Rage and Respectability: Conflicting Masks in the Halls of Civility and Layered Racial Injustice

Another improvement in the communication of smothered feelings, but also another opportunity to turn in a more analytical direction, not taken.

Let us assume that the anger or rage triggered by the sort of indignity you have in mind—I have been called "dirty Jew" in both Russian and Ukranian at times when it would have been in a literal sense worse than fatal to respond, so I have some rough idea what you mean—is an emotion different than whatever else we call anger (or rage) so as to require a distinction among those words. I think that was not productive use of the space you gave it, but even if I am missing an important analytical element, that's really the only such moment in the essay. Everywhere else feeling, in this case feeling an emotion that jams thinking, has displaced thinking. The one other element present is the description (entirely accurate, but not made precise for any purpose) of the process by which white supremacy (or, for that matter in the Soviet Union, anti-Semitism) demands radical containment of subordination's natural response.

Good so far as it goes, but it needs to go further precisely in order to transcend the political condition of which it complains. You can do that.

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Black woman are never supposed to be angry. Sassy? Absolutely. Funny? But of course. Shady? Maybe just a touch, but no more than that otherwise people start to get their feelings hurt. But we are never supposed to be angry. In predominantly white institutions where safe spaces are prime, Black women are often forced to fold themselves (ourselves?) into nearly impossible positions so we are never perceived as threats, even as we ourselves are placed in positions where we feel threatened. We are constantly toeing the line, walking carefully between the shores of rage and respectability.

Anger, which is by no means unique to the Black woman oft has to be suppressed by us in predominantly white settings, buried and built upon until it explodes. And then we are dismissed, Black women don’t get angry. We become enraged. The difference between the two lies in the level of control we are able exercise over both emotional states. We believe anger is the more transient of the two states and one we don’t allow ourselves to indulge in too often. We wrongly assume that if we ignore it or push it down or “rise above it” (as we are often told to do which is PWI coded language for do not engage because “nothing is more dangerous than playing into a stereotype” and by having feelings we “let them win”), our anger will pass. The more pressing belief is that our anger must pass. Perhaps this would be true if we were allowed the fullness of freedom to feel and express a full range of human emotions, and thus being allowed to feel angry in those trying moments, we could in fact get past them. But the world has little patience for us and has little tolerance for the angry black woman. In every historically steeped sense of the phrase, we are given a very short leash. In law school and the larger legal field, the leash—like the limit—does not exist. Black women have no opportunity to express our anger in a safe and accepted way.

This of course has consequences.

When anger is built up over time, it collects and it is no longer so easily pushed aside. It simmers, flexing and expanding with each and every unwanted advance, every micro-aggression, every ignorant comment, every run in with hoteps who champion Blackness at the expense of Black womanhood. To be a Black woman in predominantly white spaces is to be constantly and continually besieged with bullshit. All the while putting on a brave face.

Black women don’t get angry, we become enraged.

Unlike anger, which may be wrestled with, rage is much more difficult to control. Anger is prompted. Rage is triggered. And when it is, it is something else. You can spot a face that looks nothing like those faces from long ago—faces you have no hope of ever remembering—and that anger that was yet unavailable to you in that moment fights its way to the surface, no longer the acute anger that you knew but an uncontrollable by-product of your collective experiences. In the legal world, there is no room even for that. When Black women even approach anything that looks like anger, red flags go up, and we are forced to find shelter in the respectability doctrine: one must go along to get along.

This became evident during a conversation I had with a friend last month. As another woman of color who had been through the job search, she wanted to make sure I knew as much as she did about Big Law. I listened attentively while she schooled me on everything from practice areas to the kinds of things I would “have to deal with” in the office. I pushed her on the latter and was dumbfounded when she told me about how one of her co-workers had referred to one of her friends in the office as a “fucking nigger.” I bit back my immediate response--as my training dictated—and asked her what her response had been. Essentially, she had reported the woman to human resources, while declining to give HR the woman’s name.

“I didn’t want to rock the boat.”

When she said this, the corners of my mouth turned down. I immediately flashed back to my time abroad—as the only Black woman in a 12 person house--when one of my flat mates made a joke about me being a nigger . I remembered jumping over the small living room table that separated us, slamming my fist into the wall by his head and screaming “how fucking dare you?!” I remembered telling him that if he ever did anything like that I would kill him and seeing the shocked faces of my flat mates who had never seen anything but the happy person that I was (and still am). I remembered walking calmly back to my room and locking the door before falling to the floor, crying so hard my shoulders shook, partly because of what had been said and partly because the person in the living room was so completely outside myself.

I remembered that and tried to imagine myself in the office scenario. I shuddered at the idea of being in a place that forced you to control the uncontrollable. I realized she was still waiting on my response.

“That sounds horrible.”