On the Usefulness of Anger

Photo by Julio Cortez/Associated Press

Given the events of the past few months, the past few days, and ultimately, yesterday (Friday, 29 May), it is safe to say that the country is on fire. This isn’t hyperbole; we’re seeing conflict bred of racial oppression of a virulent and systemic kind. I’m purposefully using virulent here to emphasize that racism isn’t merely a social act; it is very much a part of the DNA that led to the founding of this country and remains very much a part of our identity.

It stems from deep rooted ignorance that goes back to (at the very least) our European ancestors and their sense of exceptionalism that led to the conquest of much of the world, their empire building, and the concomitant subjugation of the peoples they invaded/slaughtered/enslaved. NOTE: I’m not going to go off into a discussion about racism and imperialism in non-European nations’ histories. I’ll acknowledge that it is just as virulent and just as ugly, but what concerns me here is the country I was born in and am a citizen of.

The history of racism in the United States is etched into our DNA. Even if you think you are not a racist, if you’re honest, you’ll find those uncomfortable areas in your personality that are like shadows, however fleeting. What I propose here is not to examine racism from the perspective of those who perpetrate it, but to examine more accurately why those who experience it every day, every moment of their lives have a right, perhaps even a duty to protest violently.

To do so, I’m looking at two closely related emotions; hatred and anger. The one is self-defeating in the end and leads to utter destruction of the hater as anything remotely human. Anger, on the other hand, has a usefulness. It can lead to hatred if unchecked, but I see a function that is often dismissed by the religious and the passive-aggressive.

Anger is often born of frustration. Within ourselves, it comes up when we don’t pay attention. A simple example is stubbing our toe on furniture. We curse the furniture and fume until the emotion clears and the glandular responses settle down. Then, we either laugh at ourselves for not turning the light on or looking where we were going and promise ourselves to do better next time or, well, we don’t.

A more detrimental anger is born of frustration with other human beings. Yelling at strangers who cut us off (either in traffic or conversation), brow-beating co-workers, simmering with rage at a call center representative or a relative. We know that getting angry is mostly unwarranted, but when we pass the threshold of expressing ourselves In measured tones, and begin weaponizing our words, then we enter the waters of conflict. We are determined to win this battle. We don’t care who we hurt and often feel that we are justified in doing so. It can get ugly. We don’t apologize or repent after the storm and sometimes take solace in knowing we’ve ruined a total stranger’s day. Or that we’ve torn apart a once valued relationship.

After such outbursts, if there’s even a slight degree of empathy, we feel remorse, apologize, attempt to make amends. Hopefully, we learn from this and comport ourselves differently in the future.

But there are degrees of anger and dimensions of causality. Most of what I’ve described are internally felt senses of being encroached on, not getting our way, and some form of resistance from the outside world to achieving our goal (however tiny or meaningless or great and grand).

Zooming out from this internality, most would probably feel that a more rational response to the occasion would better assist us. The outside world doesn’t mean to cause us grief. The call service rep is doing his best to help us, our relative didn’t intend to flick a switch or push our button (and if they did, so what?).

However, what if it is the case that the outside world does mean to cause us pain? What would it feel like if simple tasks like going for a walk were scrutinized with an eye searching for a way to frustrate that moment? What if not getting a job because someone else simply didn’t like you was a routine, almost foreordained, affair?

This is the stuff we say of Kafkaesque nightmares. It’s silly to think that would ever be the case. Sure, you’d get angry if someone said you couldn’t go here or there if it was their property. You’d suck it up if you were passed over for a job if you got another one down the line. Just imagine, though, if this were a regular feature of your life.

I want to leave this thought there for a minute and come back to it soon enough.

Hatred. Hatred is something far more corrosive. It eats the individual up in a way that no other emotion does. Hatred results in systemic reactions of disgust and verbal, if not physical violence. 

There is no room for dialog with hatred. Hatred grows like a poisonous vine that kills what it grows on, fertilized by its on-going clinging to self-righteousness, to prioritizing my self above all others. 

Hatred may be couched in social ideals, the most obvious of which are classism, colonialism, and racism. And it is the last that concerns us the most here.

There is a collision course with hatred in the form of racism in this country with the legitimate and reasonable anger of the oppressed. The oppressed in this moment are African-Americans who are and have been historically disproportionately subject to the worst aspects of the ruling race. I’m most assuredly putting this in the starkest of terms. Every one of us who are white are part of what I’m calling the “ruling race”.

It sounds ugly, doesn’t it? It sounds like we’re all KKK or Nazis, doesn’t it?

Yet, every one of you who might be reading this, if you’re white, ask yourself this: have you ever felt threatened by the police at being pulled over? Have you ever been denied advancement because of your race? Have people looked at you “funny” because they were obviously uncomfortable by your appearance?

Oh, I’m sure some of you will say, “yeah, well, the hiring manager was black and that’s why I was passed over for the job” or “yeah, I was somewhere where I was really out of place” and you’ll follow this up with “I know how it feels.” No. No, you fucking don’t.

On the day that the hiring manager passed you over for the job, you weren’t worried about getting pulled over by a cop who might decide to take his frustrations out on you and possibly kill you. You weren’t concerned about a random white woman calling the cops on you because you were walking through a park or a nice neighborhood. You probably didn’t start the day of the job interview wondering how you’d explain to your kids why they got beat up at school today (and probably got called into the principal’s office for being unruly and fighting) or how’d you soothe their feelings of pain, sorrow, and terror after being called the n-word or mocked for their appearance and skin color.

No, I’m sorry (not), friend. Your experienced of “reverse racism” is not that. It’s at worst, inconvenience. As a thought experiment in attempting to generate empathy, take that sense of inconvenience and multiply it exponentially until almost every moment is focused on how to get around encountering something like that inconvenience, just to get one moment’s peace. Just to feel that there’s a safe place in the broader community you can go with your friends and family and not be judged or worse, assaulted and/or killed.

I said above that anger is frowned upon by religion. There are sound reasons for that. That’s why there are injunctions to practice patience, generosity, and understanding. You don’t need a religion to figure that out, but this is instructional. There are strategies for growing away from being so reactive.

That’s a luxury that few have and principally, it is the ruling race who actually has the lion’s share of luxuries. (I’m not relinquishing that ugly phrase; it needs to be emphasized how very lucky the melantonin-challenged are.) If you lived under constant threat of losing your job, your life, you might be a little sensitive to the forces at work in the society in which you find yourself.

Now let’s look at what living in a world where people who look like you are regularly humiliated by the ruling race (phoning the police on you because you “don’t look like you belong here” or just being talked down to on a regular basis or any number of micro-aggressions that happen so much you can’t be sure if you imagined it or not – societal gaslighting). Or at the next level, frustrated in simply getting a promotion because some co-worker told your manager you were “playing the race card” or maybe the hiring manager thought you were playing the race card all by himself. Or at the next level, you’re stopped on the street by a couple of cruisers’ worth of police and interrogated about your recent whereabouts and that you had been identified as a criminal – and maybe you get lucky and you are released. Or maybe you’re not – and at the next level, you’re a statistic. You’re one more black man (or woman; white law doesn’t seem to discriminate here) who wasn’t respectful enough, didn’t bend enough, didn’t kiss ass enough.  And your legacy is besmirched by the onslaught of what you did in the past, how you weren’t nice to someone or had been caught on video drunk at a club or committed a minor crime or … and the arresting officers and by extension, the ruling race gets off in a pure sheen of white light. “It’s too bad they couldn’t just be more respectful.”

But this doesn’t happen to you. It happens to members of your community, it happens to someone you know, it happens to a family member. Your cousin, brother, father. It happens to your best friend. It happens one day then another. It happens in Dade County or it happens in Minneapolis. It happens in L.A. or it happens in New York It goes on and on. It happens on high-profiled caught-on-video but it happens more unrecorded, daily, by the hour, perhaps the minute. Even if it doesn’t, the chemicals are always there, waiting for a catalyst.

There’s the ruling race’s looks, pointed words, refusal to acknowledge your presence. There’s the phone call on you even though you’re a tenured professor at an Ivy League university. There’s the threat of a phone call for letting someone know that their dog needs to be leashed.

Anger is justified in this case more than in any other.

We see the quote from Martin Luther King, Jr. a lot on social media these days (“[A] riot is the language of the unheard”), but it’s instructive to quote him in full:

“But it is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the negro poor has worsened over the last twelve or fifteen years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity."

Reverend King contextualizes the why of the anger and the resulting rioting that needs to be understood. It’s unlikely that contemporary white people who need to understand this will grasp the context anymore than their antecedents. But let’s persist.

The danger of anger is metastasizing into hatred. We are seeing in real time, the result of hatred. There’s no polite word for it. Hatred and racism go hand in hand. The ignorance that fuels both is an ever-present gasoline. Ignorance doesn’t excuse racism. However, it can be combated and I’ll get to that in a bit.

First, though, while I see the utility of anger, it’s important to not cling to it. Anger spends itself and once spent, it’s a good time to reflect and see what can be done to move forward. The party who has been the immediate (and proximate) cause of that anger is required to recognized that the anger didn’t arise out of nowhere and the canard that “they weren’t the ones who did this” is beside the point. You own a store that got set on fire? I’m sorry that happened, but maybe it’s a good time to ask a larger question: where do you fit in the narrative of the murder of one more black person?

The temptation is to go down a Marxist route and blather about the evil of capitalist exploitation and how owning property is supreme in the hierarchy of social relationship. I don’t need to do that, though. The fact that the most vocal of the ruling race will be more upset by and decry the reports of looting than the brutal murder of one more black man (captured on video) should be self-explanatory. (Interestingly, at least one property owner gets it:

)

How to deal with what is before us? Black people have been practically begging for white people to listen to them and do something about their self-perceived (and toxic) exceptionalism/superiority complex. The bullshit flows and the deaths continue.

It doesn’t take a genius to see what needs to happen. The underlying ignorance that leads to hatred and that misplaced sense of superiority needs to be met. The first line item there would, ordinarily, be education. But there are two obstacles to that of a very high order.

One is defining the very type of education required. I don’t mean that there needs to be classes in our schools focused on race relations (though that wouldn’t be a bad start); the education I have in mind needs to be deep and pervasive. It would require the ruling race waking up to its own illusion of superiority, seeing its hypocrisy for what it is, and understanding the moral groundwork for why it needs to move away from clinging to its antipathy to others. Indeed, the deepest education would be in engaging with and dismantling the construction of the  Other.

The second obstacle is to actually politically engage with the opposition. It’s obvious who the enablers are and it’s obvious why they continue their divisive, ugly tactics. Their clinging to power is as deeply rooted in their make-up as their ignorance.

Political engagement means debating and voting at the very least. If you can write, write; if you’re an artist, get to work addressing this divide. But mainly, don’t let the bullshit spread. Rather like Covid-19, racism is a virus. It spreads with a sneeze, with a “well, they’re like that…oh, no, I’m not racist, but you know some of them act this way and that and wind up tarring their people with the same brush…sad, really <sniff-sniff>”. You meet this by calling your fellow ruling race members (if you’re white) out. I’ve done it; you can do it. I’d rather take my chances with a racist attempting to punch my lights out than live with not doing anything.

Beyond that? Listen. Listen deeply to the voices of the oppressed and don’t assume because you read Martin or Malcolm or attended an African American Studies class in college that you know it all. Don’t assume because you “have a black friend” that you’re an expert. Shut the fuck up and listen.

Get yourself educated and not merely about what you see in the news and on your Twitter or Facebook feeds. Get educated about yourself; what are you blind spots? What are you not seeing? 

What makes you uncomfortable? And how do you inhabit that space of discomfort? Are you angry that “they” are rioting and always asking for reparations and equality? Are you angry that “they” are ungrateful? Are you angry that “they” think the world owes them a living and by god, “they’re” just freeloaders taking advantage of the system and are going to take over the country and drive it into a welfare state? Are you?

Because if you are, you have a great deal of leaning ahead of you and a good place to begin would be with questioning your assumptions.

The least anyone can do is vote. You know who needs to go. You know who are pulling the strings and stacking the courts and doing their best to ensure that the corporate class and the ruling race maintain hegemony over the unwashed masses. You see it every day. You see it in the mounting deaths from the pandemic and the routine murder of black people. These two are not separate. Both are caused by a casual disdain for those who suffer inequity.

If I could offer one last possibility; for those who have friends or family who don’t see why there are riots and why can’t “these people behave”, I recommend regarding them with a degree of sympathy but take a hardline. If someone tells you that they’re not racists, that they didn’t kill George Floyd, they may not grasp their complicity and you can try to explain that to them or you can simply tell them: “no, you and I don’t  get to make the rules here – pay attention to what’s going on more deeply and not with what you think is your understanding of history or sociology: look very long and deeply in the mirror and question your assumptions.” Will that do any good? Hell, I don’t know. We need to start somewhere.