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 Mud Vein (2014)

  I scream. He created a monster, now he’s going to meet her. Every little crevice. “I am crazy! Because of you! I can do it alone. I’ve always done it alone. How dare you think I haven’t.” He grabs my wrists, and tries to subdue me. I’m not having it. I rip away from him and walk to the center of my white room, rage rolling in waves. I can ride them, but someone’s going to get hurt. “You see this,” I say, throwing my arms up, “this is you. You made me feel so much good, then you made me feel so much bad. So I decided to just stop feeling.” He’s artist enough to understand me. “What do you want me to say? I’m here now.” That’s it. That’s all he has to say and the truth hits me like an icy wind. My hair rises on its hackles. I feel flushed and bereaved. I grab my head at the temples and squeeze with the heels of my hands. I am petrified. Never in my life have I been this afraid. Not of the cancer, not of being alone, not of my future or of my past. I am afraid of never seeing Isaac again. Of never having him hold me when life is so absolute in its unfairness that all I can do is scream. I turn to Nick. Nick, who is here now. “Now?” I whisper, incredulous. “Now? Where were you when I was raped, or when I had my breasts cut off? Where were you when someone stole me away in the middle of the night and starved me in the middle of the goddamn arctic tundra?” I cut off the space between us and pound three hard times on his chest. “Where. Did. You. Go.” He’s shaking. I’m dropping things on him like a hailstorm, but I don’t give a fuck. I even say things like fuck now, because I don’t want to waste another second on the white room way I lived my life. He’s here now. But, Isaac was here then … and then … and then … and then. “I was so hung up on you that I missed it,” I say. I’m shaking so bad. I’m shaking worse than Nick, who looks like the weak, trembling leaf he’s always been. I want to crush him between my fingertips. “What did you miss, Brenna?” I don’t like the way he says my name. “Ahhh … agh…” I bend at the waist. Succulent, heavy tears drop right out of my eyes and onto the floor. Splat. I cry now, I think. All the time. And it’s so much fun. “I missed my chance,” I say, standing up straight and crushing the tears with the toe of my shoe. “With my soulmate.”

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  The action in Grenada served many purposes for the United States, provided the grounds for many tests. A major one was addressed to the concern long expressed by the Pentagon as to whether or not Black american soldiers could be gotten to fire upon other Black people. This becomes a vital question as the U.S. military-industrial complex executes increasingly military solutions to this country’s precarious position in the Third World, where the U.S. either ignores or stands upon the wrong side of virtually every single struggle for liberation by oppressed peoples. Of course, there were also lesser tests. In addition to trying out new armaments, there was the question of whether the marines liked their new Nazi-style helmets. They did not because they couldn’t shave in them. And whether the new army uniforms were too heavy to be worn comfortably in the tropics. They were.18 Listen to the language that came from the Pentagon, orchestrated by the psychological warfare experts operating in Grenada. • We got there just in time. • Not an invasion, a rescue mission. • Mopping up. • It was our turf. We had every right. • Armed thugs (the Grenadian militia). • An Idi Amin-type character, capable of taking hostages (General Austin.) • Imprisoned for spreading ill will among the people. This language is calculated to reduce a Black nation’s aspirations in the eyes and ears of white americans already secretly terrified by the Black Menace, enraged by myths of Black Progress, at the same time encouraged by government action never to take the life of a Black person seriously. Even many Black americans, threatened by some spectre of a socialism that is mythic and undefined at best, have bought the government line of “them” against “us.” But which one of us as a Black american has ever taken the time to examine this threat of socialism for any reality nearly as destructive as racism is within all of our lives? With the constant manipulation of the media, many Black americans are honestly confused, defending “our” invasion of Black Grenada under a mistaken mirage of patriotism. Nineteen eighty-four is upon us, and doublethink has come home to scramble our brains and blanket our protest.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  I ask that you be aware of the effect that this dismissal has upon the community of Black women and other women of Color, and how it devalues your own words. This dismissal does not essentially differ from the specialized devaluations that make Black women prey, for instance, to the murders even now happening in your own city. When patriarchy dismisses us, it encourages our murderers. When radical lesbian feminist theory dismisses us, it encourages its own demise. This dismissal stands as a real block to communication between us. This block makes it far easier to turn away from you completely than to attempt to understand the thinking behind your choices. Should the next step be war between us, or separation? Assimilation within a solely western european herstory is not acceptable. Mary, I ask that you re-member what is dark and ancient and divine within yourself that aids your speaking. As outsiders, we need each other for support and connection and all the other necessities of living on the borders. But in order to come together we must recognize each other. Yet I feel that since you have so completely un-recognized me, perhaps I have been in error concerning you and no longer recognize you. I feel you do celebrate differences between white women as a creative force toward change, rather than a reason for misunderstanding and separation. But you fail to recognize that, as women, those differences expose all women to various forms and degrees of patriarchal oppression, some of which we share and some of which we do not. For instance, surely you know that for nonwhite women in this country, there is an 80 percent fatality rate from breast cancer; three times the number of unnecessary eventrations, hysterectomies and sterilizations as for white women; three times as many chances of being raped, murdered, or assaulted as exist for white women. These are statistical facts, not coincidences nor paranoid fantasies. Within the community of women, racism is a reality force in my life as it is not in yours. The white women with hoods on in Ohio handing out KKK literature on the street may not like what you have to say, but they will shoot me on sight. (If you and I were to walk into a classroom of women in Dismal Gulch, Alabama, where the only thing they knew about each of us was that we were both Lesbian/Radical/Feminist, you would see exactly what I mean.) The oppression of women knows no ethnic nor racial boundaries, true, but that does not mean it is identical within those differences. Nor do the reservoirs of our ancient power know these boundaries.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Everything can be used / except what is wasteful / (you will need / to remember this when you are accused of destruction.)* Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change. And when I speak of change, I do not mean a simple switch of positions or a temporary lessening of tensions, nor the ability to smile or feel good. I am speaking of a basic and radical alteration in those assumptions underlining our lives. I have seen situations where white women hear a racist remark, resent what has been said, become filled with fury, and remain silent because they are afraid. That unexpressed anger lies within them like an undetonated device, usually to be hurled at the first woman of Color who talks about racism. But anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification, for it is in the painful process of this translation that we identify who are our allies with whom we have grave differences, and who are our genuine enemies. Anger is loaded with information and energy. When I speak of women of Color, I do not only mean Black women. The woman of Color who is not Black and who charges me with rendering her invisible by assuming that her struggles with racism are identical with my own has something to tell me that I had better learn from, lest we both waste ourselves fighting the truths between us. If I participate, knowingly or otherwise, in my sister’s oppression and she calls me on it, to answer her anger with my own only blankets the substance of our exchange with reaction. It wastes energy. And yes, it is very difficult to stand still and to listen to another woman’s voice delineate an agony I do not share, or one to which I myself have contributed. 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.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  These are statistical facts, not coincidences nor paranoid fantasies. Within the community of women, racism is a reality force in my life as it is not in yours. The white women with hoods on in Ohio handing out KKK literature on the street may not like what you have to say, but they will shoot me on sight. (If you and I were to walk into a classroom of women in Dismal Gulch, Alabama, where the only thing they knew about each of us was that we were both Lesbian/Radical/Feminist, you would see exactly what I mean.) The oppression of women knows no ethnic nor racial boundaries, true, but that does not mean it is identical within those differences. Nor do the reservoirs of our ancient power know these boundaries. To deal with one without even alluding to the other is to distort our commonality as well as our difference. For then beyond sisterhood is still racism. We first met at the MLA panel, “The Transformation of Silence Into Language and Action.” This letter attempts to break a silence which I had imposed upon myself shortly before that date. I had decided never again to speak to white women about racism. I felt it was wasted energy because of destructive guilt and defensiveness, and because whatever I had to say might better be said by white women to one another at far less emotional cost to the speaker, and probably with a better hearing. But I would like not to destroy you in my consciousness, not to have to. So as a sister Hag, I ask you to speak to my perceptions. Whether or not you do, Mary, again I thank you for what I have learned from you. This letter is in repayment. In the hands of Afrekete, Audre Lorde * Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Beacon Press, Boston, 1978). ** In the spring of 1979, twelve Black women were murdered in the Boston area. Man Child: A Black Lesbian Feminist’s Response * THIS ARTICLE IS NOT a theoretical discussion of Lesbian Mothers and their Sons, nor a how-to article. It is an attempt to scrutinize and share some pieces of that common history belonging to my son and to me. I have two children: a fifteen-and-a-half-year-old daughter Beth, and a fourteen-year-old son Jonathan. This is the way it was/is with me and Jonathan, and I leave the theory to another time and person. This is one woman’s telling. I have no golden message about the raising of sons for other lesbian mothers, no secret to transpose your questions into certain light. I have my own ways of rewording those same questions, hoping we will all come to speak those questions and pieces of our lives we need to share. We are women making contact within ourselves and with each other across the restrictions of a printed page, bent upon the use of our own/one another’s knowledges.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  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. Anger is an appropriate reaction to racist attitudes, as is fury when the actions arising from those attitudes do not change. To those women here who fear the anger of women of Color more than their own unscrutinized racist attitudes, I ask: Is the anger of women of Color more threatening than the woman-hatred that tinges all aspects of our lives? It is not the anger of other women that will destroy us but our refusals to stand still, to listen to its rhythms, to learn within it, to move beyond the manner of presentation to the substance, to tap that anger as an important source of empowerment. I cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt, nor hurt feelings, nor answering anger; for to do so insults and trivializes all our efforts. Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness. Most women have not developed tools for facing anger constructively. CR groups in the past, largely white, dealt with how to express anger, usually at the world of men. And these groups were made up of white women who shared the terms of their oppressions. There was usually little attempt to articulate the genuine differences between women, such as those of race, color, age, class, and sexual identity.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  I was really sickened with fury, and I decided to pull over and just jot some things down in my notebook to enable me to cross town without an accident because I felt so sick and so enraged. And I wrote those lines down — I was just writing, and that poem came out without craft. That’s probably why I was talking to you about it because I didn’t feel it was really a poem. I was thinking that the killer had been a student at John Jay and that I might have seen him in the hall, that I might see him again. What was retribution? What could have been done? There was one Black woman on the jury. It could have been me. Now I am here teaching in John Jay College. Do I kill him? What is my effective role? Would I kill her in the same way — the Black woman on the jury. What kind of strength did she, would I, have at the point of deciding to take a position ... Adrienne: Against eleven white men ... Audre: ... that atavistic fear of an articulated power that is not on your terms. There is the jury — white male power, white male structures — how do you take a position against them? How do you reach down into threatening difference without being killed or killing? How do you deal with things you believe, live them not as theory, not even as emotion, but right on the line of action and effect and change? All of those things were riding in on that poem. But I had no sense, no understanding at the time, of the connections, just that I was that woman. And that to put myself on the line to do what had to be done at any place and time was so difficult, yet absolutely crucial, and not to do so was the most awful death. And putting yourself on the line is like killing a piece of yourself, in the sense that you have to kill, end, destroy something familiar and dependable, so that something new can come, in ourselves, in our world. And that sense of writing at the edge, out of urgency, not because you choose it but because you have to, that sense of survival — that’s what the poem is out of, as well as the pain of my spiritual son’s death over and over. Once you live any piece of your vision it opens you to a constant onslaught. Of necessities, of horrors, but of wonders too, of possibilities. Adrienne: I was going to say, tell it on the other side. Audre: Of wonders, absolute wonders, possibilities, like meteor showers all the time, bombardment, constant connections. And then, trying to separate what is useful for survival from what is distorted, destructive to self.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  During his presentation, Davis showed an impressively produced video that portrayed Scientology’s worldwide efforts for literary programs and drug education, the translation of Hubbard’s work into dozens of languages, and the deluxe production facilities at Gold Base. “The real question is who would produce the kind of material we produce and do the kinds of things we do, set up the kind of organizational structure that we set up?” Davis asked. “Or what kind of man, like L. Ron Hubbard, would spend an entire lifetime researching, putting together the kind of material, suffer all the trials and tribulations and go through all the things he went through in his life ... or even with the things that we, as individuals, have to go through, as part of the new religion? Work seven days a week, three hundred sixty-five days a year, fourteen-, fifteen-, eighteen-hour days sometimes, out of sheer total complete dedication to our faith. And do it all, for what? As some sort of sham? Just to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes?” He concluded, “It’s ridiculous. Nobody works that hard to cheat people. Nobody gets that little sleep to screw over their fellow man.” We came to the section in the queries dealing with Hubbard’s war record. His voice filling with emotion, Davis said that if it was true that Hubbard had not been injured, then “the injuries that he handled by the use of Dianetics procedures were never handled, because they were injuries that never existed; therefore, Dianetics is based on a lie; therefore, Scientology is based on a lie.” He concluded: “The fact of the matter is that Mr. Hubbard was a war hero.” I believe everyone on the New Yorker side of the table was taken aback by this daring equation, one that seemed not only fair but testable. As proof of his claim that Hubbard had been injured, Davis provided a letter from the US Naval Hospital in Oakland, dated December 1, 1945. It states that Hubbard had been hospitalized that year for a duodenal ulcer, but was pronounced “fit for duty.” Davis had highlighted a passage in the letter: “Eyesight very poor, beginning with conjunctivitis actinic in 1942. Lame in right hip from service connected injury. Infection in bone. Not misconduct, all service connected.” Davis added later that according to Robert Heinlein, Hubbard’s ankles had suffered a “drumhead-type injury”; this can result, Davis explained, “when a ship is torpedoed or bombed.” Despite subsequent requests to produce additional records, this was the only document Davis provided to prove that the founder of Scientology was not lying about his war injuries. And yet, Hubbard’s medical records show that only five days after receiving the doctor’s note, Hubbard applied for a pension based on his conjunctivitis, an ulcer, a sprained knee, malaria, and arthritis in his right hip and shoulder.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The epilogue is written by Castellio, and is the most important part of the book. He examines the different biblical and patristic passages quoted for and against intolerance. He argues against his opponents from the multiplicity of sects which disagree on the interpretation of Scripture, and concludes that, on their principles, they should all be exterminated except one. He justly charges St. Augustin with inconsistency in his treatment of the Donatists, for which, he says, he was punished by the invasion of the Arian Vandals. The lions turned against those who had unchained them. Persecution breeds Christian hypocrites in place of open heretics. It provokes counter-persecution, as was just then seen in England after the accession of Queen Mary, which caused the flight of English Protestants to Switzerland. In conclusion he gives an allegorical picture of a journey through the centuries showing the results of the two conflicting principles of force and liberty, of intolerance and charity, and leaves the reader to decide which of the two armies is the army of Jesus Christ. Castellio anticipated Bayle and Voltaire, or rather the Baptists and Quakers. He was the champion of religious liberty in the sixteenth century. He claimed it in the name of the gospel and the Reformation. It was appropriate that this testimony should come from the Swiss city of Basel, the home of Erasmus.1219 But the leaders of the Swiss Reformation in Geneva and Zürich could see in this advocacy of religious freedom only a most dangerous heresy, which would open the door to all kinds of errors and throw the Church of Christ into inextricable confusion. Theodore Beza, the faithful aid of Calvin, took up his pen against the anonymous sceptics of Basel, and defended the right and duty of the Christian magistrate to punish heresy. His work appeared in September, 1554; that is, five months after the book of Martinus Bellius. It was Beza’s first published theological treatise (he was then thirty-five years of age).1220

• From Between Us

  Inside-out emotions may be healthy when emotions are understood as MINE, but not so much when they are OURS. In an elegant study, psychologists Iris Mauss and Emily Butler made European American and Asian Americans undergraduate students angry in the lab. On average, Asian American students put a higher value on emotional control than their European American counterparts, agreeing more that “It is wrong for people to always display how they feel.” In contrast, European American students put a lower value on emotional control, and agreed more than their Asian American peers that “It is better for people to let out pent up emotions.” Generally, students who valued (high) emotional control behaved less angry during the experiment (as perceived by judges who were blind to the hypotheses of the study). Turning that same finding around, it can be said that the individuals showing most anger were the ones to endorse the Freudian notion that it is better to let out pent-up emotions. Most of these were European American. Even more interestingly, Mauss and Butler tracked anger experience and cardiac output during the same experiment. Low cardiac output is often a sign that the individual has difficulty coping with the situation (the situation is a “threat”); high cardiac output can mean that the individual feels well equipped to cope with the situation and that the situation feels under control (the situation is a “challenge”). Judging by cardiac output measures, anger affected the cultural groups in the study differently. European Americans who showed little anger had stronger anger feelings and felt more “threat” than European Americans who did show anger. In contrast, Asian Americans who showed little anger felt less angry and better equipped to cope than Asian Americans who did show anger. These findings suggest that emotional control, while effortful, allowed Asian American individuals to achieve the emotional state that they were aiming for. Moreover, the outward-in adjustment felt under control. Outside-in emotions do not always move away from strong to weaker emotions. Norms, other people’s needs and expectations, or relationship concerns may call for expression rather than suppression: either for an emotion that was not there in the first place, or for amplification of an existing emotion. Among the Ifaluk, who live on a small Micronesian island in the southwest Pacific, another person’s needs call for fago, the readiness to care for others. Fago can be translated as a mix of compassion, love, and sadness. A sister who feels fago for her brother comes to his aid. When Tamalekar, an Ifaluk man, was shamed by his ten-year-old son who had thrown rocks at a man who lived on the island and suffered from psychosis, this elicited fago in Tamalekar’s sisters. The sisters “hurried to his house with gifts and cloth to be given, by way of apology, to the family of the ‘crazy’ man.”

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  We find, however, from the context that Prof. S.'s practice before the mirror has developed in him such a virtuosity in the control of his facial muscles that he can entirely disregard their natural association and contract them in any order of grouping, on either side of the face isolatedly, and each one alone. Probably in him the facial mimicry is an entirely restricted and localized thing, without sympathetic changes of any sort elsewhere. Third Objection. Manifesting an emotion, so far from increasing it, makes it cease. Rage evaporates after a good outburst; it is pent-up emotions that "work like madness in the brain." Reply. The objection fails to discriminate between what is felt during and what is felt after the manifestation. During the manifestation the emotion is always felt. In the normal course of things this, being the natural channel of discharge, exhausts the nerve-centres, and emotional calm ensues. But if tears or anger are simply suppressed, whilst the object of grief or rage remains unchanged before the mind, the current which would have invaded the normal channels turns into others, for it must find some outlet of escape. It may then work different and worse effects later on. Thus vengeful brooding may replace a burst of indignation; a dry heat may consume the frame of one who fain would weep, or he may, as Dante says, turn to stone within; and then tears or a storming fit may bring a grateful relief. This is when the current is strong enough to strike into a pathological path when the normal one is dammed. When this is so, an immediate outpour may be best. But here, to quote Prof. Bain again: "There is nothing more implied than the fact that an emotion may be too strong to be resisted, and me only waste our strength in the endeavor. If we are really able to stem the torrent, there is no more reason for refraining from the attempt than in the case of weaker feelings. And undoubtedly the habitual control of the emotions is not to be attained without a systematic restraint, extended to weak and strong."

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  For it is through the coming together of self-actualized individuals, female and male, that any real advances can be made. The old sexual power relationships based on a dominant/subordinate model between unequals have not served us as a people, nor as individuals. Black women who define ourselves and our goals beyond the sphere of a sexual relationship can bring to any endeavor the realized focus of completed and therefore empowered individuals. Black women and Black men who recognize that the development of their particular strengths and interests does not diminish the other do not need to diffuse their energies fighting for control over each other. We can focus our attentions against the real economic, political, and social forces at the heart of this society which are ripping us and our children and our worlds apart. Increasingly, despite opposition, Black women are coming together to explore and to alter those manifestations of our society which oppress us in different ways from those that oppress Black men. This is no threat to Black men. It is only seen as one by those Black men who choose to embody within themselves those same manifestations of female oppression. For instance, no Black man has ever been forced to bear a child he did not want or could not support. Enforced sterilization and unavailable abortions are tools of oppression against Black women, as is rape. Only to those Black men who are unclear about the pathways of their own definition can the self-actualization and self- protective bonding of Black women be seen as a threatening development. Today, the red herring of lesbian-baiting is being used in the Black community to obscure the true face of racism/sexism. Black women sharing close ties with each other, politically or emotionally, are not the enemies of Black men. Too frequently, however, some Black men attempt to rule by fear those Black women who are more ally than enemy. These tactics are expressed as threats of emotional rejection: “Their poetry wasn’t too bad but I couldn’t take all those lezzies.” The Black man saying this is code-warning every Black woman present interested in a relationship with a man — and most Black women are — that (1) if she wishes to have her work considered by him she must eschew any other allegiance except to him and (2) any woman who wishes to retain his friendship and/or support had better not be “tainted” by woman-identified interests.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Yet at what cost! In order to withstand the weather, we had to become stone, and now we bruise ourselves upon the other who is closest. How do I alter course so each Black woman’s face I meet is not the face of my mother or my killer? I loved you. I dreamed about you. I talked to you for hours in my sleep sitting under a silk-cotton tree our arms around each other or braiding each other’s hair or oiling each other’s backs, and every time I run into you on the street or at the post office or behind the Medicaid desk I want to wring your neck . There are so many occasions in each of our lives for righteous fury, multiplied and dividing. • Black women being told that we can be somehow better, and are worse, but never equal. To Black men. To other women. To human beings. • The white academic feminist who tells me she is so glad This Bridge Called My Back * exists, because now it gives her a chance to deal with racism without having to face the harshness of Black undiluted by other colors. What she means is she does not have to examine her own specific terror and loathing of Blackness, nor deal with the angers of Black women. So get away with your dirty ugly mean faces, all screwed up all the time! • The racist filmstrip artist who I thought I had handled so patiently and well. I didn’t blow up his damned machine. I explained how his racial blindness made me feel and how his film could be altered to have some meaning. He probably learned something about showing Black images. Then I came home and almost tore up my house and my lover because some invitations happened to be misprinted. Not seeing where the charge of rage was born . • A convicted Black man, a torturer of women and children, army-trained to be a killer, writes in his journal in his death cell: “I am the type of person you are most likely to find driving a Mercedes and sitting in the executive offices of 100 big corporations.” And he’s right. Except he’s Black. How do we keep from releasing our angers at them upon ourselves and each other? How do I free myself from this poison I was force-fed like a Strasburg goose until I vomited anger at the least scent of anything nourishing, oh my sister the belligerent lift of your shoulder the breath of your hair .… We each learned the craft of destruction. It is all they knew to allow us, yet look how our words are finding each other again. It is difficult to construct a wholesomeness model when we are surrounded with synonyms for filth. But not impossible.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  Because Roscoe is determined to demonstrate that Native American berdaches represent “third genders,” he plays up the ways in which these groups showed signs of being separate from and/or a mix of female and male, while playing down evidence that some berdaches may have actually seen themselves as, or wanted to be, the other gender. While this is not difficult to do for certain berdaches (as these roles varied significantly between Native American nations), Roscoe sticks to his “third gender” hypothesis even when analyzing the historical record of the Mohave alyha (MTF spectrum) and hwame (FTM spectrum) berdaches (reviewed in his 1994 essay “How to Become a Berdache”). Despite the fact that the alyha “insisted on being referred to by female names and with female gender references,” used “the Mohave word for clitoris to refer to their penises,” received female facial tattoos, and took part in rituals where they simulated pregnancy, Roscoe still argues that they should be considered “third gender” because they were given a unique name (i.e., alyha) to distinguish them from other women.67 Other evidence that Roscoe uses to undermine the Mohave berdaches’ self-identified gender is that they were not always fully accepted in that gender by other Mohaves: He references accounts of individual Mohaves commenting that alyha were less womanly than other women and cites rare occasions when some Mohaves used pronouns that referenced the berdaches’ birth (rather than identified) sex.68 Thus, to make his point that Mohave berdaches represent “third genders,” Roscoe resorts to giving more credence to the judgments of non-gender-variant Mohave than to the way the alyha and hwame saw themselves. Perhaps this shouldn’t be a surprise, as Roscoe himself purposely uses inappropriate pronouns and favors birth sex over identified sex when writing about berdaches.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  “Out!” I send my fists into his chest. “That’s not my name anymore!” “You’re acting crazy,” he insists. “You can’t do this alone. Let me help you.” I scream. He created a monster, now he’s going to meet her. Every little crevice. “I am crazy! Because of you! I can do it alone. I’ve always done it alone. How dare you think I haven’t.” He grabs my wrists, and tries to subdue me. I’m not having it. I rip away from him and walk to the center of my white room, rage rolling in waves. I can ride them, but someone’s going to get hurt. “You see this,” I say, throwing my arms up, “this is you. You made me feel so much good, then you made me feel so much bad. So I decided to just stop feeling.” He’s artist enough to understand me. “What do you want me to say? I’m here now.” That’s it. That’s all he has to say and the truth hits me like an icy wind. My hair rises on its hackles. I feel flushed and bereaved. I grab my head at the temples and squeeze with the heels of my hands. I am petrified. Never in my life have I been this afraid. Not of the cancer, not of being alone, not of my future or of my past. I am afraid of never seeing Isaac again. Of never having him hold me when life is so absolute in its unfairness that all I can do is scream. I turn to Nick. Nick, who is here now. “Now?” I whisper, incredulous. “Now? Where were you when I was raped, or when I had my breasts cut off? Where were you when someone stole me away in the middle of the night and starved me in the middle of the goddamn arctic tundra?” I cut off the space between us and pound three hard times on his chest. “Where. Did. You. Go.” He’s shaking. I’m dropping things on him like a hailstorm, but I don’t give a fuck. I even say things like fuck now, because I don’t want to waste another second on the white room way I lived my life. He’s here now. But, Isaac was here then … and then … and then … and then. “I was so hung up on you that I missed it,” I say. I’m shaking so bad. I’m shaking worse than Nick, who looks like the weak, trembling leaf he’s always been. I want to crush him between my fingertips. “What did you miss, Brenna?” I don’t like the way he says my name. “Ahhh … agh…” I bend at the waist. Succulent, heavy tears drop right out of my eyes and onto the floor. Splat. I cry now, I think. All the time. And it’s so much fun. “I missed my chance,” I say, standing up straight and crushing the tears with the toe of my shoe. “With my soulmate.”

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  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 . Anger is an appropriate reaction to racist attitudes, as is fury when the actions arising from those attitudes do not change. To those women here who fear the anger of women of Color more than their own unscrutinized racist attitudes, I ask: Is the anger of women of Color more threatening than the woman-hatred that tinges all aspects of our lives? It is not the anger of other women that will destroy us but our refusals to stand still, to listen to its rhythms, to learn within it, to move beyond the manner of presentation to the substance, to tap that anger as an important source of empowerment. I cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt, nor hurt feelings, nor answering anger; for to do so insults and trivializes all our efforts. Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness. Most women have not developed tools for facing anger constructively. CR groups in the past, largely white, dealt with how to express anger, usually at the world of men. And these groups were made up of white women who shared the terms of their oppressions. There was usually little attempt to articulate the genuine differences between women, such as those of race, color, age, class, and sexual identity. There was no apparent need at that time to examine the contradictions of self, woman as oppressor.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  If the problems of Black women are only derivatives of a larger contradiction between capital and labor, then so is racism, and both must be fought by all of us. The capitalist structure is a many-headed monster. I might add here that in no socialist country that I have visited have I found an absence of racism or of sexism, so the eradication of both of these diseases seems to involve more than the abolition of capitalism as an institution. No reasonable Black man can possibly condone the rape and slaughter of Black women by Black men as a fitting response to capitalist oppression. And destruction of Black women by Black men clearly cuts across all class lines. Whatever the “structural underpinnings” (Staples) for sexism in the Black community may be, it is obviously Black women who are bearing the brunt of that sexism, and so it is in our best interest to abolish it. We invite our Black brothers to join us, since ultimately that abolition is in their best interests also. For Black men are also diminished by a sexism which robs them of meaningful connections to Black women and our struggles. Since it is Black women who are being abused, however, and since it is our female blood that is being shed, it is for Black women to decide whether or not sexism in the Black community is pathological. And we do not approach that discussion theoretically. Those “creative relationships” which Staples speaks about within the Black community are almost invariably those which operate to the benefit of Black males, given the Black male/female ratio and the implied power balance within a supply and demand situation. Polygamy is seen as “creative,” but a lesbian relationship is not. This is much the same as how the “creative relationships” between master and slave were always those benefiting the master. The results of woman-hating in the Black community are tragedies which diminish all Black people. These acts must be seen in the context of a systematic devaluation of Black women within this society. It is within this context that we become approved and acceptable targets for Black male rage, so acceptable that even a Black male social scientist condones and excuses this depersonalizing abuse. This abuse is no longer acceptable to Black women in the name of solidarity, nor of Black liberation. Any dialogue between Black women and Black men must begin there, no matter where it ends. * First published as “The Great American Disease” in The Black Scholar, vol. 10, no. 9 (May-June 1979) in response to “The Myth of Black Macho: A Response to Angry Black Feminists” by Robert Staples in The Black Scholar, vol. 10, no. 8 (March-April 1979).

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Unemployment in Grenada dropped 26 percent in four years.10 On October 25, 1983 american Corsair missiles and naval shells and mortars pounded into the hills behind Grenville, St. Georges, Gouyave. American marines tore through homes and hotels searching for “Cubans.” Now the Ministries are silent. The state farms are at a standstill. The cooperatives are suspended. The cannery plant in True Blue is a shambles, shelled to silence. On the day after the invasion, unemployment was back up to 35 percent. A cheap, acquiescent labor pool is the delight of supply side economics. One month later, the U.S. Agency for International Development visits Grenada. They report upon the role of the private sector in Grenada’s future, recommending the revision of tax codes to favor private enterprise (usually foreign), the development of a labor code that will ensure a compliant labor movement, and the selling off of public sector enterprises to private interests.11 How soon will it be Grenadian women who are going blind from assembling microcomputer chips at $.80 an hour for international industrial corporations? “I used to work at the radio station,” says a young woman on the beach, shrugging. “But that ended in the war.” This short, undeclared, and cynical war against Grenada is not a new direction for american foreign policy. It is merely a blatant example of a 160-year-old course of action called the Monroe Doctrine. In its name america has invaded small Caribbean and Central American countries over and over again since 1823, cloaking these invasions under a variety of names. Thirty-eight such invasions occurred prior to 1917 before the Soviet Union even existed. For example, in 1897, U.S. marines landed in Puerto Rico to fight the Spanish-American War. They never left. Beginning in 1981, the United States rehearsed the invasion of Grenada openly. It practiced the war game Ocean Venture in which it bombed the Puerto Rican island of Vieques, calling it “Amber of the Amberdines” (Grenada of the Grenadines). In this grisly make-believe, a situation is supposed to occur where americans are held hostage. As we know, this was the first excuse used to justify the invasion of Grenada. As for americans really being in danger, there were still over 500 resident american citizens who chose to remain in Grenada during and after the invasion. But since Ocean Venture appears to be the script, we must remember that it also calls for the assassination of the Prime Minister of Amber. Are we now to believe that the U.S./CIA was not involved directly or indirectly with Prime Minister Maurice Bishop’s death? Was the coup which served as the opening for Ocean Venture to become a reality merely an unhappy coincidence of personal intrigue, or was it an event lengthily orchestrated by clever manipulators?

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Why do Black women reserve a particular voice of fury and disappointment for each other? Who is it we must destroy when we attack each other with that tone of predetermined and correct annihilation? We reduce one another to our own lowest common denominator, and then we proceed to try and obliterate what we most desire to love and touch, the problematic self, unclaimed but fiercely guarded from the other. This cruelty between us, this harshness, is a piece of the legacy of hate with which we were inoculated from the time we were born by those who intended it to be an injection of death. But we adapted, learned to take it in and use it, unscrutinized. Yet at what cost! In order to withstand the weather, we had to become stone, and now we bruise ourselves upon the other who is closest. How do I alter course so each Black woman’s face I meet is not the face of my mother or my killer? I loved you. I dreamed about you. I talked to you for hours in my sleep sitting under a silk-cotton tree our arms around each other or braiding each other’s hair or oiling each other’s backs, and every time I run into you on the street or at the post office or behind the Medicaid desk I want to wring your neck. There are so many occasions in each of our lives for righteous fury, multiplied and dividing. • Black women being told that we can be somehow better, and are worse, but never equal. To Black men. To other women. To human beings. • The white academic feminist who tells me she is so glad This Bridge Called My Back* exists, because now it gives her a chance to deal with racism without having to face the harshness of Black undiluted by other colors. What she means is she does not have to examine her own specific terror and loathing of Blackness, nor deal with the angers of Black women. So get away with your dirty ugly mean faces, all screwed up all the time! • The racist filmstrip artist who I thought I had handled so patiently and well. I didn’t blow up his damned machine. I explained how his racial blindness made me feel and how his film could be altered to have some meaning. He probably learned something about showing Black images. Then I came home and almost tore up my house and my lover because some invitations happened to be misprinted. Not seeing where the charge of rage was born. • A convicted Black man, a torturer of women and children, army-trained to be a killer, writes in his journal in his death cell: “I am the type of person you are most likely to find driving a Mercedes and sitting in the executive offices of 100 big corporations.” And he’s right. Except he’s Black.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  I am a lesbian woman of Color whose children eat regularly because I work in a university. If their full bellies make me fail to recognize my commonality with a woman of Color whose children do not eat because she cannot find work, or who has no children because her insides are rotted from home abortions and sterilization; if I fail to recognize the lesbian who chooses not to have children, the woman who remains closeted because her homophobic community is her only life support, the woman who chooses silence instead of another death, the woman who is terrified lest my anger trigger the explosion of hers; if I fail to recognize them as other faces of myself, then I am contributing not only to each of their oppressions but also to my own, and the anger which stands between us then must be used for clarity and mutual empowerment, not for evasion by guilt or for further separation. I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own. And I am not free as long as one person of Color remains chained. Nor is any one of you. I speak here as a woman of Color who is not bent upon destruction, but upon survival. No woman is responsible for altering the psyche of her oppressor, even when that psyche is embodied in another woman. I have suckled the wolf’s lip of anger and I have used it for illumination, laughter, protection, fire in places where there was no light, no food, no sisters, no quarter. We are not goddesses or matriarchs or edifices of divine forgiveness; we are not fiery fingers of judgment or instruments of flagellation; we are women forced back always upon our woman’s power. We have learned to use anger as we have learned to use the dead flesh of animals, and bruised, battered, and changing, we have survived and grown and, in Angela Wilson’s words, we are moving on. With or without uncolored women. We use whatever strengths we have fought for, including anger, to help define and fashion a world where all our sisters can grow, where our children can love, and where the power of touching and meeting another woman’s difference and wonder will eventually transcend the need for destruction.