… our myriad of emotions about the treatment of Blackness and Black folks must happen beyond the digital light. This screen you read from is not where we should solely hear each other’s anger.
This is not where we only must hold each other accountable for the anger and rage we harbor against one another. Your rage toward me does not change the fact that I am like YOU.
When we let anger flow its natural course, it can rally us to care for one another in powerful ways. Those ways may look like civil disobedience, activism, “riots,” but they may also appear in the form of artistic expression, dance and play.
I think about the artistic medium of dance regularly. I dance a lot (in and outside my head). Back in September of 2019, I remember carrying a heavy weight on my chest causing me to dim my light around people. My anger reared its head most days during that time. However, one day I attended a workshop led by Taller Balance Bomba Afro-Boricua. After the demonstrators and folks went through the cultural background and the historical significance of Bomba they invited dancers and instrumentalists. I stood on the sidelines of the large practice room at FSU while my feet were aching to act the fuck up on the dance floor. Something in me could not stand still or watch much longer. I had to move. So, I did and that anger was lifted off of my spirit.
Moving is what, in particular, Black femmes, women (trans and cis alike), non-binary folks must commit themselves to doing. A commitment to moving through emotions, through understanding, through caring and knowing that processing the grief they experience due to the anti-Blackness that exists on earth is a lifelong trek. Despite what anyone may feel about this work and the time that it takes, it is necessary that we take this time.
TAKE ALL THE TIME YOU NEED.
What might I do to ensure you work through the flow of your full emotions today? * Ask someone what angers them. Locate it and hold their anger in your hands and let it set you on fire.
In short, don’t deny yourself the right to feel. You ain’t numb. Your emotions matter.
Sending you all equanimity amid fire.
“Your fear of that anger will teach you nothing, also.” -Audre
*Sometimes you don’t have the capacity to help them through that flow and that’s okay.
[1] As an aside, white people have only written stereotypes about Black folks to aggrandize the lie(s) of their own superiority. The script that they wrote for Black people is not our existence. The script that they wrote for themselves alongside writing bullshit for Black people was also a lie (Matthew Morrison, Ericka Hart, and Ebony Donnley).
References:
Hart, Ericka and Ebony Donnley. Hoodrat to Headwrap Podcast. 2020. https://open.spotify.com/episode/4Pq9NLOoA0CcmCsJUec2TG?si=NB2_YB5CQjexHpnXcnQlCQ
Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider. Ten Speed Press, 1984.
Morrison, Matthew D. “Race, Blacksound, and the (Re)Making of Musicological Discourse.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 1 December 2019; 72 (3): 781–823. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2019.72.3.781
