Sweet Anger
There are white people upset at the threat of being cited by police for going outside without a mask. Black people are mourning and angry because another Black man has been killed outside, in broad daylight by the police. There are white people bitching about their freedom to be outside and to have free speech. Black people are still wondering where in this country can we truly be free!
I just don’t understand this. I see it happening over and over again, but it just makes no sense to me. Racism has never made sense to me. The despicable behavior of racists is beyond my capacity to fully explain. I can call it. I can define it. But I can never totally understand it. Can never make it make sense. In fact, I fear that in my attempt to understand it, to satiate my questions about it, that I will be plunged into the same dark abyss of evil from which I believe it emanates. So, it has remained throughout my life something that I know when I see and upon seeing, abhor with a passion.
What human being with any sense of decency uses their authority to crush the air passages of another human being while watching them struggle to get free enough to breathe? How do you position your knee on another human being’s neck refusing to move and listen to them gasp for air while crying out, “I cannot breathe”? What motivates those with you to stand by, watch and witness you commit murder without intervention?
There is no acceptable reason that George Floyd and so many others should be dead. (I can’t list their names today. I am already weeping as I write. Emotionally, I can’t yet again, call their many names.) I am tired of this massacre on repeat. Tired of having whatever peace I enjoy on one day be troubled the next. Yesterday, I felt calm. Today, all I have are tears and anger. Between the two, I cherish my anger most of all.
My anger gives me beautiful words to describe the murderers. I cherish every profanity-laced phrase floating through my mind right now. My anger transports me to an imagined uprising where Black and Brown people take control of the political engines of this country. My anger moves me to yell at the television and every device displaying the killer’s image. I need my anger right now because it keeps me from going insane. It is a passion that swells up inside me at the injustice so frequently on display in America. Anger won’t let me be impassive. It rocks my heated mind and ushers me into that familiar pathway called protest – in whatever form that takes.
I no longer yield my heart to hoping that murderers like these will be brought to justice. They may. They may not. I just don’t linger in that kind of hope. To what end? I’ve seen this too many times before. Should it be resolved another Black man another Black woman will once again be murdered in similar style. Some argue that the solution is in changing policing in America. Others say the answer is in prison abolition. Still others resort to religious responses. There may be some grain of truth in all of this. Right now, I’d rather hold on to my anger than limp towards the ever-moving goalposts of hope. At the very least, anger keeps me alert to the quotidian mores of white supremacist culture.
It seems to me that Black people are safer embracing anger than allowing ourselves to be pacified by the current systems responsible for delivering justice.