Anger

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Despite our recent economic gains, Black women are still the lowest paid group in the nation by sex and race. This gives some idea of the inequity from which we started. In Staples’ own words, Black women in 1979 only “threaten to overtake black men” [italics mine] by the “next century” in education, occupation, and income. In other words, the inequity is self-evident; but how is it justifiable? Black feminists speak as women because we are women and do not need others to speak for us. It is for Black men to speak up and tell us why and how their manhood is so threatened that Black women should be the prime targets of their justifiable rage. What correct analysis of this capitalist dragon within which we live can legitimize the rape of Black women by Black men? At least Black feminists and other Black women have begun this much-needed dialogue, however bitter our words. At least we are not mowing down our brothers in the street, or bludgeoning them to death with hammers. Yet. We recognize the fallacies of separatist solutions. Staples pleads his cause by saying capitalism has left the Black man only his penis for fulfillment, and a “curious rage.” Is this rage any more legitimate than the rage of Black women? And why are Black women supposed to absorb that male rage in silence? Why isn’t that male rage turned upon those forces which limit his fulfillment, namely capitalism? Staples sees in Ntozake Shange’s play For Colored Girls “a collective appetite for black male blood.” Yet it is my female children and my Black sisters who lie bleeding all around me, victims of the appetites of our brothers. Into what theoretical analysis would Staples fit Patricia Cowan? She answered an ad in Detroit for a Black actress to audition in a play called Hammer. As she acted out an argument scene, watched by the playwright’s brother and her four-year-old son, the Black male playwright picked up a sledgehammer and bludgeoned her to death. Will Staples’ “compassion for misguided black men” bring this young mother back, or make her senseless death more acceptable? Black men’s feelings of cancellation, their grievances, and their fear of vulnerability must be talked about, but not by Black women when it is at the expense of our own “curious rage.” If this society ascribes roles to Black men which they are not allowed to fulfill, is it Black women who must bend and alter our lives to compensate, or is it society that needs changing? And why should Black men accept these roles as correct ones, or anything other than a narcotic promise encouraging acceptance of other facets of their own oppression? One tool of the Great-American-Double-Think is to blame the victim for victimization: Black people are said to invite lynching by not knowing our place; Black women are said to invite rape and murder and abuse by not being submissive enough, or by being too seductive, or too . . .

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  CHRYSOSTOM. With such ill designs they came to the chief Priest, seeking a sanction whence a prohibition should have issued. There were at that time several Chief Priests, while the Law allowed but of one, whence it was manifest that the dissolution of the Jewish state was having its beginning. For Moses had commanded that there should be one Chief Priest, whose office should be filled up at death; but in process of time it grew to be annual. All those then who had been Chief Priests1, are here called Chief Priests. REMIGIUS. They are condemned both because they were gathered together, and because they were the Chief Priests; for the more the numbers, and the higher the rank and station of those who band together for any villany, the greater the enormity of what they do, and the heavier the punishment stored up for them. To shew the Lord’s innocence and openness, the Evangelist adds, that they might take Jesus by subtilty, and kill him. CHRYSOSTOM. For what then did they conspire, to seize Him secretly, or put Him to death? For both; but they feared the people, and therefore waited till the feast was over, for they said, not on the feast-day. For the Devil would not that Christ should suffer at the Passover, that His Passion might not be notorious. The Chief Priests had no fear in respect of God, namely, that their guilt might be aggravated by the season, but took into account human things only, Lest there be an uproar among the people. ORIGEN. By reason of the parties among the populace, those who favoured and those who hated Christ, those who believed and those who believed not. LEO. (Serm. 58, 2.) This precaution of the Chief Priests arose not from reverence for the festival, but from care for the success of their plot; they feared an insurrection at that season, not because of the guilt the populace might thereby incur, but because they might rescue Christ. CHRYSOSTOM. But their fury set aside their caution, and finding a betrayer, they put Christ to death in the middle of the feast. LEO. (Serm. 58, 1.) We recognise here a providential arrangement whereby the chief men of the Jews, who had often sought occasion of effecting their cruel purposes against Christ, could never yet succeed till the days of the paschal celebration. For it behoved that the things which had long been promised in symbol and mystery should be accomplished in manifest reality, that the typical lamb should be displaced by the true, and one sacrifice embrace the whole catalogue of the varied victims. That shadows should give way to substance, and copies to the presence of the original; victim is commuted for victim, blood is abolished by blood, and the festival of the Law is at once fulfilled and changed. 26:6–136. Now when Jesus was in Bethany, in the house of Simon the leper,

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Of unleashing the damned gall where hatred swims like a tadpole waiting to swell into the arms of war? And what does that war teach when the bruised leavings jump an insurmountable wall where the glorious Berlin chestnuts and orange poppies hide detection wires that spray bullets which kill? My poems are filled with blood these days because the future is so bloody. When the blood of four-year-old children runs unremarked through the alleys of Soweto, how can I pretend that sweetness is anything more than armor and ammunition in an ongoing war? I am saving my life by using my life in the service of what must be done. Tonight as I listened to the ANC speakers from South Africa at the Third World People’s Center here, I was filled with a sense of self answering necessity, of commitment as a survival weapon. Our battles are inseparable. Every person I have ever been must be actively enlisted in those battles, as well as in the battle to save my life. June 9, 1984 Berlin At the poetry reading in Zurich this weekend, I found it so much easier to discuss racism than to talk about The Cancer Journals. Chemical plants between Zurich and Basel have been implicated in a definite rise in breast cancer in this region, and women wanted to discuss this. I talked as honestly as I could, but it was really hard. Their questions presume a clarity I no longer have. It was great to have Gloria there to help field all those questions about racism. For the first time in europe, I felt I was not alone but answering as one of a group of Black women—not just Audre Lorde! I am cultivating every iota of my energies to do battle with the possibility of liver cancer. At the same time, I am discovering how furious and resistant some pieces of me are, as well as how terrified. In this loneliest of places, I examine every decision I make within the light of what I’ve learned about myself and that self-destructiveness implanted inside of me by racism and sexism and the circumstances of my life as a Black woman. Mother why were we armed to fight with cloud wreathed swords and javelins of dust? Survival isn’t some theory operating in a vacuum. It’s a matter of my everyday living and making decisions. How do I hold faith with sun in a sunless place? It is so hard not to counter this despair with a refusal to see. But I have to stay open and filtering no matter what’s coming at me, because that arms me in a particularly Black woman’s way. When I’m open, I’m also less despairing.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  It is the need to give voice to the complexities of living with cancer, outside of the tissue-thin assurance that they “got it all,” or that the changes we have wrought in our lives will insure that cancer never reoccurs. And it is a need to give voice to living with cancer outside of that numbing acceptance of death as a resignation waiting after fury and before despair. There is nothing I cannot use somehow in my living and my work, even if I would never have chosen it on my own, even if I am livid with fury at having to choose. Not only did nobody ever say it would be easy, nobody ever said what faces the challenges would wear. The point is to do as much as I can of what I came to do before they nickel and dime me to death. Racism. Cancer. In both cases, to win the aggressor must conquer, but the resisters need only survive. How do I define that survival and on whose terms? So I feel a sense of triumph as I pick up my pen and say yes I am going to write again from the world of cancer and with a different perspective— that of living with cancer in an intimate daily relationship. Yes, I’m going to say plainly, six years after my mastectomy, in spite of drastically altered patterns of eating and living, and in spite of my self-conscious living and increased self-empowerment, and in spite of my deepening commitment to using myself in the service of what I believe, and in spite of all my positive expectations to the contrary, I have been diagnosed as having cancer of the liver, metastasized from breast cancer. This fact does not make my last six years of work any less vital or important or necessary. The accuracy of that diagnosis has become less important than how I use the life I have. November 8, 1986 New York City If I am to put this all down in a way that is useful, I should start with the beginning of the story. Sizable tumor in the right lobe of the liver, the doctors said. Lots of blood vessels in it means it’s most likely malignant. Let’s cut you open right now and see what we can do about it. Wait a minute, I said. I need to feel this thing out and see what’s going on inside myself first, I said, needing some time to absorb the shock, time to assay the situation and not act out of panic. Not one of them said, I can respect that, but don’t take too long about it.

• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  In Acts, the tribunal of the Roman magistrate was often the safest refuge of the Christian missionaries against the hatred of the Jews and the fury of the mob. Paul was proud that he was a Roman citizen, and he repeatedly claimed the rights to which every Roman citizen was entitled. In Philippi, he put the local magistrates in their place by revealing his citizenship (Acts 16:36-40). In Corinth, Gallio dismissed the complaints against Paul with impartial Roman justice (Acts 18:1-17). In Ephesus, the Roman authorities protected him from the rioting mob (Acts 19:23-41). In Jerusalem, the Roman tribune rescued him from what might have become a lynching (Acts 21:30-40). When the Roman tribune in Jerusalem heard that there was to be an attempt on Paul's life on the way to Caesarea, he took every possible step to ensure Paul's safety (Acts 23:12-31). When Paul despaired of justice in Palestine, he exercised his right as a citizen and appealed direct to Caesar (Acts When he wrote to the Romans, he urged upon them obedience to the powers that be, because they were ordained by God and were a terror only to the evil and not to the good (Romans 13:1-7). Peter's advice is exactly the same. Governors and kings are to be obeyed, for their task is given to them by God. It is a Christian's duty to fear God and honour the emperor (1 Peter 2:12-17). In writing to the Thessalonians, it is likely that Paul points to the power of Rome as the one thing which is controlling the threatening chaos of the world (2 Thessalonians 2:7). In Revelation, there is nothing but blazing hatred for Rome. Rome is a Babylon, the mother of prostitutes, drunk with the blood of the saints and the martyrs (Revelation 17:5-6). John hopes for nothing but Rome's total destruction. The explanation of this change in attitude lies in the wide development of Caesar-worship, which, with its accompanying persecution, is the background of Revelation. By the time of Revelation, Caesar-worship was the one religion which covered the whole Roman Empire; and it was because of their refusal to conform to its demands that Christians were persecuted and killed. Its essence was that the reigning Roman emperor, who was seen to embody the spirit of Rome, was divine. Once a year, everyone in the Empire had to appear before the magistrates to burn a pinch of incense to the godhead of Caesar and to say: `Caesar is Lord.' After they had done that, people were able to go away and worship any god or goddess they liked, as long as that worship did not infringe decency and good order; but they had to go through this ceremony in which they acknowledged the emperor's divinity.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  He owned numerous homes, a 1953 Rolls-Royce, a sleek houseboat, and closets filled with expensive suits. Jim and Tammy Faye had gone from living in a trailer to amassing salaries and bonuses in the millions of dollars. 37 Bakker’s ministry preached the white trash dream of excess. In one 1985 program, he defended the extravagant style of his Christian amusement park hotel: “The newspaper people think we should still be back in the trash. . . . They really think Christians ought to be shabby, tacky, crummy, worthless people because we threaten them when we have things as nice as they have.” In admitting his overindulgences, Bakker crooned, “I’m excessive. Dear Lord, I’m excessive. . . . God is a great God. He deserves my best.” The second-rate hustler was a real-life version of Andy Griffith’s role as Lonesome Rhodes in A Face in the Crowd. Or as one reporter claimed after watching untold hours of the Bakkers’ show, their prosperity theology and living-room preaching had “the cheesy feel of Petticoat Junction.” 38 Greed was just the backstory. Tammy Faye, who became known for the makeup that oozed down her cheeks as she wept along with her flock, had to be carted off to rehab for an addiction to tranquilizers. Meanwhile, her reverend husband was paying hush money to the church secretary, a young woman he had used sexually seven years earlier. Jessica Hahn told her story to Playboy. And if that kind of exposure was not enough, the same church official who had arranged for Bakker’s motel meeting with Hahn confessed that he had had three separate homosexual encounters with the TV pastor. 39 The tabloid exploitation of the Bakker affair may have augured the official birth of “reality TV.” One can directly trace the unholy line from the out-of- control Bakkers to the gawking at rural Georgian white trashdom in TLC’s Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. Both the preacher’s perversions and the underage beauty contestant’s shenanigans tapped into the public’s attachment to the tawdry behavior of the American underclass. (Tammy Faye later starred in the reality show The Surreal Life in 2004.) The people whom the Praise the Lord Ministry conned were mainly poor whites; the majority of the program’s viewers were born-again, with less than a high school education, and were, most pitifully, unemployed. As one staffer revealed, PTL sent out appeals for money on the first of the month, when the Social Security and welfare checks were arriving. Critics of evangelical hypocrisy vented their rage, and one outraged editorialist attacked President Reagan himself for bringing “white trash front and center” when he entertained Bakker and other televangelists at the White House and told Americans they could learn from them about “traditional American values.” The Bakkers appeared on television day and night, “dressed like pimps,” massacring the English language and defiling religion. 40 The Bakkers were not even native to the South.

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  Please,” she responded. We hugged and cried and then we did what the women in my family do—we put on our fucking game faces and (you guessed it!) got busy. Spreadsheets. Research. Facebook groups. Phone calls. E-mails. Second and third opinions. Networking. Networking. Networking. My mom goes into beast mode with this stuff. Doctors are blown away by her thoroughness. They say things like, “I wish you could teach all my patients how to organize like this.” But like all beasts, Mom has teeth and she will use them. For example, don’t tell her she can’t have a physical copy of the latest round of blood work because “it isn’t standard procedure.” Moving mountains to save your loved ones isn’t standard procedure, either. Get her the damn report. Unfortunately, Mom’s tenacity is warranted. In today’s medical system, you have to be hypervigilant to get the care you need. For people with anxiety and control issues, this is the marathon that we’ve been training for our whole lives. No doubt, having a trauma history plays a role, too. We’re so accustomed to the chaos of crises that it feels natural and good to navigate storms. Survivors gonna survive. My mother’s fierceness and compassion are among the reasons my dad lived for as long, and as well, as he did. And this wasn’t the first time she had to go into beast mode. As I watched her eagle-eyeing nurses, meticulously taking notes and formulating important follow-up questions, I was reminded of how quickly she had also flown into action in the early days of my own diagnosis. How many years of her precious life would be eaten up by caring for loved ones with cancer? I was enraged for her. And yet I’ve sometimes felt like the reason I got sick was so we’d have half a clue about what to do when Dad needed us. Turns out my cancer was our family’s dress rehearsal. I didn’t sleep a wink that night, and I don’t remember what I said to Dad the next morning. What I do remember was his biopsy. I marveled at how dressed up he looked in his wingtips and crisp button-down shirt. In his words, “You have to look spiffy for these things.” He was still groggy as we were leaving the hospital. Seeing him looking so vulnerable was foreign territory. It reduced me to feeling like a little girl trying to imagine what a grown-up would do in this situation. How should I act? What should I say? “I’m sorry your rock is a little wobbly right now,” Dad whispered as I held his arm to steady his balance.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  For it is not the anger of Black women which is dripping down over this globe like a diseased liquid. It is not my anger that launches rockets, spends over sixty thousand dollars a second on missiles and other agents of war and death, slaughters children in cities, stockpiles nerve gas and chemical bombs, sodomizes our daughters and our earth. It is not the anger of Black women which corrodes into blind, dehumanizing power, bent upon the annihilation of us all unless we meet it with what we have, our power to examine and to redefine the terms upon which we will live and work; our power to envision and to reconstruct, anger by painful anger, stone upon heavy stone, a future of pollinating difference and the earth to support our choices. We welcome all women who can meet us, face to face, beyond objectification and beyond guilt. * One poem from this series is included in Chosen Poems: Old and New (W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1978), pp. 105–108.† This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua (Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, New York, 1984), first published in 1981.‡ From “For Each of You,” first published in From A Land Where Other People Live (Broadside Press, Detroit, 1973), and collected in Chosen Poems: Old and New (W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1982), p. 42.Fourth of July The first time I went to Washington, D.C. was on the edge of the summer when I was supposed to stop being a child. At least that’s what they said to us all at graduation from the eighth grade. My sister Phyllis graduated at the same time from high school. I don’t know what she was supposed to stop being. But as graduation presents for us both, the whole family took a Fourth of July trip to Washington, D.C., the fabled and famous capital of our country. It was the first time I’d ever been on a railroad train during the day. When I was little, and we used to go to the Connecticut shore, we always went at night on the milk train, because it was cheaper. Preparations were in the air around our house before school was even over. We packed for a week. There were two very large suitcases that my father carried, and a box filled with food. In fact, my first trip to Washington was a mobile feast; I started eating as soon as we were comfortably ensconced in our seats, and did not stop until somewhere after Philadelphia. I remember it was Philadelphia because I was disappointed not to have passed by the Liberty Bell.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Corded and crisp and pinafored, the five of us seated ourselves one by one at the counter. There was I between my mother and father, and my two sisters on the other side of my mother. We settled ourselves along the white mottled marble counter, and when the waitress spoke at first no one understood what she was saying, and so the five of us just sat there. The waitress moved along the line of us closer to my father and spoke again. “I said I kin give you to take out, but you can’t eat here. Sorry.” Then she dropped her eyes looking very embarrassed, and suddenly we heard what it was she was saying all at the same time, loud and clear. Straight-backed and indignant, one by one, my family and I got down from the counter stools and turned around and marched out of the store, quiet and outraged, as if we had never been Black before. No one would answer my emphatic questions with anything other than a guilty silence. “But we hadn’t done anything!” This wasn’t right or fair! Hadn’t I written poems about Bataan and freedom and democracy for all? My parents wouldn’t speak of this injustice, not because they had contributed to it, but because they felt they should have anticipated it and avoided it. This made me even angrier. My fury was not going to be acknowledged by a like fury. Even my two sisters copied my parents’ pretense that nothing unusual and anti-american had occurred. I was left to write my angry letter to the president of the united states all by myself, although my father did promise I could type it out on the office typewriter next week, after I showed it to him in my copybook diary. The waitress was white, and the counter was white, and the ice cream I never ate in Washington, D.C. that summer I left childhood was white, and the white heat and the white pavement and the white stone monuments of my first Washington summer made me sick to my stomach for the whole rest of that trip and it wasn’t much of a graduation present after all. I Am Your Sister Black Women Organizing Across Sexualities Whenever I come to Medgar Evers College I always feel a thrill of anticipation and delight because it feels like coming home, like talking to family, having a chance to speak about things that are very important to me with people who matter the most. And this is particularly true whenever I talk at the Women’s Center. But, as with all families, we sometimes find it difficult to deal constructively with the genuine differences between us and to recognize that unity does not require that we be identical to each other. Black women are not one great vat of homogenized chocolate milk.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  America already had a long history of politicians pretending to identify with the earnest plowman. In the South, it was more than a pastime—it was everything. The erudite Brain Truster, though raised on a dairy farm in upstate New York, couldn’t claim to be of hillbilly stock, nor did he sport farmers’ red suspenders like one of the New Deal’s loudest critics, Georgia governor Eugene Talmadge. He was not a rustic clown like Huey Long, who captivated audiences. He didn’t have a folksy nickname either, like South Carolina senator “Cotton Ed” Smith, who went on the warpath against Tugwell’s appointment as undersecretary of agriculture even before Roosevelt named him as head of the Resettlement Administration. Before his confirmation hearing, Tugwell’s friends had advised him to “affect a homely democratic manner, to suggest the dear old farm.” He refused to do so. 35 In 1936, a young Washington journalist named Blair Bolles accused Tugwell of a series of crimes against America. Writing for H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury, he shared the renowned editor’s choleric rage for harebrained uplifters. Bolles claimed that the poor who were under the agency’s supervision were willing to “crawl” into the “impersonal lap” of government dependency. They were all deluded and undeserving—the litany will sound familiar: “hillbilly clay- eaters,” “hoe-wielders” (backward tenant farmers looking for a handout), “urban poor who see success in green pastures,” and, last but not least, “desert-dwelling Indians.” Each of these was presumed a breed of men with nowhere to go. 36 Again and again, enemies of the New Deal railed against the royalist bureaucrat “Rex” Tugwell. He continued to infuriate opposing congressmen by dismissing their logic and defending government patronage with the line “nothing is too good for these people.” Tugwell had no patience for the illusion of democracy, or the pretense of being a man of the people, or the empty rhetoric of equal opportunity. An urbane “voice in the wilderness,” he boldly challenged the credibility of the old, illusive belief that America’s class boundaries were porous and that hard work was all it took to succeed. 37 Tugwell’s class argument was simple. He summed up his views in a 1934 speech in Kansas City when he said that the old standby refrain of “rugged individualism” really meant “the regimentation of the many for the benefit of the few.”

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  If this society ascribes roles to Black men which they are not allowed to fulfill, is it Black women who must bend and alter our lives to compensate, or is it society that needs changing? And why should Black men accept these roles as correct ones, or anything other than a narcotic promise encouraging acceptance of other facets of their own oppression? One tool of the Great-American-Double-Think is to blame the victim for victimization: Black people are said to invite lynching by not knowing our place; Black women are said to invite rape and murder and abuse by not being submissive enough, or by being too seductive, or too . . . Staples’ “fact” that Black women get their sense of fulfillment from having children is only a fact when stated out of the mouths of Black men, and any Black person in this country, even a “happily married” woman who has “no pent-up frustrations that need release” (!) is either a fool or insane. This smacks of the oldest sexist canard of all time, that all a woman needs to “keep her quiet” is a “good man.” File that one alongside “Some of my best friends are . . .” Instead of beginning the much-needed dialogue between Black men and Black women, Staples retreats to a defensive stance reminiscent of white liberals of the 60s, many of whom saw any statement of Black pride and self-assertion as an automatic threat to their own identity and an attempt to wipe them out. Here we have an intelligent Black man believing—or at least saying—that any call to Black women to love ourselves (and no one said only) is a denial of, or threat to, his Black male identity! In this country, Black women traditionally have had compassion for everybody else except ourselves. We have cared for whites because we had to for pay or survival; we have cared for our children and our fathers and our brothers and our lovers. History and popular culture, as well as our personal lives, are full of tales of Black women who had “compassion for misguided black men.” Our scarred, broken, battered and dead daughters and sisters are a mute testament to that reality. We need to learn to have care and compassion for ourselves, also. In the light of what Black women often willingly sacrifice for our children and our men, this is a much needed exhortation, no matter what illegitimate use the white media makes of it. This call for self-value and self-love is quite different from narcissism, as Staples must certainly realize. Narcissism comes not out of self-love but out of self-hatred.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  If this vast product of creative energy were a celebration of death it would be nothing more than a mockery. We know full well that, whatever its defeats or limitations, this great body of creation represents the triumph of life over death. And so I make bold to say that no matter how vile, filthy, scabrous, scatalogical or obscene a book may be, if it serves life, if it aims at the cancer which is eating out the heart of the world, it is a good book, a righteous book, a holy book. To say of it that it is immoral, to call it pornographic or obscene, is like talking of spittle in connection with the hydrogen bomb. There is no book yet written devastating enough to wipe from the consciousness of living man the horrors to which he is now privy, the horrors which he is being asked to accept in advance in return for the privilege of belonging to a civilization which has virtually converted him into an unthinking, unfeeling monster. Monster, robot, slave, accursed one—it makes little difference which term one uses to convey the picture of our dehumanized condition. Never was mankind as a whole in a more ignoble condition than ours. We are all bound to one another in a disgraceful master-slave relationship; we are all caught in the same vicious circle of judge and be judged; we all aim to destroy one another if we cannot have our way. Instead of respect, toleration, kindness and consideration, to say nothing of love, we view one another with fear, suspicion, hatred, envy, rivalry and malevolence. Our world is grounded in falsity. In whatever direction you venture, into whatever sphere of human activity you penetrate, you encounter nothing but sham, fraud, deceit, falsehood. Cognizant of the fact that, no matter how highly placed, men can not, dare not, think freely, independently, I almost despair of making myself heard. And if I speak at all, if I venture to hazard my point of view about matters fundamental, it is because I am convinced that, however black the picture may be, a drastic change is not only possible but inevitable. I feel that it is my right and my duty as a human being to further this change. Without in the least wishing to glorify myself I should like to point out that there is evidence throughout my work that I myself have undergone a change; I say it is evident and obvious that the man who relates the story of his life is not the same as the “hero” who stalks the pages of these autobiographical novels. The man who confesses his sins, his crimes or his misdeeds is never the same as the one who committed them. Is it necessary for me to underline the fact that the author, in exposing his guilt and suffering, his fears and his triumphs, is but announcing his liberation and emancipation?

• From How to Deal with Angry People (2023)

  and have entirely different emotional reactions. TIP Finding the nuance in situations or motivations of others so as not to think of them as all bad can help people lessen their anger. Imagine, for instance that these two people are students who fail a test. The person with a depressed worldview might look at that experience and think, “Of course I failed it. I’m not smart enough and the teacher knows it. I’ll probably fail the entire class now.” The angry person, though, might externalize the cause and think, “This teacher doesn’t know anything. I failed because the test was unfair and they didn’t teach me well enough.” Interestingly, they may come to the same conclusion, that they will fail the class, but for very different reasons. The first will fail because they think they don’t have what it takes to be successful. The second will fail because they think the instructor isn’t a good enough teacher. Three Broad, Overlapping Categories of Thoughts When it comes to the automatic thoughts of angry people, there are three broad, overlapping categories that tend to cause or at least exacerbate their anger: high expectations of others, dichotomous thinking, and disaster thinking. High Expectations of Others I recently described the following scenarios on social media and asked people how they would respond if it happened to them: You’re driving along, going over the speed limit in the left lane, passing cars, going to get over as soon as you have a chance. The car behind you

• From How to Deal with Angry People (2023)

  In the end, much of this is rooted in the fact that she finds intense anger especially scary. “I still don’t have a healthy relationship with anger,” she told me. Izzy told me that her dad has softened a little as he has gotten older. It’s hard to tell if this due to the typical pattern of development or if it’s more specific to how their relationship as evolved. As people age, they often tend to relax a little as it becomes more important to experience positive emotions. When Izzy moved away from home, their relationship changed quite a bit. They saw each other less, obviously, and that impacted the way anger played out in their relationship. But, she also thinks that he’s become “more reflective” about his anger as he’s gotten older and this has changed how he emotes. Anger as an Emotion Izzy’s dad nicely illustrates how anger can be two things. An often sweet and loving person, he would get angry and “lose control emotionally,” as she described it. Like a lot of people when they are angry, he would lash out in these circumstances. As I said earlier, the angry experience is associated with a particular set of thoughts, physiological experiences, and behaviors. When we get mad, for example, our thoughts often shift to those of blaming, judgement, and revenge. How dare they, they should not have done that , or even I’ll get back at them for this are all things we might think when we get angry. Similarly, we often lash out physically or verbally when we get angry. Those thoughts of revenge we might experience can lead to vengeful actions. Like with Izzy’s dad, people will yell or say hurtful things. They will push, hit, or find other ways to aggress against the people they believed wronged them. Even when they don’t actually behave aggressively, they may want to. Psychologists call these action tendencies – when we want to carry out a particular behavior as part of our emotional response, but, because we are human and have the capacity for impulse control, we can stop ourselves and direct our anger differently. Finally, our anger brings with it a particular set of physiological responses. When we get angry, our fight-or-flight response kicks in to help prepare us to respond to the injustice or work through the blocked goals. Our heart rate increases, we start to breath more heavily, our muscles tense up, and our digestive system slows down. This fascinating and complex set of responses is rooted in our evolutionary history. Such responses offered our ancestors, human and nonhuman, a survival benefit.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  Since before that. Since the days of the Archangel Michael. In the not too distant past there was one who was given the cup of hemlock for being “the corruptor of youth.” Today he is regarded as one of the sanest, most lucid minds that ever was. We who are always being arraigned before the bar can do no better than to resort to the celebrated Socratic method. Our only answer is to return the question. There are so many questions one could put to the Court, to any court. But would one get a response? Can the Court of the Land ever be put in question? I am afraid not. The judicial body is a sacrosanct body. This is unfortunate, as I see it, for when issues of grave import arise the last court of reference, in my opinion, should be the public. When justice is at stake responsibility cannot be shifted to an elect few without injustice resulting. No court could function if it did not follow the steel rails of precedent, taboo and prejudice. I come back to the lengthy document representing the decision of the Oslo Town Court, to the tabulation of all the infractions of the moral code therein listed. There is something frightening as well as disheartening about such an indictment. It has a medieval aspect. And it has nothing to do with justice. Law itself is made to look ridiculous. Once again let me say that it is not the courts of Oslo or the laws and codes of Norway which I inveigh against; everywhere in the civilized world there is this mummery and flummery manifesting as the Voice of Inertia. The offender who stands before the Court is not being tried by his peers but by his dead ancestors. The moral codes, operative only if they are in conformance with natural or divine laws, are not safeguarded by these flimsy dikes; on the contrary, they are exposed as weak and ineffectual barriers. Finally, here is the crux of the matter. Will an adverse decision by this court or any other court effectively hinder the further circulation of this book? The history of similar cases does not substantiate such an eventuality. If anything, an unfavorable verdict will only add more fuel to the flames. Proscription only leads to resistance; the fight goes on underground, becomes more insidious therefore, more difficult to cope with. If only one man in Norway reads the book and believes with the author that one has the right to express himself freely, the battle is won.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  In a world of possibility for us all, our personal visions help lay the groundwork for political action. The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower. Why weren’t other women of Color found to participate in this conference? Why were two phone calls to me considered a consultation? Am I the only possible source of names of Black feminists? And although the Black panelist’s paper ends on an important and powerful connection of love between women, what about interracial cooperation between feminists who don’t love each other? In academic feminist circles, the answer to these questions is often, “We did not know who to ask.” But that is the same evasion of responsibility, the same cop-out, that keeps Black women’s art out of women’s exhibitions, Black women’s work out of most feminist publications except for the occasional “Special Third World Women’s Issue,” and Black women’s texts off your reading lists. But as Adrienne Rich pointed out in a recent talk, white feminists have educated themselves about such an enormous amount over the past ten years, how come you haven’t also educated yourselves about Black women and the differences between us—white and Black—when it is key to our survival as a movement? Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educate men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns. Now we hear that it is the task of women of Color to educate white women—in the face of tremendous resistance—as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought. Simone de Beauvoir once said: “It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for acting.” Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices. Sexism An American Disease in Blackface Black feminism is not white feminism in blackface. Black women have particular and legitimate issues which affect our lives as Black women, and addressing those issues does not make us any less Black. To attempt to open dialogue between Black women and Black men by attacking Black feminists seems shortsighted and self-defeating. Yet this is what Robert Staples, Black sociologist, has done in The Black Scholar.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  I would never presume to speak about Black men the way I have heard some of my straight sisters talk about the men they are attached to. And of course that concerns me, because it reflects a situation of noncommunication in the heterosexual Black community that is far more truly threatening than the existence of Black Lesbians. What does this have to do with Black women organizing? I have heard it said—usually behind my back—that Black Lesbians are not normal. But what is normal in this deranged society by which we are all trapped? I remember, and so do many of you, when being Black was considered not normal, when they talked about us in whispers, tried to paint us, lynch us, bleach us, ignore us, pretend we did not exist. We called that racism. I have heard it said that Black Lesbians are a threat to the Black family. But when 50 percent of children born to Black women are born out of wedlock, and 30 percent of all Black families are headed by women without husbands, we need to broaden and redefine what we mean by family. I have heard it said that Black Lesbians will mean the death of the race. Yet Black Lesbians bear children in exactly the same way other women bear children, and a Lesbian household is simply another kind of family. Ask my son and daughter. The terror of Black Lesbians is buried in that deep inner place where we have been taught to fear all difference—to kill it or ignore it. Be assured: loving women is not a communicable disease. You don’t catch it like the common cold. Yet the one accusation that seems to render even the most vocal straight Black woman totally silent and ineffective is the suggestion that she might be a Black Lesbian. If someone says you’re Russian and you know you’re not, you don’t collapse into stunned silence. Even if someone calls you a bigamist, or a childbeater, and you know you’re not, you don’t crumple into bits. You say it’s not true and keep on printing the posters. But let anyone, particularly a Black man, accuse a straight Black woman of being a Black Lesbian, and right away that sister becomes immobilized, as if that is the most horrible thing she could be, and must at all costs be proven false. That is homophobia. It is a waste of woman energy, and it puts a terrible weapon into the hands of your enemies to be used against you to silence you, to keep you docile and in line. It also serves to keep us isolated and apart. I have heard it said that Black Lesbians are not political, that we have not been and are not involved in the struggles of Black people.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  The lack of a reasonable and articulate Black male viewpoint on these questions is not the responsibility of Black women. We have too often been expected to be all things to all people and speak everyone else’s position but our very own. Black men are not so passive that they must have Black women speak for them. Even my fourteen-year-old son knows that. Black men themselves must examine and articulate their own desires and positions and stand by the conclusions thereof. No point is served by a Black male professional who merely whines at the absence of his viewpoint in Black women’s work. Oppressors always expect the oppressed to extend to them the understanding so lacking in themselves. For Staples to suggest, for instance, that Black men leave their families as a form of male protest against female decision making in the home is in direct contradiction to his own observations in “The Myth of the Black Matriarchy.” * Now I am sure there are still some Black men who marry white women because they feel a white woman can better fit the model of “femininity” set forth in this country. But for Staples to justify that act using the reason it occurs, and take Black women to task for it, is not only another error in reasoning; it is like justifying the actions of a lemming who follows its companions over the cliff to sure death. Because it happens does not mean it should happen, nor that it is functional for the well-being of the individual nor the group. It is not the destiny of Black america to repeat white america’s mistakes. But we will, if we mistake the trappings of success in a sick society for the signs of a meaningful life. If Black men continue to define “femininity” instead of their own desires, and to do it in archaic european terms, they restrict our access to each other’s energies. Freedom and future for Blacks does not mean absorbing the dominant white male disease of sexism. As Black women and men, we cannot hope to begin dialogue by denying the oppressive nature of male privilege. And if Black males choose to assume that privilege for whatever reason—raping, brutalizing, and killing Black women—then ignoring these acts of Black male oppression within our communities can only serve our destroyers. One oppression does not justify another. It has been said that Black men cannot be denied their personal choice of the woman who meets their need to dominate. In that case, Black women also cannot be denied our personal choices, and those choices are becomingly increasingly self-assertive and female-oriented. As a people, we most certainly must work together.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  This time is my turn. I bend to the knife my ears blood-drumming across the street my lover’s voice the only moving sound within white heat “Don’t touch it!” I straighten, weaken, then start down again hungry for resolution simple as anger and so close at hand my fingers reach for the familiar blade the known grip of wood against my palm I have held it to the whetstone a thousand nights for this escorting fury through my sleep like a cherished friend to wake in the stink of rage beside the sleep-white face of love The keen steel of a dreamt knife sparks honed from the whetted edge with a tortured shriek between my lover’s voice and the grey spinning a choice of pain or fury slashing across judgment like a crimson scar I could open her up to my anger with a point sharpened upon love. In the deathland my lover’s voice fades like the roar of a train derailed on the other side of a river every white woman’s face I love and distrust is upon it eating green grapes from a paper bag marking yellow exam-books tucked into a manilla folder orderly as the last thought before death I throw the switch. Through screams of crumpled steel I search the wreckage for a ticket of hatred my lover’s voice calling a knife at her throat. In this steaming aisle of the dead I am weeping to learn the names of those streets my feet have worn thin with running and why they will never serve me nor ever lead me home. “Don’t touch it!” she cries I straighten myself in confusion a drunken woman is running away down the Westside street my lover’s voice moves me to a shadowy clearing. Corralled in fantasy the woman with white eyes has vanished to become her own nightmare a french butcher blade hangs in my house love’s token I remember this knife it carved its message into my sleeping she only read its warning written upon my face. [1981] from Our Dead Behind Us (1986) to Gloria I. Joseph tikoro nnko agyina * * Ashanti proverb: “One head cannot go into counsel” To the Poet Who Happens to Be Black and the Black Poet Who Happens to Be a Woman I I was born in the gut of Blackness from between my mother’s particular thighs her waters broke upon blue-flowered lineoleum and turned to slush in the Harlem cold 10 PM on a full moon’s night my head crested round as a clock “You were so dark,” my mother said “I thought you were a boy.”

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Utterly lost, drifting from relationship to relationship, or remaining stuck in unhappy marriages of their own, they settle for crumbs in love and life. FOURTEEN Sex and Drugs I n Larry’s and Carol’s stories I talked a bit about drug and alcohol abuse during adolescence and the astonishing rise in sexual promiscuity among many of the young girls from both chaotic intact and chaotic postdivorce families. But we still have not delved into the heart of these destructive behaviors and what the child gains from them psychologically. Paula shows us the inner logic of running out of control. The next time I saw Paula she was fifteen and looked about twenty-five. She was thin, very attractive, and very, very precocious. Her green eyes, lined with heavy black eyeliner, were bloodshot, whether from her incessant smoking or from some other drug I could not tell. With her black, short, sleeveless dress artfully falling from one shoulder and her legs encased in high red leather boots, she was the picture of what her exasperated mother had warned me of a week earlier: “Don’t be surprised, Judy. She looks like a slut.” With bravado, constantly tossing her long, curly hair into and then out of her eyes, she told me of her numerous boyfriends and of her adventures partying and evading the police and the school authorities. She boasted about being high every day and of the huge quantities of alcohol that she and her friends drank. In describing a confused mixture of sexual exploits and physical fights, she told me, “I give as good as I get.” She looked very tough and seemed utterly lost. I remember being saddened and very troubled by Paula at this time, but I wasn’t surprised. Her mother told me that the trouble started the summer after sixth grade when Paula turned twelve. In the next two years, Paula accumulated a police record for possession of drugs, disrupting the peace, and drinking in public. She had been suspended from school several times for possession of marijuana and for stealing from and harassing other students. She was on her final probation. One day, Paula’s mother unexpectedly came home early from work to find her thirteen-year-old daughter in bed with two seventeen-year-old boys. Screaming, pleading, grounding, and taking away privileges had no effect. Paula stomped out as soon as her mother left for work and returned when she felt like it. At age fifteen, she took her sister’s car and totaled it. Paula was on a tear and out of control. Paula hit adolescence filled with anger about having been abandoned as a little girl.