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CHAPTER ONE
KILLING RAGE
MILITANT RESISTANCE
I am writing this essay sitting beside an anonymous white
male that I long to murder. We have just been involved
in an incident on an airplane where K, my friend and traveling
companion, has been called to the front of the plane and
publicly attacked by white female stewardesses who accuse
her of trying to occupy a seat in first class that is not assigned
to her. Although she had been assigned the seat, she was
not given the appropriate boarding pass. When she tries to
explain they ignore her. They keep explaining to her in loud
voices as though she is a child, as though she is a foreigner
who does not speak airline English, that she must take another
seat. They do not want to know that the airline has
made a mistake. They want only to ensure that the white
male who has the appropriate boarding card will have a seat
in first class. Realizing our powerlessness to alter the moment
we take our seats. K moves to coach. And I take my seat
next to the anonymous white man who quickly apologizes to
K as she moves her bag from the seat he has comfortably
settled in. I stare him down with rage, tell him that I do not
want to hear his liberal apologies, his repeated insistence that
"it was not his fault." I am shouting at him that it is not
question of blame, that the mistake was understandable, but
that the way K was treated was completely unacceptable,
that it reflected both racism and sexism.
He let me know in no uncertain terms that he felt his
apology was enough, that I should leave him be to sit back
and enjoy his flight. In no uncertain terms I let him know
that he had an opportunity to not be complicit with the
racism and sexism that is so all-pervasive in this society (that
he knew no white man would have been called on the loudspeaker
to come to the front of the plane while another
white male took his seat - a fact that he never disputed).
Yelling at him I said, "It was not a question of your giving
up the seat, it was an occasion for you to intervene in the
harassment of a black woman and you chose your own comfort
and tried to deflect away from your complicity in that
choice by offering an insincere, face-saving apology."
From the moment K and I had hailed a cab on the New
York City street that afternoon we were confronting racism.
The cabbie wanted us to leave his taxi and take another; he
did not want to drive to the airport. When I said that I
would willingly leave but also report him, he agreed to take
us. K suggested we just get another cab. We faced similar
hostility when we stood in the first-class line at the airport.
Ready with our coupon upgrades, we were greeted by two
young white airline employees who continued their personal
conversation and acted as though it were a great interruption
serve us. When I tried to explain that we had upgrade
coupons, I was told by the white male that "he was not
to me." It was not clear why they were so hostile.
When I suggested to K that I never see white males receiving
such treatment in the first-class line, the white female insisted
that "race" had nothing to do with it, that she was just
trying to serve us as quickly as possible. I noted that as a
line of white men stood behind us they were indeed eager
to complete our transaction even if it meant showing no
courtesy. Even when I requested to speak with a supervisor,
shutting down that inner voice which urged me not to make
a fuss, not to complain and possibly make life more difficult
for the other black folks who would have to seek service
from these two, the white attendants discussed together
whether they would honor that request. Finally, the white
male called a supervisor. He listened, apologized, stood quietly
by as the white female gave us the appropriate service.
When she handed me the tickets, I took a cursory look at
them to see if all was in order. Everything seemed fine. Yet
she looked at me vath a gleam of hatred in her eye that
startled, it was so intense. After we reached our gate, I
shared vath K that I should look at the tickets again because
I kept seeing that gleam of hatred. Indeed, they had not
been done properly.
I went back to the counter and asked a helpful black skycap
to find the supervisor. Even though he was black, I did
not suggest that we had been the victims of racial harassment.
I asked him instead if he could think of any reason
why these two young white folks were so hostile.
Though I have always been concerned about class elitism
and hesitate to make complaints about individuals who work
long hours at often unrewarding jobs that require them to
serve the public, I felt our complaint was justified. It was a
case of racial harassment. And I was compelled to complain
because I feel that the vast majority of black folks who are
subjected daily to forms of racial harassment have accepted
this as one of the social conditions of our life in white supremacist
patriarchy that we cannot change. This acceptance
is a form of complicity. I left the counter feeling better, not
feeling that I had possibly made it worse for the black folks
who might come after me, but that maybe these young white
folks would have to rethink their behaviors if enough folk
complained.
We were reminded of this incident when we boarded the
plane and a black woman passenger arrived to take her seat
in coach, only the white man sitting there refused to move
He did not have the correct boarding pass; she did. Yet he
was not called to the front. No one compelled him to move
as was done a few minutes later with my friend K. The very
embarrassed black woman passenger kept repeating in a soft
voice, "I am willing to sit anywhere." She sat elsewhere.
It was these sequences of racialized incidents involving
black women that intensified my rage against the white man
sitting next to me. I felt a "killing rage." I wanted to stab
him softly, to shoot him with the gun I wished I had in my
purse. And as I watched his pain, I would say to him tenderly
"racism hurts." With no outlet, my rage turned to overwhelming
grief and I began to weep, covering my face with
hands. All around me everyone acted as though they could
not see me, as though I were invisible, with one exception. The
man seated next to me watched suspiciously whenever I
reached for my purse. As though I were the black nightmare
at haunted his dreams, he seemed to be waiting for me to
strike, to be the fulfillment of his racist imagination. I leaned
towards him with my legal pad and made sure he saw the title
written in bold print: "Killing Rage."
In the course on black women novelists that I have been
teaching this semester at City University, we have focused
again and again on the question of black rage. We began the
semester reading Harriet jacobs's autobiography, Incidents
the Life of a Slave Girl, asking ourselves "where is the
rage?" In the graduate seminar I teach on Toni Morrison we
pondered whether black folks and white folks can ever be
subjects together if white people remain unable to hear black
rage, if it is the sound of that rage which must always remain
repressed, contained, trapped in the realm of the unspeakable.
In Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye, her narrator
says of the dehumanized colonized little black girl Pecola
that there would be hope for her if only she could express
her rage, telling readers "anger is better, there is a presence
in anger." Perhaps then it is that "presence," the assertion
of subjectivity colonizers do not want to see, that surfaces
when the colonized express rage.
In these times most folks associate black rage with the
underclass, with desperate and despairing black youth who in
their hopelessness feel no need to silence unwanted passions.
Those of us black folks who have "made it" have for the
most part become sldfled at repressing our rage. We do wbat
Ann Petry's heroine tells us we must in that prophetic forties
novel about black female rage The Street. It is Lutie Johnson
who exposes the rage underneath the calm persona. She declares:
"Everyday we are choldng down that rage." In the
nineties it is not just white folks who let black folks know
they do not want to hear our rage, it is also the voices of
cautious upper-class black academic gatekeepers who assure
us that our rage has no place. Even though black psychiatrists
William Grier and Price Cobbs could write an entire book
called Black Rage, they used their Freudian standpoint to
convince readers that rage was merely a sign of powerlessness.
They named it pathological, explained it away. They
did not urge the larger culture to see black rage as something
other than sickness, to see it as a potentially healthy, potentiaully
healing response to oppression and exploitation.
In his most recent collection of essays, Race Matters, Cornel
West includes the chapter "Malcolm X and Black Rage"
where he makes rage synonymous with "great love for black
people." West acknowledges that Malcolm X "articulated
black rage in a manner unprecedented in American history,"
yet he does not link that rage to a passion for justice that
may not emerge from the context of great love. By collapsing
Malcolm's rage and his love, West attempts to explain that
rage away, to temper it. Overall, contemporary reassessments
of Malcolm X's political career tend to deflect away from
"killing rage." Yet it seems that Malcolm X's passionate ethical
commitment to justice served as the catalyst for his rage.
That rage was not altered by shifts in his thinking about
white folks, racial integration, etc. It is the clear defiant articulation
of that rage that continues to set Malcolm X apart
from contemporary black thinkers and leaders who feel that
"rage" has no place in anti-racist struggle. These leaders are
often more concerned about their dialogues with white folks.
Their repression of rage (if and when they feel it) and their
silencing of the rage of other black people are the sacrificial
offering they make to gain the ear of white listeners. Indeed,
black folks who do not feel rage at racial injustice because
their own lives are comfortable may feel as fearful of black
rage as their white counterparts. Today degrees and intensities
of black rage seem to be overdetermined by the politics
of location-by class privilege.
I grew up in the apartheid South. We learned when we
were very little that black people could die from feeling rage
and expressing it to the wrong white folks. We learned to
choke down our rage. This process of repression was aided
by the existence of our separate neighborhoods. In all black
schools, churches, juke joints, etc., we granted ourselves the
luxury of forgetfulness. Within the comfort of those black
paces we did not constantly think about white supremacy
and its impact on our social status. We lived a large part of
our lives not thinking about white folks. We lived in denial.
And in living that way we were able to mute our rage. I
black folks did strange, weird, or even brutally cruel acts now
and then in our neighborhoods (cut someone to pieces over
a card game, shoot somebody for looking at them the wrong
way), we did not link this event to the myriad abuses and
humiliations black folks suffered daily when we crossed the
tracks and did what we had to do with and for whites to
make a living. To express rage in that context was suicidal.
Every black person knew it. Rage was reserved for life at
home - for one another.
To perpetuate and maintain white supremacy, white folks
have colonized black Americans, and a part of that colonizing
process has been teaching us to repress our rage, to never
make them the targets of any anger we feel about racism.
Most black people internalize this message well. And though
many of us were taught that the repression of our rage was
necessary to stay alive in the days before racial integration,
we now know that one can be exiled forever from the promise
of economic well-being if that rage is not permanently
silenced. Lecturing on race and racism all around this country,
I am always amazed when I hear white folks speak about
their fear of black people, of being the victims of black violence.
They may never have spoken to a black person, and
certainly never been hurt by a black person, but they are
convinced that their response to blackness must first and
foremost be fear and dread. They too live in denial. They
claim to fear that black people will hurt them even though
there is no evidence which suggests that black people routinely
hurt white people in this or any other culture. Despite
the fact that many reported crimes are committed by black
offenders, this does not happen so frequently as to suggest
that all white people must fear any black person.
Now, black people are routinely assaulted and harassed by
white people in white supremacist culture. This violence is
condoned by the state. It is necessary for the maintenance
of racial difference. Indeed, if black people have not learned
our place as second-class citizens through educational institutions,
we learn it by the daily assaults perpetuated by white
offenders on our bodies and beings that we feel but rarely
publicly protest or name. Though we do not live in the same
fierce conditions of racial apartheid that only recently ceased
being our collective social reality, most black folks believe
that if they do not conform to white-determined standards
of acceptable behavior they will not survive. We live in a
society where we hear about white folks killing black people
to express their rage. We can identify specific incidents
throughout our history in this country whether it be Emmett
Till, Bensonhurst, Howard Beach, etc. We can identify rare
incidents where individual black folks have randomly responded
to their fear of white assault by killing. White rage
is acceptable, can be both expressed and condoned, but black
rage has no place and everyone knows it.
When I first left the apartheid South, to attend a predominantly
white institution of higher education, I was not in
touch with my rage. I had been raised to dream only of
racial uplift, of a day when white and black would live together
as one. I had been raised to turn the other cheek.
However, the fresh air of white liberalism encountered
when I went to the West Coast to attend college in the
early seventies invited me to let go some of the terror and
mistrust of white people that living in apartheid had bred
in me. That terror keeps all rage at bay. I remember my
first feelings of political rage against racism. They surfaced
within me after I had read Fanon, Memmi, Freire. They
came as I was reading Malcolm X's autobiography. As Corel
West suggests in his essay, I felt that Malcolm X dared
black folks to claim our emotional subjectivity and that we
could do this only by claiming our rage.
Like all profound repression, my rage urdeashed made me
afraid. It forced me to turn my back on forgetfulness, called
me out of my denial. It changed my relationship with home
with the South - made it so I could not return there. Inwardly,
I felt as though I were a marked woman. A black person unashamed
of her rage, using it as a catalyst to develop critical
consciousness, to come to full decolonized self-actualization,
had no real place in the existing social structure. I felt like
an exile. Friends and professors wondered what had come
over me. They shared their fear that this new militancy might
consume me. When I journeyed home to see my family I felt
estranged from them. They were suspicious of the new me.
The "good" southern white folks who had always given me a
helping hand began to worry that college was ruining me. I
seemed alone in understanding that I was undergoing a process
of radical politicization and self-recovery.
Confronting my rage, witnessing the way it moved me to
grow and change, I understood intimately that it had the
potential not only to destroy but also to construct. Then and
now I understand rage to be a necessary aspect of resistance
struggle. Rage can act as a catalyst inspiring courageous action.
By demanding that black people repress and annihilate
our rage to assimilate, to reap the benefits of material privilege
in white supremacist capitalist patriarchal culture, white
folks urge us to remain complicit with their efforts to colonize,
oppress, and exploit. Those of us black people who
have the opportunity to further our economic status willingly
surrender our rage. Many of us have no rage. As individual
black people increase their class power, live in comfort, with
money mediating the viciousness of racist assault, we can
come to see both the society and white people differently.
We experience the world as infinitely less hostile to blackness
than it actually is. This shift happens particularly as we buy
into liberal individualism and see our individual fate as black
people in no way linked to the collective fate. It is that link
that sustains full awareness of the daily impact of racism on
black people, particularly its hostile and brutal assaults.
Black people who sustain that link often find that as we
"move on up" our rage intensifies. During that time of my
life when racial apartheid forbid possibilities of intimacy and
closeness with whites, I was most able to forget about the
pain of racism. The intimacy I share with white people now
seldom intervenes in the racism and is the cultural setting
that provokes rage. Close to white folks, I am forced to witness
firsthand their willful ignorance about the impact of race
and racism. The harsh absolutism of their denial. Their refusal
to acknowledge accountability for racist conditions past
and present. Those who doubt these perceptions can read a
white male documenting their accuracy in Andrew Hacker's
work Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal.
His work, like that of the many black scholars and
thinkers whose ideas he draws upon, highlights the anti-black
feelings white people cultivate and maintain in white supremacist
capitalist patriarchy. Racial hatred is real. And it
is humanizing to be able to resist it with militant rage.
Forgetfulness and denial enable masses of privileged black
people to live the "good life" without ever coming to terms
with black rage. Addictions of all sorts, cutting across class,
enable black folks to forget, take the pain and the rage away,
replacing it with dangerous apathy and hard-heartedness. Addictions
promote passive acceptance of victimization. In recent
times conservative black thinkers have insisted that
many black folks are wedded to a sense of victimization. That
is only a partial truth. To tell the whole truth they would
have to speak about the way mainstream white culture offers
the mantle of victimization as a substitute for transformation
of society. White folks promote black victimization, encourage
passivity by rewarding those black folks who whine,
grovel, beg, and obey. Perhaps this is what Toni Morrison's
character Joe Trace is talking about when he shares in Jazz
the knowledge his play-father Mr. Frank taught him, "the
secret of kindness from white people - they had to pity a thing
before they could like it." The presence of black victimization
is welcomed. It comforts many whites precisely because it is
the antithesis of activism. Internalization of victimization renders
black folks powerless, unable to assert agency on our behalf.
When we embrace victimization, we surrender our rage.
My rage intensifies because I am not a victim. It burns in
my psyche with an intensity that creates clarity. It is a constructive
healing rage. Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich
Nhat Hanh teaches that self-recovery is ultimately about
learning to see clearly. The political process of decolonization
is also a way for us to learn to see clearly. It is the way to
freedom for both colonized and colonizer. The mutuality of
a subject-to-subject encounter between those individuals who
have decolonized their minds makes it possible for black rage
to be heard, to be used constructively.
Currently, we are daily bombarded with mass media images
of black rage, usually personified by angry young black
males wreaking havoc upon the "innocent," that teach everyone
in the culture to see this rage as useless, without meaning,
destructive. This one-dimensional misrepresentation of
the power of rage helps maintain the status quo. Censoring
militant response to race and racism, it ensures that there
will be no revolutionary effort to gather that rage and use
it for constructive social change. Significantly, contemporary
reinterpretations and critiques of Malcolm X seek to redefine
him in a manner that strips him of rage as though this were
his greatest flaw. Yet his "rage" for justice clearly pushed
him towards greater and greater awareness. It pushed him
to change. He is an example of how we can use rage to
empower. It is tragic to see his image recouped to condone
mindless anger and violence in black life.
As long as black rage continues to be represented as always
and only evil and destructive, we lack a vision of militancy
that is necessary for transformative revolutionary action. I
did not kill the white man on the plane even though I remain
awed by the intensity of that desire. I did listen to my rage,
allow it to motivate me to take pen in hand and write in the
heat of that moment. At the end of the day, as I considered
why it had been so full of racial incidents, of racist harassment,
I thought that they served as harsh reminders compelling
me to take a stand, speak out, choose whether I will be
complicit or resist. All our silences in the face of racist assault
are acts of complicity. What does our rage at injustice mean
if it can be silenced, erased by individual material comfort?
If aware black folks gladly trade in their critical political consciousness
for opportunistic personal advancement then there
is no place for rage and no hope that we can ever live to
see the end of white supremacy.
Rage can be consuming. it must be tempered by an engagement
with a full range of emotional responses to black
struggle for self-determination. In midlife, I see in myself
that same rage at injustice which surfaced in me more than
twenty years ago as I read the Autobiography of Malcolm X
and experienced the world around me anew. Many of my
peers seem to feel no rage or believe it has no place. They
see themselves as estranged from angry black youth. Sharing
rage connects those of us who are older and more experienced
with younger black and non-black folks who are seeking
ways to be self-actualized, self-determined, who are eager
to participate in anti-racist struggle. Renewed, organized
black liberation struggle cannot happen if we remain unable
to tap collective black rage. Progressive black activists must
show how we take that rage and move it beyond fruitless
scapegoating of any group, linking it instead to a passion
for freedom and justice that illuminates, heals, and makes
redemptive struggle possible.