Black People Don’t Have Freedom of Emotion (Anger) in America. Why?
A look at one of the Freedoms Black People Do not Have.
Living in an Emotional Cage
Anger is an emotion characterized by antagonism toward someone, or something you feel has deliberately done you wrong. Anger can be a good thing. It can give you a way to express negative feelings, for example, or motivate you to find solutions to problems. But excessive anger can cause problems. Increased blood pressure and other physical changes associated with anger make it difficult to think straight and harm your physical and mental health. ~ Encyclopedia of Psychology
I tend to speak out against bigotry, a lot. I speak a lot on racism and sexism, devoid of concern for how uncomfortable it may make a white person or a male. With that said, I tend to find the varying responses to my sociopolitical talk a tad bit fascinating. It’s the comically wrathful, accusatory responses that I find the most telling. Red Herring is the tactic of deflecting good points — to avoid having to listen to you so that they don’t have to bother with understanding your point of view. An ad hominem is a personal attack on a person to discredit them from the discussion. The “angry black man” accusation serves as both in a conversation or debate. In other words, it’s the equivalent of sand being kicked in your face, followed by a swift punch to the crotch in what otherwise should have been a clean fight.
Understanding Anger, Accusations, and Illusions
I always pushed to be the calm, cool articulate fellow, which always warranted great respect throughout my entire life. With that being said, I adopted this maxim; Only Get Angry On Purpose. This means understanding that anger denotes a lack of control, but it’s also a natural human emotion. It is also a necessary one — it can serve as a motivator to get things done. I’ve noticed that this accusation gets thrown around a lot, “angry black man,” throughout my time speaking and listening to others.
It gets categorically comical when someone attempts to exaggerate the accusation to the point of accusing me of hating white people. At that point, I’m at the end of “hilarity,” which is quite far from being angry or the type of “angry” they accuse. I will then tell them that anti-racism is NOT a zero-sum game, and we are in this together. Respecting people’s differences and people being different is paramount. Then I continue with my discussion without further pivoting.
The intent of tone policing is to protect whoever has the sociological privilege. In this case, it is to protect white privilege and protect white supremacy.
Now that I’m a bit older and looking at a lot more material in the psychology realm, I begin to question the totality of the “angry black man” accusation. I used to diffuse this accusation by pointing out my calm and cool. Now I’m beginning to approach what this pejorative accusation implies: black people, black men especially, are NOT allowed to be angry, ever. When you think about the gravity of that implication, it’s astounding.
Approximately 45,000,000 people in this United States of America — Black people — are not allowed to be angry. To say that’s “a bit emotionally paralyzing” is a profound understatement.
When you then, as a black person, objectively observe (and study) the anger and response of people of white privilege, the results are quite shocking. As a white person, you can be angry and even go further, and project aggression, rage, and wrath, without consequence, have such behaviors totally validated. As a white person, not only can you be visibly irate, but you can also stack guns, create political militias and stare down government officials while being armed to kill; walk-in restaurants with rifles on your back and sidearms on your hip. On top of that, no one will ever call you the “angry white man” as a pejorative. In fact, you might be called in for a job on a Republican political campaign or find space in conservative media. In fact, white anger is summoned for political means all the time; it’s politicians’ normal behavior. But to summon “black anger” seems to be some evil “dark power,” a “dirty tactic” in politics in America. Even a president of the United States, if black, isn’t socially allowed to get mad — even when anger is logically reasonable.
Fascinating stuff.
The Angry black man myth comes from the American Slavery/Reconstruction Era where black people, men especially, had to live in a constant state of terror their entire lives, and honestly, a white person who witnessed a black man reasonably “angry” as a threat to the white way of life in America. A black man who was visibly angry was kept under control by lynching him, killing him. Anger was not tolerated from blacks as slaves or blacks as free men. So, white fear of the angry black man stems from American Slavery — which means that blacks were not the only ones affected by slavery, and those effects still linger for black and white people of America.
Anger and Aggression Projection
I’ll pause for a second to point out that “anger” and “projecting aggression” are two different things. While one can lead to another, they are not the same thing. Anger is a natural human emotion; projecting aggression is something someone does to persons, places, and things. Violent action plus anger equals rage. Blacks are not socially allowed to be reasonably irate. White privilege extending into violence always occurs in America. Black anger, even in existence, has nothing on white rage. They are not on equal terms. Not even close.
It is not a moot point to observe the fact that in the eyes of whiteness, Black anger is treated like aggression. In other words, white people treat angry Black people as if those angry Black people have already broke something, or harmed someone’s physical body. White people equate Black people’s emotion as literal violence, even when no actual violence occurred.
I once spoke on Black people being held in an infinite (futile) state of taking care of your irrational fear. The angry Black man myth is an extension of that fear. As a Black man in America, I am objectively observing (studying) white people’s wrath and rage, and I find myself jealous of how white people can infinitely express themselves at all times with the full spectrum of emotionality of the human spirit. Meanwhile, as a Black person, I am to be on good behavior at all times, as if I were infinitely staged as a child in a school play, regardless of my age.
I begin to wonder should I be angry when my emotional disposition comes to question. “Should I be?” Anger deals with a psychological interpretation of having been threatened; socio-psychological boundaries are being infringed. So nowadays, when I get accused of being angry, I calmly retort in a sarcastic tone, “oh excuse me, isn’t that allowed?”
I no longer duck and dodge being angry; I embrace it.
Years ago I began to question if I am allowed to be angry or not. I began to question why does these sociological restrictions exist for Black people. That was my starting point. Perhaps we all should ask these same questions.
