Hood Feminism Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot - Mikki Kendall Page 0,95
Anger can be cathartic, motivating, and above all else an expression of the innate humanity of any community. Demands that the oppressed be calm and polite and that forgiveness come before all else are fundamentally dehumanizing. If your child is killed by police, if the water in your community is poisoned, if a mockery is made of your grief, how do you feel? Do you want to be calm and quiet? Do you want to forgive in order to make everyone else comfortable? Or do you want to scream, to yell, to demand justice for the wrongs done?
Anger gets the petitions out, it motivates marches, it gets people to the ballot. Anger is sometimes the only fuel left at the end of a long, horrible day, week, month, or generation. It’s a powerful force, and sometimes when oppressors want to demonize the oppressed, the first thing they point to is anger. “Why must you be so mean?” or “I’m trying to help.”
There’s an element of saviorism that creeps into identifying as an ally. On paper being an ally sounds great: you come in and you use your privilege to help a marginalized person or group. But when we talk about an intersectional approach to feminism, we also have to understand that the reason the concept of intersectionality centers on Black women and justice is that Black women are the least likely to have the kind of class privilege that can grant them access to anything like justice. Even now, with camera phones and body cams to document wrongdoing, being able to generate public support can make a huge difference in whether justice is even an option.
After all the hashtags and the arguments online and off, I am perhaps best known for my anger, the way I wield it, and the way it has been framed as too dangerous. My rage is sometimes eloquent and often effective, and it occasionally feels eviscerating in its intensity. I believe in rage, believe in aiming it when I unleash it because I know it can be so powerful. My targets tend to be up, not down or sideways, from where I sit.
It’s true that social media has made it easier to see inflamed emotions. Facebook and Twitter are places where the marginalized can’t be silenced as easily. It’s a place where attracting attention to social ills is easier if solutions aren’t necessarily forthcoming. On social media, the narratives around anger, especially public anger, can be skewed by the collision of different social norms. But to paraphrase James Baldwin, to be aware of what is happening in this world is to be in an almost perpetual state of rage. Everyone should be angry about injustice, not just those experiencing it.
And we can’t afford to shy away from anger. Because the bigots who use anger as a political tool, as a way to motivate, as an incitement to violence, also have access to large platforms. And in some ways, they have the upper hand in terms of organizing oppression precisely because any attempts to confront issues within feminism are met by calls to not be divisive, at the expense of being effective and honest. While white male politicians and pundits are some of the biggest peddlers of rage, the fact is that misogyny and racism creep into interpretations of rage from the marginalized. The power that could be brought to bear by addressing the roots of anger and working to resolve the problems is wasted on demands that individual feelings be a priority above safety.
Politeness as filtered through fragility and supremacy isn’t about manners; it’s about a methodology of controlling the conversation. Polite white people who respond to calls for respect, for getting boots off necks with demand for decorum, aren’t interested in resistance or disruption. They are interested in control. They replicate the manners of Jim Crow America, demanding deference and obedience; they want the polite facade instead of disruption. They insist that they know best what should be done when attempting to battle and defeat bias, but in actuality they’re just happy to be useless. They are obstacles to freedom who feel no remorse, who provide no valuable insight, because ultimately, they are content to get in the way. They’re oppression tourists, virtue-signaling volunteers who are really just here to get what they can and block the way, so no others can pass without meeting whatever