Justice, Anger, and Companions in Stigma

 

 (3 minute read)

It is not the anger of [black women] that will destroy us, but our refusals to stand still, to listen to its rhythms, to learn within it, to move beyond the manner of presentation to the substance, to tap that anger as an important source of empowerment. I cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt, nor hurt feelings.

Audre Lorde, "The Uses of Anger" 

I've mostly been wary of anger my whole life. It can turn vicious. It can create resentment. However, it now seems odd to me that anger's potential to go wrong is often wielded as a decisive reason to suppress it. The reason that's odd is because we don't do that with other emotions. Take compassion and joy, for example. Compassion can lead to irrational, impulsive, wasteful philanthropy. It can leave us satisfied with having felt positive regard for those in need, though we have not acted meaningfully on their behalf. Feelings of compassion often lead to good-willed, but complacent, emotionalism. Joy, on the other hand, may lead us to be insensitive to the pain of others. Enamored with joy, we want to rush people out of lament. We are content with nothing less than positive spins (what psychologists call "toxic positivity"). Moreover, joy can create a fear of being unsettled by the world's harms. If we lean in and listen, if we confront injustice (like we should), we might not feel so joyful on the other end. Hence, we might be temped to not lean in and listen, to not confront injustice. These are some of the ways that pursuit of compassion and joy can go wrong

Still, none of these liabilities are decisive reasons to suppress these emotions. Instead, they are reasons to mature in them, to properly learn their rhythms.

Why not mature into anger as well?

At the very least, the fact that anger can go wrong is not itself a reason to suppress it––nor to stigmatize its manifestation in others––unless we are also willing to concede that the same liability is a reason to suppress compassion and joy––to stigmatize their manifestations in others. More likely, the fact that joy and compassion can go wrong is a reason to mature into each, to properly learn their rhythms, as Lorde might say. Unless there is something special about anger, we should treat it the same way.

Don't stigmatize anger. Learn its righteous rhythms.

Photo by Dominika Roseclay from Pexels