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

  He was a slaveholding planter whose reputation situated him not in the halls of power but among the common stock. In the Tennessee backcountry, where settlement came much later than it did on the East Coast, landowning and class stations ostensibly had shallower roots. As one New England journalist wondered aloud during Jackson’s first run for president in 1824, who precisely were these “hardy sons of the West”? 40 In the popular imagination, Jackson was inseparable from a wild and often violent landscape. After his celebrated victory at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, he was identified as a “green backwoodsman” who had bested the “invincible” British foe. To another, he was “Napoleon of the woods.” His political rise came through violence, having slaughtered the Red Stick faction of the Creek Nation in the swamps of Alabama in 1813–14, while leaving hundreds of British soldiers dead in the marshes of New Orleans in January 1815. Jackson bragged about the British death toll, as did American poets. One extolled, “Carnage stalks wide o’er all the ensanguin’ plain.” And it was no exaggeration. Bodies floated in rivers and streams, and bones of the vanquished were found by travelers decades later. 41 Jackson did not look or act like a conventional politician, which was a fundamental part of his appeal. When Jackson arrived in Philadelphia from Tennessee to take his seat in the U.S. Senate in 1796, Pennsylvania congressman Albert Gallatin described a “tall, lank, uncouth-looking personage, with long locks hanging over his face, and a queue down his back tied in eel skin.” In later years, the gaunt general struck observers as stiff in carriage, and weatherworn. Backwater diseases stalked him. Saying nothing of his external appearance, Thomas Jefferson perceived in Jackson a man of savage instincts. Once he observed him so overcome with anger that he was left speechless. (Speechlessness was the classic signifier of primitive man and untamed beast.) 42 His fiery temper and lack of scholarly deportment permanently marked him. A sworn enemy put it best: “Boisterous in ordinary conversation, he makes up in oaths what he lacks in arguments.” Not known for his subtle reasoning, Jackson was blunt in his opinions and quick to resent any who disagreed with him. Shouting curses put him in the company of both common soldiers and uncouth crackers. In “A Backwoodsman and a Squatter” (1821), one satirist captured such frontier types, folks known to “squale loose jaw and slam an angry oath.” 43 Jackson’s aggressive style, his frequent resorting to duels and street fights, his angry acts of personal and political retaliation seemed to fit what one Frenchman with Jacksonian sympathies described as the westerner’s “rude instinct of masculine liberty.”

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  We live in a time where the president of the United States flouts all conventions of the office, decorum, and decency. Police brutality persists, unabated. Women share their experiences with sexual harassment or violence but rarely receive any kind of justice. It seems like things have only gotten worse since the height of Lorde’s career when she was writing about the very things we continue to deal with— the place of women and, more specifically, black women in the world, what it means to raise black girls and boys in a world that will not welcome them, what it means to live in a world so harshly stratified by class, what it means to live in a vulnerable body, what it means to live. There are very few voices for women and even fewer voices for black women, speaking from the center of consciousness, from the I am out to the we are, but Lorde was, throughout her storied career, one such voice. In her poem “Power,” Lorde wrote about a white police officer who murdered a ten-year-old black boy and was acquitted by a jury of eleven of his peers and one black woman who succumbed to the will of those peers. She captured the rage of such injustice and how futile it feels to try and fight such injustice, but she also demonstrated that even in the face of futility, silence is never an option. A great deal of Lorde’s writing was committed to articulating her worldview in service of the greater good. She crafted lyrical manifestos. The essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” made the case for the importance of poetry, arguing that poetry “is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.” In “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” Lorde examines women using their erotic power to benefit themselves instead of benefiting men. She notes that women are often vilified for their erotic power and treated as inferior. She suggests that we can rethink and reframe this paradigm. This is what is so remarkable about Lorde’s writing—how she encourages women to understand weaknesses as strengths. She writes, “As women, we need to examine the ways in which our world can be truly different. I am speaking here of the necessity for reassessing the quality of all aspects of our lives and our work, and how we move toward and through them.” In this, she offers an expansive definition of the erotic, one that goes well beyond the carnal to encompass a wide range of sensate experiences. Rethinking and reframing paradigms is a recurring theme in Lorde’s writing. As the child of immigrants who came to the United States for their American dream only to have that dream shattered by the Great Depression, Lorde understood the nuances of oppression from an early age.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Women respond to racism. 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. Your fear of that anger will teach you nothing, also. Women responding to racism means women responding to anger; the anger of exclusion, of unquestioned privilege, of racial distortions, of silence, ill-use, stereotyping, defensiveness, misnaming, betrayal, and cooptation. My anger is a response to racist attitudes and to the actions and presumptions that arise out of those attitudes. If your dealings with other women reflect those attitudes, then my anger and your attendant fears are spotlights that can be used for growth in the same way I have used learning to express anger for my growth. But for corrective surgery, not guilt. Guilt and defensiveness are bricks in a wall against which we all flounder; they serve none of our futures. Because I do not want this to become a theoretical discussion, I am going to give a few examples of interchanges between women that illustrate these points. In the interest of time, I am going to cut them short. I want you to know there were many more. For example: •​I speak out of direct and particular anger at an academic conference, and a white woman says, “Tell me how you feel but don’t say it too harshly or I cannot hear you.” But is it my manner that keeps her from hearing, or the threat of a message that her life may change? •​The Women’s Studies Program of a southern university invites a Black woman to read following a week-long forum on Black and white women. “What has this week given to you?” I ask. The most vocal white woman says, “I think I’ve gotten a lot. I feel Black women really understand me a lot better now; they have a better idea of where I’m coming from.” As if understanding her lay at the core of the racist problem. •​After fifteen years of a women’s movement which professes to address the life concerns and possible futures of all women, I still hear, on campus after campus, “How can we address the issues of racism? No women of Color attended.” Or, the other side of that statement, “We have no one in our department equipped to teach their work.” In other words, racism is a Black women’s problem, a problem of women of Color, and only we can discuss it.

• 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 The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  In this place we speak removed from the more blatant reminders of our embattlement as women. This need not blind us to the size and complexities of the forces mounting against us and all that is most human within our environment. We are not here as women examining racism in a political and social vacuum. We operate in the teeth of a system for which racism and sexism are primary, established, and necessary props of profit. Women responding to racism is a topic so dangerous that when the local media attempt to discredit this conference they choose to focus upon the provision of lesbian housing as a diversionary device—as if the Hartford Courant dare not mention the topic chosen for discussion here, racism, lest it become apparent that women are in fact attempting to examine and to alter all the repressive conditions of our lives. Mainstream communication does not want women, particularly white women, responding to racism. It wants racism to be accepted as an immutable given in the fabric of your existence, like evening time or the common cold. So we are working in a context of opposition and threat, the cause of which is certainly not the angers which lie between us, but rather that virulent hatred leveled against all women, people of Color, lesbians and gay men, poor people—against all of us who are seeking to examine the particulars of our lives as we resist our oppressions, moving toward coalition and effective action. Any discussion among women about racism must include the recognition and the use of anger. This discussion must be direct and creative because it is crucial. We cannot allow our fear of anger to deflect us nor seduce us into settling for anything less than the hard work of excavating honesty; we must be quite serious about the choice of this topic and the angers entwined within it because, rest assured, our opponents are quite serious about their hatred of us and of what we are trying to do here. And while we scrutinize the often painful face of each other’s anger, please remember that it is not our anger which makes me caution you to lock your doors at night and not to wander the streets of Hartford alone. It is the hatred which lurks in those streets, that urge to destroy us all if we truly work for change rather than merely indulge in academic rhetoric.

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

  The red eyes and sickly complexion were gone, along with all drugs, cigarettes, and alcohol. “By drinking and carrying on, I was trying to be the man of the house,” he said matter-of-factly. “I was my alcoholic father.” I listened with amazement as he said, “I’m proud to look back with a different perspective. I finally realized how much my mother has done for me and I now appreciate how hard she works. I feel very bad about the way I’ve treated her. She’s had a very difficult time. I was very selfish.” “What caused this great change?” I asked, wondering to myself whether to believe him and if he was talking to impress me. His answer was straightforward. “I didn’t have any great vision all of a sudden. No religious conversion. I didn’t wake up in the middle of the night screaming or sweating. A few years ago, when I was nineteen, I just stopped. I looked at my friends and saw what was happening to them and I dropped them. I looked at myself in the mirror and I hated what I saw. I don’t know how to explain it, Judy. I guess I just did it from within. I decided I wanted to have a family and kids and I wanted a good job, so I applied to a community college and got back into school. I didn’t want to ask anyone for help, not my mom and certainly not my dad. There was no one. I’ve been working my way through college, paying for everything by myself.” I tried to keep from rubbing my eyes in disbelief as Larry went on to talk about his father in a more balanced way than I had ever heard. “You’re talking very differently about your dad than you used to, Larry.” “When I was younger,” he said, “I used to see him on weekends. In the beginning it was fun, but after a while I began to realize it wasn’t really a father-son relationship. We never really talked.” With a sudden flash of anger Larry said, “And finally I realized that he had been leading me on about everything my whole life. Suddenly I knew that I meant nothing to him, just nothing. What an asshole I had been, a goddamn monkey on a string. When I calmed down, I suddenly saw him for the pathetic creep that he was, a drunk who hits helpless women, who picks on my little sister her whole life, and who lies to his son. That’s who he really is. And that was who I was becoming.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  and chicken foot stew and the day before Christmas having no presents to wrap I poured two ounces of Nux Vomica into a bottle of Cream Soda and listened to the old lady puke all night long. When spring came I crossed the river again moving up in the world six and half stories and one day on the corner of eighth street across from Wanamakers which had burned down while I was away in Brooklyn— where I caught the bus for work every day a bus driver slowed down at the bus stop one morning— I was late it was raining and my jacket was soaked— and then speeded past without stopping when he saw my face. I have been given other doses of truth— that particular form of annihilation— shot through by the cold eye of the way things are baby and left for dead on a hundred streets of this city but oh that captain marvel glance brushing up against my skull like a steel bar in passing and my heart withered sheets in the gutter passing passing booted feet and bus drivers and old yentes in Brighton Beach kitchens SHIT! said the king and the whole court strained passing me out as an ill-tempered wind lashing around the corner of 125th Street and Lenox. Keyfood In the Keyfood Market on Broadway a woman waits by the window daily and patient the comings and goings of buyers neatly labeled old like yesterday’s bread her restless experienced eyes weigh fears like grapefruit testing for ripeness. Once in the market she was more comfortable than wealthy more black than white more proper than friendly more rushed than alone all her powers defined her like a carefully kneaded loaf rising and restrained working and making loving behind secret eyes. Once she was all the sums of her knowing counting on her to sustain them once she was more somebody else’s mother than mine now she weighs faces as once she weighed grapefruit. Waiting she does not count her change Her lonely eyes measure all who enter the market are they new are they old enough can they buy each other? To The Girl Who Lives In A Tree A letter in my mailbox says you’ve made it to Honduras and I wonder what is the colour of the wood you are chopping now. When you left this city I wept for a year down 14th Street across the Taconic Parkway through the shingled birdcotes along Riverside Drive and I was glad because in your going you left me a new country where Riverside Drive became an embattlement that even dynamite could not blast free where making both love and war became less inconsistent and as my tears watered morning I became my own place to fathom While part of me follows you still thru the woods of Oregon splitting dead wood with a rusty axe acting out the nightmares of your mothers creamy skin soot-covered from communal fires

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  We cannot allow our fear of anger to deflect us nor seduce us into settling for anything less than the hard work of excavating honesty; we must be quite serious about the choice of this topic and the angers entwined within it because, rest assured, our opponents are quite serious about their hatred of us and of what we are trying to do here. And while we scrutinize the often painful face of each other’s anger, please remember that it is not our anger which makes me caution you to lock your doors at night and not to wander the streets of Hartford alone. It is the hatred which lurks in those streets, that urge to destroy us all if we truly work for change rather than merely indulge in academic rhetoric. This hatred and our anger are very different. Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change. But our time is getting shorter. We have been raised to view any difference other than sex as a reason for destruction, and for Black women and white women to face each other’s angers without denial or immobility or silence or guilt is in itself a heretical and generative idea. It implies peers meeting upon a common basis to examine difference, and to alter those distortions which history has created around our difference. For it is those distortions which separate us. And we must ask ourselves: Who profits from all this? Women of Color in america have grown up within 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. And I say symphony rather than cacophony because we have had to learn to orchestrate those furies so that they do not tear us apart. We have had to learn to move through them and use them for strength and force and insight within our daily lives. Those of us who did not learn this difficult lesson did not survive. And part of my anger is always libation for my fallen sisters.

• 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 The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  For the mothers sisters daughters girls I have never been for the women who clean the Staten Island Ferry for the sleek witches who burn me at midnight in effigy because I eat at their tables and sleep with their ghosts. These stones in my heart are you of my own flesh whittling me with your sharp false eyes searching for prisms falling out of your head laughing me out of your skin because you do not value your own self nor me. This is a simple poem I will have no mother no sister no daughter when I am through and only the bones are left see how the bones are showing the shape of us at war clawing our own flesh out to feed the backside of our masklike faces that we have given the names of men. Donald DeFreeze I never knew you so well as in the eyes of my own mirror did you hope for blessing or pardon lying in bed after bed or was your eye sharp and merciless enough to endure beyond the deaths of wanting?

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Each of these imposed definitions has a place not in human growth and progress, but in human separation, for they represent the dehumanization of difference. And certainly there are very real differences between us, of race, sex, age, sexuality, class, vision. But it is not the differences between us that tear us apart, destroying the commonalities we share. Rather, it is our refusal to examine the distortions which arise from their misnaming, and from the illegitimate usage of those differences which can be made when we do not claim them nor define them for ourselves. Racism. The belief in the inherent superiority of one race over all others and thereby the right to dominance. Ageism. Heterosexism. Elitism. These are some of the distortions created around human differences, all serving the purpose of further separation. It is a lifetime pursuit for each one of us to extract these distortions from our living at the same time as we recognize, reclaim, and define the differences upon which they are imposed, and explore what these differences can teach us about the future we must all share. And we do not have forever. The distortions are endemic in our society, and so we pour energy needed for exposing difference into pretending these differences do not exist, thereby encouraging false and treacherous connections. Or we pretend the differences are insurmountable barriers, which encourages a voluntary isolation. Either way, we do not develop tools for using our differences as springboards for creative change within our lives. Often, we do not even speak of human difference, which is a comparison of attributes best evaluated by their possible effect and illumination within our lives. Instead, we speak of deviance, which is a judgment upon the relationship between the attribute and some long-fixed and established construct. Somewhere on the edge of all our consciousness there is what I call the mythical norm, which each of us knows within our hearts is “not me.” In this society, that norm is usually defined as white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian, and financially secure. It is within this mythical norm that the trappings of power reside. Those of us who stand outside that power, for any reason, often identify one way in which we are different, and we assume that quality to be the primary reason for all oppression. We forget those other distortions around difference, some of which we ourselves may be acting out within our daily lives. For unacknowledged difference robs all of us of each other’s energy and creative insight, and creates a false hierarchy. What does this mean for each one of us?

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  I walk down the withering limbs of my last discarded house and there is nothing worth salvage left in this city but the faint reedy voices like echoes of once beautiful children. The American Cancer Society Or There Is More Than One Way To Skin A Coon Of all the ways in which this country Prints its death upon me Selling me cigarettes is one of the most certain. Yet every day I watch my son digging ConEdison GeneralMotors GarbageDisposal Out of his nose as he watches a 3 second spot On How To Stop Smoking And it makes me sick to my stomach. For it is not by cigarettes That you intend to destroy my children. Not even by the cold white light of moon-walks While half the boys I knew Are doomed to quicker trips by a different capsule; No, the american cancer destroys By seductive and reluctant admission For instance Black women no longer give birth through their ears And therefore must have A Monthly Need For Iron: For instance Our Pearly teeth are not racially insured And therefore must be Gleemed For Fewer Cavities: For instance Even though all astronauts are white Perhaps Black People can develop Some of those human attributes Requiring Dried dog food frozen coffee instant oatmeal Depilatories deodorants detergents And other assorted plastic. And this is the surest sign I know That the american cancer society is dying— It has started to dump its symbols onto Black People Convincing proof that those symbols are now useless And far more lethal than emphysema. A Sewerplant Grows In Harlem Or I’m A Stranger Here Myself When Does The Next Swan Leave How is the word made flesh made steel made shit by ramming it into No Exit like a homemade bomb until it explodes smearing itself made real against our already filthy windows or by flushing it out in a verbal fountain? Meanwhile the editorial They— who are no less powerful— prepare to smother the actual Us with a processed flow of all our shit non-verbal. Have you ever risen in the night bursting with knowledge and the world dissolves toward any listening ear into which you can pour whatever it was you knew before waking Only to find all ears asleep or drugged perhaps by a dream of words because as you scream into them over and over nothing stirs and the mind you have reached is not a working mind please hang up and die again? The mind you have reached is not a working mind Please hang up And die again. Talking to some people is like talking to a toilet. One Year To Life On The Grand Central Shuttle If we hate the rush hour subways who ride them every day why hasn’t there been a New York City Subway Riot some bloody rush-hour revolution where a snarl goes on from push to a shove that does not stop at the platform’s edge the whining of automated trains

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  •​After I read from my work entitled “Poems for Women in Rage,”* a white woman asks me: “Are you going to do anything with how we can deal directly with our anger? I feel it’s so important.” I ask, “How do you use your rage?” And then I have to turn away from the blank look in her eyes, before she can invite me to participate in her own annihilation. I do not exist to feel her anger for her. •​White women are beginning to examine their relationships to Black women, yet often I hear them wanting only to deal with little colored children across the roads of childhood, the beloved nursemaid, the occasional second-grade classmate—those tender memories of what was once mysterious and intriguing or neutral. You avoid the childhood assumptions formed by the raucous laughter at Rastus and Alfalfa, the acute message of your mommy’s handerkerchief spread upon the park bench because I had just been sitting there, the indelible and dehumanizing portraits of Amos’n Andy and your daddy’s humorous bedtime stories. •​I wheel my two-year-old daughter in a shopping cart through a supermarket in Eastchester in 1967, and a little white girl riding past in her mother’s cart calls out excitedly, “Oh look, Mommy, a baby maid!” And your mother shushes you, but she does not correct you. And so fifteen years later, at a conference on racism, you can still find that story humorous. But I hear your laughter is full of terror and disease. •​A white academic welcomes the appearance of a collection by non-Black women of Color.* “It allows me to deal with racism without dealing with the harshness of Black women,” she says to me. •​At an international cultural gathering of women, a well-known white American woman poet interrupts the reading of the work of women of Color to read her own poem, and then dashes off to an “important panel.” If women in the academy truly want a dialogue about racism, it will require recognizing the needs and the living contexts of other women. When an academic woman says, “I can’t afford it,” she may mean she is making a choice about how to spend her available money. But when a woman on welfare says, “I can’t afford it,” she means she is surviving on an amount of money that was barely subsistence in 1972, and she often does not have enough to eat. Yet the National Women’s Studies Association here in 1981 holds a conference in which it commits itself to responding to racism, yet refuses to waive the registration fee for poor women and women of Color who wished to present and conduct workshops. This has made it impossible for many women of Color—for instance, Wilmette Brown, of Black Women for Wages for Housework—to participate in this conference. Is this to be merely another case of the academy discussing life within the closed circuits of the academy?

• From Giovanni's Room (1956)

  GIOVANNrSROOM 187 gin, youwalk around withyourhands infront of youas thoughyou hadsomeprecious metal, gold, silver, rubies,maybe diamonds downthere between yourlegs!You willnevergive it to any- body, you will neverlet anybody touch it — man orwoman. Youwantto be clean. You think you came here covered with soap andyou think you willgoout coveredwithsoap — andyou do not want to stink, notevenforfiveminutes, in the meantime/ He graspedmebythecollar, wrestling andcaressingat once, fluidandiron at once, salivasprayingfrom his Upsand his eyesfullof tears,butwiththe bones of his face showingandthe musclesleapingin his arms and neck.Touwant to leave Giovannibecause he makes youstink. Youwant to despise Gio- vanni because heis notafraid ofthestink of love. Youwantto killhiminthe name of all yourlying little moralities. Andyou — you are immoral. You are, by far,the most immoral man IhavemetinallmyUfe.Look,look what youhavedonetome. Do youthinkyou could have donethisif I did not love you? Is this what youshoulddoto love?' 'Giovanni, stop it! For God's sake, stop it! What in theworld do you wantme to do? I can't help the wayIfeel.' T)oyou know how youfeel?Do youfeel? What doyoufeel?' 1 feelnothing now,' I said, 'nothing. Iwant to get outofthisroom, Iwanttoget away from you, Iwant toend thisterriblescene.' 188 James Baldwin Tou wanttogetawayfrom me/ Helaughed; he watched me;the look inhis eyes was so bottomlessly bitterit wasalmost benevolent. 'At last youarebeginning tobe honest. And do youknow why you wantto get awayfrom me?' Insidemesomething locked. 1 —I cannot havea lifewithyou/ I said. 'But you canhave a life with Hella. With that moon-faced httlegirl whothinks babies comeoutofcabbages — orfrigidaires, I am not acquaintedwiththemythology ofyourcountry. You can have alife with her.' Tes/ I said, wearily, 1 can have alifewith her/ I stood up. I was shaking. What kind of lifecanwehave inthis room? — this filthy little room.What kind of life can twomenhave to- gether,anyway?All this loveyoutalk about — isn't itjustthatyou wanttobemade to feel strong?Youwant togooutand be the big laborerand bring homethe money,and you want metostay here andwash the dishes and cook the food andcleanthis miserable closet of aroomandkiss youwhen you come in throughthatdoorandlie with you atnight and be your littlegirl That's whatyouwant. That's whatyoumeanand that'sallyou mean whenyou say youlove me. Yousay Iwant to kill you. What doyouthink you'vebeen doing to me?' 1 amnot tryingto makeyou a littlegirl. If I wanted a little girl, I wouldbe with a little girl/ *Why aren't you?Isn'tit justthatyou're

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

  (3) Caligula (AD 37-41), the next emperor, was an epileptic, a madman and a megalomaniac. He insisted on divine honours. He attempted to enforce Caesar-worship even on the Jews, who had always been and who always were to remain exempt from it. He planned to place his own image in the Holy of Holies in the Temple in Jerusalem, a step which would certainly have provoked unyielding rebellion. Mercifully, he died before he could carry out his plans. But, in his reign, we have an episode when Caesar-worship became an imperial demand. (4) Caligula was succeeded by Claudius (AD 41-54), who completely reversed his insane policy. He wrote to the governor of Egypt - there were 1,ooo,ooo Jews in Alexandria - fully approving the Jewish refusal to call the emperor a god and granting them full liberty to enjoy their own worship. On his accession to the throne, he wrote to Alexandria saying: `I deprecate the appointment of a high priest to me and the erection of temples, for I do not wish to be offensive to my contemporaries, and I hold that sacred fanes [temples] and the like have been by all ages attributed to the immortal gods as peculiar honours.' (5) Nero (AD 54-68) did not take his own divinity seriously and did nothing to insist on Caesar-worship. It is true that he persecuted the Christians; but this was not because they would not worship him, but because he had to find scapegoats for the great fire of Rome. (6) On the death of Nero, there were three emperors in eighteen months - Galba, Otho and Vitellius - and in such a time of chaos the question of Caesar-worship did not arise. ('7) The next two emperors, Vespasian (AD 69-79) and Titus (AD 79-81), were wise rulers, who made no insistence on Caesar-worship. (8) The coming of Domitian (AD 81-96) brought a complete change. He was a devil. He was the worst of all things - a cold-blooded persecutor. With the exception of Caligula, he was the first emperor to take his divinity seriously and to demand Caesar-worship. The difference was that Caligula was an insane devil; Domitian was a sane devil, which is much more terrifying. He erected a monument to `the deified Titus, son of the deified Vespasian'. He began a campaign of bitter persecution against all who would not worship the ancient gods - `the atheists', as he called them. In particular, he launched his hatred against the Jews and the Christians. When he arrived in the theatre with his empress, the crowd were urged to rise and shout: `All hail to our Lord and his Lady!' He behaved as if he himself were a god. He informed all provincial governors that government announcements and proclamations must begin: `Our Lord and God Domitian commands ...' Everyone who addressed him in speech or in writing must begin: `Lord and God.'

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

  Or we’re angry at the person for not taking better care of themselves. Angry they chose to drive down that street the day of the accident. Angry we didn’t drive instead. Angry at other family members for not showing up. Meanwhile, they’ve got their own traumas and dramas that have nothing to do with us, yet we take their absence personally. Angry at God for not protecting us. If he, she, it can’t keep us safe, how the heck are we supposed to trust life or anyone in it? Simply put, when it comes to anger, there’s often more than meets the eye. THE ANGER ICEBERG Another reason anger is such a powerful emotion is that it rarely shows up alone. Instead, it’s usually accompanied by other emotions that you may not know how to access or express, or think you have a right to feel, like grief, guilt, shame, embarrassment, anxiety, loneliness, hopelessness, or a combination thereof. Researchers from the Gottman Institute say that it can be helpful to think of anger like an iceberg. With icebergs, the tip may look like a large mass, but in reality it’s only a small part that we see. Most of the iceberg is actually hidden below the water. This is how anger can work, too. In fact, anger is commonly referred to as a secondary or “indicator” emotion. It steps in and points out a whole host of other big and raw emotions roiling under the surface. For example, let’s say you’re annoyed that you have to go to a friend’s baby shower. Having had a miscarriage yourself, the last thing you want is to be around cute babies or happy mothers. You’re envious your friend got pregnant so easily, when it’s been so hard and painful for you to conceive. These complicated feelings are completely justified. They don’t make you a jerk; they make you a normal, hurting human. I’ll be honest, if I had to watch a father-daughter dance at a wedding after Dad passed, I’d have tossed a banana peel on the floor and prayed for a full-on wipeout (and pileup). Anger indicates that there’s more to the story than meets the eye. It asks us to be courageous and go deeper. To explore the pain beneath the outrage. The heartbreak, rejection, sadness, fear, betrayal, and so on. Our anger never needs to be justified to make sense. Your pain, like mine, isn’t looking for validation; it just wants permission to exist.