On the Power of Black Rage

“To Be a Negro and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage all the time.” ~ James Baldwin

James Baldwin (1924 - 1987) always says it best! His eloquent observation of Black anger in America engenders confusion and fear into the hearts of white people every where.  Yet this feeling is viscerally familiar to Black people every where. This “rage” has been and continues to be felt and expressed (and suppressed) by Black people from all walks of life, from hip hop artists to ministers, activists, writers, artists, and politicians. No one is immune from the epidemic of Black rage. All economic and educational levels are represented. The rage is real, pervasive, and persistent. 

“As a sapling bent low stores energy for a violent backswing, Blacks bent double by oppression have stored energy which will be released in the form of rage — black rage, apocalyptic and final.” ~ William H. Grier, Ph.D and Price M. Cobbs, Ph.D, Black Rage

Published just months after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929 - 1968), the groundbreaking book, Black Rage, pictorially describes the deep-seated feelings—and its effects—on Black people as individuals and as a community. Drs. William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs (both psychiatrists) were unremittingly bleak by design. “This dismal tone has been deliberate,” the authors wrote in the final pages. “It has been an attempt to evoke a certain quality of depression and hopelessness in the reader and to stir these feelings. These are the most common feelings tasted by black people in America.” (source?)

 But what is Black rage? Rage is visceral reaction to a severe victimization when all else seems hopeless. 

Again, James Baldwin shows the complexity:

Rage cannot be hidden, it can only be dissembled. This dissembling deludes the thoughtless, and strengthens rage and adds, to rage, contempt.

Rage is different for everyone but hails from a single source: racism. In Violence Against Black Bodies, sociologist Deborah Cohen describes Black rage as a “legitimate righteous response to persistent systematic social inequalities.” 

Feminist poet and essayist, Audre Lorde (1934 - 1992) has another description. In her essay, The Uses of Anger: Women responding to Racism, Lorde describes her “rage” response to racism, particularly acute coming from white feminists:

“My response to racism is anger. I have lived with that anger, ignoring it, feeding upon it, learning to use it before it laid my visions to waste, for most of my life. Once I did it in silence, afraid of the weight. My fear of anger taught me nothing….Women responding to racism means women responding to anger; the anger of exclusion, of unquestioned privilege, of racial distortions, or silence, of ill-use, stereotyping, defensiveness, mis-naming, betrayal, and cooperation.”  ~ Audre Lorde

Expanding on Baldwin’s sentiments to the Black feminist experience, Lorde notes, “Women of Color in America have grown up with a symphony of anger, at being silenced, at being unchosen, at knowing that when we survive, it is in spite of a world that takes for granted our lack of humanness, and which hates our very existence outside of its service.” ~ Audre Lorde, “Uses of Anger” in Sister Outsider

With her usual precision of language, Lorde’s description of Black rage as a “symphony”; a grand mixture of feelings orchestrated to bring us together shows the power of the rage. Indeed, Black rage does bring people of color together. From the enslaved Africans working in the fields and organizing their escape to freedom, to the Black Panthers teaching Black power and organizing services in their communities, to Black Lives Matter organizing against police violence, Black rage has—and continues to fuel—the struggle for racial equity and Black empowerment. 

Yet Black rage has lost its respectability. It is viewed as frenzied and animalistic rather than logical, intellectual or even understandable. With the former perspective, the containment and violence against Black people becomes justified and necessary. 

While Black people know the rage of “living Black” in America, white people either don’t understand it or simply don’t acknowledge it as Dr. Deborah Cohan’s “legitimate response” to racism. In its negative form, Black rage is distorted so that oppressed Black people are viewed as uncontrollable, thus delegitimizing and undercutting the hundreds of years of slavery, racism and oppression experienced by Black people in America.  However, the White privilege viewpoint shows a complete failure to acknowledge Black rage as coming from systematic white racism and oppression. Worst still, this “privilege” perspective prioritizes White anger and fear over Black rage—the classic “All lives matter” over “Black lives matter” scenario. 

Historically, rage has been a useful resource in social movements. In her controversial book, Violence against Black Bodies, sociologist Deborah J. Cohan acknowledges “rageful activism may counter the alienating effects of oppression by connecting people back to themselves, their freedom, and what they care most deeply about.”

 This is seen in the Black Lives Matter and the Black Panthers movements. Yet mainstream society recognizes only White rage, celebrating “heroes” of the American rebels at the 1773 Boston Tea Party fighting British oppression. The question arise: Is rage acceptable only when it is white rage?  (Audre Lorde mentions an encounter with a white academic woman who wanted to learn about racism but did not want to experience the rage of Black women.) 

Whether choosing to embrace rage to fuel their activism or replace their rage with respectability, rage nevertheless remains real. It can bring us together as a people. It can raise our consciousness. It can ignite a movement. And it remains deeply misunderstood and feared by white people. 

Back to Drs. Grier and Cobb’s book, Black Rage, the authors describe a world unchanged for African Americans: 

“The black man of today is at one end of a psychological continuum which reaches back in time to his enslaved ancestors,” they wrote. “Observe closely a man on a Harlem street corner and it can be seen how little his life experience differs from that of his forebears. However much the externals differ, their inner life is remarkably the same.”

Summing up Baldwin’s “perpetual rage” theory in the present day, bell hooks unapologetically says, “Blacks who lack a proper killing rage are merely victims.” 

Now consider this…

 “Daddy once told me there's a rage passed down to every black man from his ancestors, born the moment they couldn't stop the slave masters from hurting their families. Daddy also said there's nothing more dangerous than when that rage is activated (196)” 
― Angie Thomas (b. 1988), The Hate U Give (2017)

 Literature is a powerful learning tool.

Black rage is a consistent theme in Black literature from slavery to the present day. Slave narratives are not surprisingly rife with rage amidst the brutality, suffering and sadness of slavery. Unexpected is how the rage is expressed. In his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845), Frederick Douglass (1818 - 1895) wrote about his outwardly expressed rage arising from his brutal treatment during his enslavement. In her narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Harriet Jacobs (1813 - 1897), wrote about her inner and silent rage as an enslaved girl suffering sexual abuse and brutal treatment from her master. Five decades later, Richard Wright (1908 - 1960), son of sharecroppers, wrote about Black rage in his iconic novel, Native Son (1939). Authors Maya Angelou (1928 - 2014) and Alice Walker (b. 1944) wrote about the Black women’s rage towards white society’s cruelty and Black men’s dissonance. In The Street (1946), social activist author Ann Petry (1908 - 1997) expresses the rage of a single mother raising her son among the violence and poverty of Harlem. 

Rage is a pervasive literary theme in Steven T. Moore’s The Cry of Black Rage in African American Literature 2013). Contrasting the experience of black rage between men and women as well as black rage and white silence, Moore’s thought-provoking book shows the evolution of rage in Black literature and Black life.

Always be reading.