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 Sister Outsider (1984)

  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 Between Us

  Can we find good translations for the most important categories of emotion? Many languages fail to make the distinctions that seem obvious in English, such as those between anger, sadness, love, and shame. Some of the most central emotion concepts (as we distinguish them in English) share a word in other languages: for example, native speakers of Luganda, a language spoken in Uganda, use the same word, okusunguwala, for “anger” and “sadness.” Native Luganda interpreters had a hard time making the distinction between anger and sadness in English. Similar blends of anger and sadness are found in other languages. Turkish-minority respondents in my research in the Netherlands used kızmak to describe an anger that was permeated with sadness, and that typically occurred in intimate relationships in which high expectations had been disappointed. Kızmak does not come with aggression, but rather with ignoring or avoiding the other person. In Indonesia, the Nias do not clearly distinguish between anger and envy. The expression afökho dödö (literally, “pain-hearted”), a focal emotion word among the Nias, refers to a range of emotions, including offended, spite, resentment, envy, malice, and ill will. It also refers both to “acts of spite and the sentiment.” Another blurred distinction is the one between sadness, love, and empathy. The central Ifaluk emotion fago is translated as “love,” yet shares features with sadness and compassion. The word for “love” in Samoan, alofa, also means sympathy, pity, and liking. My Turkish respondents used üzüntü not only for their own ill fate but also for the ill fate of close others. By doing so, elements of empathy were mixed in with sadness. Thus üzüntü prompted reaching out and being kind to others, in addition to crying, the inability to do anything, and wanting to be helped. My informants told me it is a celebrated emotion in Turkey, and this makes sense from the point of view of the sociality of the emotion. Many languages lump shame and embarrassment together. The Japanese word haji refers to both shame or embarrassment, and does not clearly distinguish between the two. The Bedouins mentioned earlier use hasham to describe an even larger range of feelings: shame, embarrassment, shyness, and modesty or respectability. Among the Ilongot in the Philippines, betang similarly refers to shame, timidity, embarrassment, awe, obedience, shame, and respect.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Both sexes often experience at least a hint of anger when they violate prohibitions. It asserts the primacy of the self over restrictive rules and regulations—and their perceived sources. More often than not, embedded in the joy of violational sex is an implied or direct “Fuck you” to prudes and naysayers everywhere. Anger says, “Your stupid rules don’t apply to me; I’m in control of my sex life!” Thus it is a key emotion behind sexual acts or fantasies of defiance and rebellion. THE RHYTHMS OF EMOTIONAs you’ve focused on each of the emotional aphrodisiacs, you’ve probably been giving considerable thought to the feelings that have played a part in your own peak turn-ons. To facilitate your observations about the emotional aspects of your eroticism, I suggest that you use a simple rating scale from the SES to help give you a clearer picture of which emotions have energized each of your memorable encounters and fantasies. The scale ranges from zero (for emotions that were not at all important) to four (for emotions that were very important). Begin by rating the importance of the response emotions in each of your peak turn-ons. As I mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, one or more of these feelings is mentioned by almost everyone in The Group. They are the emotional rewards of memorable sex: Response Emotions Not at all important [-0-1-2-3-4-] Very important Exuberance Related emotions: joy, celebration, surprise, freedom, euphoria, and pride. Satisfaction Related emotions: contentment, happiness, relaxation, and security. Now rate the importance of the emotional aphrodisiacs in each of your most memorable encounters and fantasies: Emotional Aphrodisiacs Not at all important [0-1-2-3-4-] Very important Closeness Related emotions: love, tenderness, affection, connection, unity (oneness), and appreciation. Anxiety Related emotions: fear, vulnerability, weakness, worry, and nervousness. Guilt Related emotions: remorse, naughtiness, dirtiness, and shame. Anger Related emotions: hostility, contempt, hatred, resentment, and revenge. These are the paradoxical emotions; they can either intensify or inhibit arousal. Consequently, rating them may be a bit more complicated. For one thing, the importance of any of the paradoxical emotions in peak sex is not necessarily related to its strength. This is especially true of the unexpected aphrodisiacs—anxiety, guilt, and anger—which are most likely to have had an aphrodisiac effect in their more subdued forms. Whereas few people have ever experienced “too much” satisfaction during or after peak sex, most of us have experienced too much anxiety, guilt, or anger. You may even recall instances when you became so emotionally enmeshed with a lover that your closeness turned you off.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Katy says that Lauren wrote up a report saying that Katy’s friend was known to hang out with lesbians. The friend did not get the job, Katy said. 5 Haggis also recounted the scene at John Travolta and Kelly Preston’s house, when another Scientologist made the slur about the gay waiter. “I admire John and Kelly for many reasons; one of them is the way they handled that,” Haggis stated. “You and I both know there has been a hidden anti-gay sentiment in the church for a long time. I have been shocked on too many occasions to hear Scientologists make derogatory remarks about gay people, and then quote LRH in their defense.” He said that the church’s decision not to denounce the bigots who supported Proposition 8 was cowardly. “Silence is consent, Tommy. I refuse to consent.” He referenced Davis’s interview on CNN. “I saw you deny the church’s policy of disconnection. You said straight-out there was no such policy, that it did not exist,” he wrote. “I was shocked. We all know this policy exists. I didn’t have to search for verification. I didn’t have to look any further than my own home.” He reminded Davis of Deborah’s experience with her parents. “Although it caused her terrible personal pain, my wife broke off all contact with them.... That’s not ancient history, Tommy. It was a year ago.” He added: “To see you lie so easily, I am afraid to ask myself: what else are you lying about?” Then, he said, he had read the series of articles in the St. Petersburg Times. “They left me dumbstruck and horrified. These were not the claims made by ‘outsiders’ looking to dig up dirt against us. These accusations were made by top international executives who had devoted most of their lives to the church. Say what you will about them now, these were staunch defenders of the church, including Mike Rinder, the church’s official spokesman for 20 years! “Tommy, if only a fraction of these accusations are true, we are talking about serious, indefensible human and civil rights violations.” He continued: And when I pictured you assuring me that it is all lies, that this is nothing but an unfounded and vicious attack by a group of disgruntled employees, I am afraid that I saw the same face that looked in the camera and denied the policy of disconnection. I heard the same voice that professed outrage at our support of Proposition 8, who promised to correct it, and did nothing. I was left feeling outraged, and frankly, more than a little stupid. Haggis was especially disturbed by the way the church’s Freedom magazine had responded to the newspaper’s revelations.

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

  The sons of Eric, who had lived in England during their exile, were likewise Christians, and they took up the cause of Christianity in a very high-handed manner, overthrowing the heathen altars and forbidding sacrifices. But the impression they made was merely odious, and their successor, Hakon Jarl, was a rank heathen. The first time Christianity really gained a footing in Norway, was under Olaf Trygveson. Descended from Harald Haarfagr, but sold, while a child, as a slave in Esthonia, he was ransomed by a relative who incidentally met him and recognized his own kin in the beauty of the boy, and was educated at Moscow. Afterwards he roved about much in Denmark, Wendland, England and Ireland, living as a sea-king. In England he became acquainted with Christianity and immediately embraced it, but he carried his viking-nature almost unchanged over into Christianity, and a fiercer knight of the cross was probably never seen. Invited to Norway by a party which had grown impatient of the tyranny of Hakon Jarl, he easily made himself master of the country, in 995, and immediately set about making Christianity its religion, "punishing severely," as Snorre says, "all who opposed him, killing some, mutilating others, and driving the rest into banishment." In the Southern part there still lingered a remembrance of Christianity from the days of Hakon the Good, and things went on here somewhat more smoothly, though Olaf more than once gave the people assembled in council with him the choice between fighting him or accepting baptism forthwith. But in the Northern part all the craft and all the energy of the king were needed in order to overcome the opposition. Once, at a great heathen festival at Moere, he told the assembled people that, if he should return to the heathen gods it would be necessary for him to make some great and awful sacrifice, and accordingly he seized twelve of the most prominent men present and prepared to sacrifice them to Thor. They were rescued, however, when the whole assembly accepted Christianity and were baptized. In the year 1000, he fell in a battle against the united Danish and Swedish kings, but though he reigned only five years, he nevertheless succeeded in establishing Christianity as the religion of Norway and, what is still more remarkable, no general relapse into heathenism seems to have taken place after his death.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  And that’s what I liked about Nick. He was only interested in what you were interested in. And I was not interested in my past. He liked that I was dark, but he didn’t know why. And he didn’t ask. He definitely didn’t understand. But for all of our differences he took me as I was. I needed that. Until he didn’t. Until he said that I was an emotional fort. Until nothing about me came easy, and he grew tired of trying. Nick and his words. Nick and his promises of never-ending love. I believed them all and then he left me. Love comes slow, but God does it go fast. He was beautiful—then he was ugly. I esteemed him, then I esteemed him not. Dr. Saphira Elgin had tried to teach me to control my anger. She wanted me to be able to pinpoint the source of it so I could rationalize my feelings. Talk myself down. I can never pinpoint the source. It runs around and around in my body without a point of origin. I blew her off. I always blew her off. But now I try to pinpoint it. I’m angry because… Isaac is touch, and he is sound. He is smell and he is sight. I tried to make him a single sense like I did with everyone else, but he is all of them. He overpowers my senses and that is exactly why I ran from him. I was afraid of feeling brightly—afraid I would become used to the color and sounds and smells, and they would be taken from me. I was a self-fulfilling prophecy; destroying before I could be destroyed. I wrote about women like that, I didn’t realize I was one. For years I believed that Nick left me because I failed him. I couldn’t be what he needed because I was empty and shallow. That’s what he insinuated. “Why can’t you love wedding cake, Brenna?” “Why can’t I take your darkness away?” “Why can’t you be who I need?” But, I didn’t fail Nick. He failed me. Love sticks, and it stays and it braves the bullshit. Like Isaac did. And I am mad at Isaac because he is all of that. And I am all of this. It’s irrational.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  When we do not attempt to name the confusion of feelings which exist between sisters, we act them out in hundreds of hurtful and unproductive ways. Never speaking from the old pain, to beyond. As if we have made a secret pact between ourselves not to speak, for the expression of that unexamined pain might be accompanied by other ancient and unexpressed hurtings embedded in the stored-up anger we have not expressed. And that anger, as we know from our flayed egos of childhood, is armed with a powerful cruelty learned in the bleakness of too-early battles for survival. “You can’t take it, huh!” The Dozens. A Black game of supposedly friendly rivalry and name-calling; in reality, a crucial exercise in learning how to absorb verbal abuse without faltering. A piece of the price we paid for learning survival was our childhood. We were never allowed to be children. It is the right of children to be able to play at living for a little while, but for a Black child, every act can have deadly serious consequences, and for a Black girl child, even more so. Ask the ghosts of the four little Black girls blown up in Birmingham. Ask Angel Lenair, or Latonya Wilson, or Cynthia Montgomery, the three girl victims in the infamous Atlanta murders, none of whose deaths have ever been solved. Sometimes it feels as if I were to experience all the collective hatred that I have had directed at me as a Black woman, admit its implications into my consciousness, I might die of the bleak and horrible weight. Is that why a sister once said to me, “white people feel, Black people do”? It is true that in america white people, by and large, have more time and space to afford the luxury of scrutinizing their emotions. Black people in this country have always had to attend closely to the hard and continuous work of survival in the most material and immediate planes. But it is a temptation to move from this fact to the belief that Black people do not need to examine our feelings; or that they are unimportant, since they have so often been used to stereotype and infantalize us; or that these feelings are not vital to our survival; or, worse, that there is some acquired virtue in not feeling them deeply. That is carrying a timebomb wired to our emotions. There is a distinction I am beginning to make in my living between pain and suffering. Pain is an event, an experience that must be recognized, named, and then used in some way in order for the experience to change, to be transformed into something else, strength or knowledge or action.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  CETs normally don’t change radically. I doubt, for example, that you’ll ever be drawn to passive, emotionally effusive men—although anything’s possible. Most likely, you’ll continue to appreciate a certain amount of aggressiveness and emotional reserve in a lover. But perhaps you now also require an all-important increase in warmth and affection. One more thing: it’s certainly conceivable that you’ll continue fantasizing about cold men, even though they bore you in reality. I mention this possibility because people often get upset when ingrained fantasies don’t keep pace with their evolving attractions. I’m afraid if I uncover too much about my CET I’ll ruin it. Could this happen? Also, do I have to tell my spouse about my CET? I wish I could give you the unequivocal reassurance you seek. But alas I must remind you that expanding consciousness is risky. You might, for example, be shocked by certain images that lurk, unrecognized, in the hidden recesses of your erotic mind. On the other hand, chances are slim that you will be confronted with anything you aren’t ready to handle. Your mind knows when not to notice. Implied in your question is the realization that you can, at least to some degree, decide whether to see—and how much, how fast, how clearly, or how deeply to absorb your impressions. Experimentation is the watchword. That said, I must also stress that expanding consciousness has a way of changing things—ultimately, I believe, for the better, but often not before shaking everything up. What if the original purpose of your CET was to convert a conflict from your early life into excitement? If you faced that conflict head-on and worked it through, you might no longer need your CET—at least not in the same way. But I doubt your CET would be totally ruined. Most likely you’d simply modify it or change how you use it. As to telling your spouse about your CET, here I can be unequivocal: you don’t have to. As we will see in Chapter 9, it may be in your interest to let a partner know something about what turns you on. But your CET itself is private. You, and only you, should decide when and if you want to discuss it. HONORING YOUR CETBecause your CET develops gradually in response to pivotal situations, in a sense it chooses you rather than you choosing it. This means you may not feel good about everything it contains, especially any shadow material that may have become a part of it. While it is clear that CETs are influenced by cultural norms, they also refuse to be limited by propriety. By nature your CET is untamed, primitive.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  His producing partner, Michael Nozik, who is not a Scientologist, was frustrated. Haggis was spending hours, day after day, dealing with Scientology delegations. He resorted to getting members of his staff to walk him out to his car because he knew that Scientology executives would be waiting for him, and he wanted to give the impression he was too busy to speak —which he was. But then he would give up and let them into the office for another lengthy confrontation. During one of these meetings, Davis showed Haggis a policy letter that Hubbard had written, listing the acts for which one could be declared a Suppressive Person. Haggis had stepped over the line on four of them. “Tommy, you are absolutely right, I did all those things,” Haggis responded. “If you want to call me that, that’s what I am.” “We can still put this genie back in the bottle,” Tommy assured him, but it would mean that Haggis would withdraw the letter and then resign quietly. Although Haggis listened, he didn’t change his mind. It seemed to him that the Scientology officials became more “livid and irrational” the longer they talked. For instance, Davis and the other church officials insisted that Miscavige had not beaten his employees; his accusers, they said, had committed the violence. “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Haggis responded, “okay, let’s say that’s true, Miscavige never touched anyone. I’m sorry, but if someone in my organization were going around beating people, I’d know about it! You think I’d put up with it? And I’m not that good a person.” Haggis noted that if the rumors about Miscavige’s violent temper were true, it just proved that even the greatest leaders are fallible. “Look at Martin Luther King, Jr.,” he said, referring to one of his heroes. “If you look at his personal life, it’s been said he has a few problems in that area.” “How dare you compare Dave Miscavige with Martin Luther King!” one of the officials shouted. Haggis was aghast. “They thought that comparing Miscavige to Martin Luther King was debasing his character,” he said. “If they were trying to convince me that Scientology was not a cult, they did a very poor job of it.” 11 Copies of Haggis’s e-mail resignation letter were forwarded to various members of the church, although few outside of church circles knew about it. By October, the letter had found its way to Marty Rathbun.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  I held out my hand for the book and he walked it back to me. Opening the cover I flipped to the dedication, touching it softly, running my fingers over the words … then I ripped it out. Hard. I handed the book back to Isaac, with the jagged page clutched in my fist. Stone faced, he left, the soles of his shoes sucking on the hospital floor. Thwuup ... Thwuup … Thwuup. I listened until they disappeared. I folded the page over and over until it was the size of my thumbnail, square upon square upon square. Then I ate it. I was discharged a week later. The nurses told me that normally a double mastectomy patient went home after three days, but Isaac pulled strings to keep me there longer. I didn’t say anything about it as he handed me my prescriptions in a paper bag, folded over twice and stapled. I shoved the bag into my overnight bag, trying to ignore the rattling sound of the pills. Trying to ignore how heavy the bag was in general. I supposed that it was easier for him to keep an eye on me here rather than at my house. He moved surgeries around and took the afternoon off to take me home. It annoyed me, and yet I didn’t know what I’d do without him. What did you say to a man who inserted himself as your caretaker without your permission? Stay away from me, what you’re doing is wrong? Your kindness freaks me out? What the hell do you want from me? I didn’t like being someone’s project, but he had his wits and car, and I was laced with painkillers. I wondered what he did with Nick’s book. Did he toss it in the trash? Put it in his office? Maybe when I got home it would be sitting on my night table like it had never left. A nurse wheeled me through the hospital to the main doors where Isaac had parked his car. He walked slightly ahead of me. I watched his hands, the fat of his palm beneath his thumb. I was looking for traces of the book on his fingers. Stupid. If I wanted Nick’s words, I should have read them. Isaac’s hands were more than Nick’s book. They’d just reached into my body and cut out my cancer. But I couldn’t stop seeing the book in his hands, the way his fingers lifted the corner of the page before he turned it.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Now there is no work again. Four years ago, the U.S. acted through the International Monetary Fund to assure that there would be no western money available for the Grenadian economy, much less for protecting her shores from an invasion threatened by Gairy operating out of San Diego, California, where he had sought asylum. When the PRG sought economic aid from the U.S. in 1979 to help rebuild the infrastructure of a country fallen into despair during the twenty-nine years of Gairy’s regime, the U.S. response was to offer the insult of $5000 from an ambassador’s discretionary fund! Now it is 1983, post-invasion, and the conquerors are promising Grenadians welfare, their second main exportable drug. Three million dollars thus far, administered under U.S. guns, so long as the heads that take it are bowed. Had the amount this invasion cost each one of us in taxes been lent to the PRG when it requested economic aid from the U.S. five years ago, the gratitude of Grenadians would have been real, and hundreds of lives could have been saved. But then Grenada would have been self-defined, independent; and, of course, that could not be allowed. What a bad example, a dangerous precedent, an independent Grenada would be for the peoples of Color in the Caribbean, in Central America, for those of us here in the United States. The ready acceptance by the majority of americans of the Grenadian invasion and of the shady U.S. involvement in the events leading up to the assassination of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop both happen in an america whose moral and ethical fiber is weakened by racism as thoroughly as wood is weakened by dry rot. White america has been well-schooled in the dehumanization of Black people. A Black island nation? Why, don’t be ridiculous! If they weren’t all so uppity, we’d have enough jobs and no recession. The lynching of Black youth and shooting down of Black women, 60 percent of Black teenagers unemployed and rapidly becoming unemployable, the presidential dismantling of the Civil Rights Commission, and more Black families below the poverty line than twenty years ago — if these facts of american life and racism can be passed over as unremarkable, then why not the rape and annexation of tiny Black Grenada? The Pentagon has been spoiling for a fight it could win for a long time; the last one was the battle for Inchon in the 1950s. How better to wipe out the bitter memories of Vietnam defeats by Yellow people than with a restoration of power in the eyes of the american public — the image of american marines splashing through a little Black blood? “... to keep our honor clean” the marine anthem says.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  For we must move against not only those forces which dehumanize us from the outside, but also against those oppressive values which we have been forced to take into ourselves. Through examining the combination of our triumphs and errors, we can examine the dangers of an incomplete vision. Not to condemn that vision but to alter it, construct templates for possible futures, and focus our rage for change upon our enemies rather than upon each other. In the 1960s, the awakened anger of the Black community was often expressed, not vertically against the corruption of power and true sources of control over our lives, but horizontally toward those closest to us who mirrored our own impotence. We were poised for attack, not always in the most effective places. When we disagreed with one another about the solution to a particular problem, we were often far more vicious to each other than to the originators of our common problem. Historically, difference had been used so cruelly against us that as a people we were reluctant to tolerate any diversion from what was externally defined as Blackness. In the 60s, political correctness became not a guideline for living, but a new set of shackles. A small and vocal part of the Black community lost sight of the fact that unity does not mean unanimity — Black people are not some standardly digestible quantity. In order to work together we do not have to become a mix of indistinguishable particles resembling a vat of homogenized chocolate milk. Unity implies the coming together of elements which are, to begin with, varied and diverse in their particular natures. Our persistence in examining the tensions within diversity encourages growth toward our common goal. So often we either ignore the past or romanticize it, render the reason for unity useless or mythic. We forget that the necessary ingredient needed to make the past work for the future is our energy in the present, metabolizing one into the other. Continuity does not happen automatically, nor is it a passive process. The 60s were characterized by a heady belief in instantaneous solutions. They were vital years of awakening, of pride, and of error. The civil rights and Black power movements rekindled possibilities for disenfranchised groups within this nation. Even though we fought common enemies, at times the lure of individual solutions made us careless of each other. Sometimes we could not bear the face of each other’s differences because of what we feared those differences might say about ourselves. As if everybody can’t eventually be too Black, too white, too man, too woman. But any future vision which can encompass all of us, by definition, must be complex and expanding, not easy to achieve. The answer to cold is heat, the answer to hunger is food. But there is no simple monolithic solution to racism, to sexism, to homophobia.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  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. For it is not the anger of Black women which is dripping down over this globe like a diseased liquid. It is not my anger that launches rockets, spends over sixty thousand dollars a second on missiles and other agents of war and death, slaughters children in cities, stockpiles nerve gas and chemical bombs, sodomizes our daughters and our earth. It is not the anger of Black women which corrodes into blind, dehumanizing power, bent upon the annihilation of us all unless we meet it with what we have, our power to examine and to redefine the terms upon which we will live and work; our power to envision and to reconstruct, anger by painful anger, stone upon heavy stone, a future of pollinating difference and the earth to support our choices. We welcome all women who can meet us, face to face, beyond objectification and beyond guilt. * Keynote presentation at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference, Storrs, Connecticut, June 1981. * One poem from this series is included in Chosen Poems: Old and New (W.W. Norton and Company, New York, 1978), pp. 105–108. * This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua (Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, New York, 1984), first published in 1981. * From “For Each of You,” first published in From A Land Where Other People Live (Broadside Press, Detroit, 1973), and collected in Chosen Poems: Old and New (W.W. Norton and Company, New York, 1982), p. 42. Learning from the 60s * MALCOLM X IS a distinct shape in a very pivotal period of my life. I stand here now — Black, Lesbian, Feminist — an inheritor of Malcolm and in his tradition, doing my work, and the ghost of his voice through my mouth asks each one of you here tonight: Are you doing yours? There are no new ideas, just new ways of giving those ideas we cherish breath and power in our own living. I’m not going to pretend that the moment I first saw or heard Malcolm X he became my shining prince, because it wouldn’t be true. In February 1965 I was raising two children and a husband in a three-room flat on 149th Street in Harlem. I had read about Malcolm X and the Black Muslims. I became more interested in Malcolm X after he left the Nation of Islam, when he was silenced by Elijah Muhammad for his comment, after Kennedy’s assassination, to the effect that the chickens had come home to roost.

• From Between Us

  In recent studies, Michael Boiger, Alexander Kirchner-Häusler, Anna Schouten, Yukiko Uchida, and I studied emotional interactions in Belgian and Japanese couples who came to the lab to discuss a disagreement. The Belgian and Japanese couples danced to very different types of music: the dance of “meeting each partner’s personal needs” and the dance of “relationship harmony,” respectively. The Belgian couples reported and showed mutual anger (as rated by independent judges) throughout discussion of conflict—more than any other emotion we measured, and much more so than the Japanese couples. The Japanese couples reported more mutual empathy and showed more validation than any other emotion during the discussions on conflict, and also more than their Belgian counterparts. In focus groups, Belgian men and women told us that anger and conflict were “right” for the relationship, as they helped the couple to figure out and negotiate each partner’s needs. Japanese men and women in this study, told us they avoided “bad feelings” in the relationship as much as possible by evading discussion about a disagreement, by adjusting to their partner’s wishes, and by empathizing (putting themselves in the shoes of their partners). Of course, it happened that Belgian couples felt empathy and validated each other, and of course, Japanese couples were judged as angry occasionally, but the episode—the dance in which the couple joined—was different. When unpacking the emotional episodes, it is important to try to understand the dance that is being performed: the interpersonal goals. Expectations for the dance in monocultural couples, and monocultural interaction partners in general, are shared to a certain extent. But what if you are the person to make a next step in an intercultural encounter? Many of us are these days. I do not think there is a shortcut to unpacking the emotional episode. Unpacking becomes easier when you know the many ways in which emotional episodes may develop across cultures, as these cultural differences reveal the junctures at which emotions are OURS. Some cultural competence does make it easier to imagine how emotions are tied to the sociocultural contexts in which they occur—to be aware of “opportunities.” Knowing about cultural differences in the ways emotional episodes typically unfold in other cultures also stretches your imagination beyond your habitual way of doing emotions. And yet, understanding the emotions of people from other cultures will never be like botanizing tropical plants. There is no finite number of well delineated entities to be known. I am very certain that I will never be able to make a go-to reference manual on cultural differences in emotions; nor will anybody else. To grasp the absurdity of the task, ask yourself: How would I deal with the emotions of a Dutch person, any Dutch person? (Substitute, as you wish, “Catholic Irish American,” “white American from Boston,” “Japanese from Tokyo,” . . . for “Dutch.”) What emotions do they have?

• From Going Clear (2013)

  (In fact, Zawahiri is a general surgeon, not a psychiatrist.) 10 CCHR’s main effort has been an international campaign against the use of psychiatric drugs, especially for children. The surgeon general of the United States issued a report in 2001 claiming that more than 20 percent of children ages nine to seventeen had a diagnosable mental or addictive disorder, and that four million American children suffered from major mental illness. There is obviously an immense market for medications to treat such disorders. About 10 percent of Americans over the age of six are on antidepressants, and antipsychotic drugs are the top-selling category of drugs in the country. They have become a plague on the schoolgrounds of America, with indiscriminate prescriptions creating a new culture of drug dependency—one that the pharmaceutical industry and the medical profession bear some responsibility for. Haggis has been a substantial supporter of the CCHR. As a boy, he says, he spent most of his days staring out the window, daydreaming—a candidate for an attention deficit disorder diagnosis. “I identified with the oddballs and the misfits,” he said. “Those who conform have very little chance of making a difference in life.” He was sure that if his parents had medicated him, he might never have become a writer. He hosted fund-raisers for CCHR in his home. “I simply believe that psychiatric drugs are over-prescribed, especially to children,” he said. “I think that is a crime.” Scientologists have been seeking ways of criminalizing psychiatric remedies. In the same period that Cruise was chastising Brooke Shields for taking antidepressants, Kirstie Alley and Kelly Preston were testifying before state lawmakers in Florida, who passed a bill, written in part by Scientologists, that would hold schoolteachers criminally liable for suggesting to parents that their children might be suffering from a mental health condition, such as attention deficit disorder. Governor Jeb Bush vetoed the bill. Governor Jon Huntsman did the same in Utah. Similar bills have been pushed by the CCHR in other states. In her Florida testimony, Kirstie Alley held up photographs of children who had committed suicide after taking psychotropic drugs. “None of these children were psychotic before they took these drugs,” she asserted, sobbing so hard she could barely speak. “None of these children were suicidal before they took these drugs.” Some drug makers have covered up studies that indicate an increased danger of suicidal or violent thoughts caused by psychotropic medicines. Eli Lilly, for instance, suppressed data showing that patients who were taking the popular drug Prozac—the only antidepressant certified as safe for children—were twelve times more likely to attempt suicide than patients taking similar medications. Antidepressants have been implicated in a number of schoolyard shootings, such as the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, where two students killed twelve of their classmates and a teacher. One of the killers was taking Luvox at the time. Adderall—one of the drugs cited by Cruise—is an amphetamine often prescribed for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder; it sometimes causes increased aggression in children and adolescents.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Staples’ “fact” that Black women get their sense of fulfillment from having children is only a fact when stated out of the mouths of Black men, and any Black person in this country, even a “happily married” woman who has “no pent-up frustrations that need release” (!) is either a fool or insane. This smacks of the oldest sexist canard of all time, that all a woman needs to “keep her quiet” is a “good man.” File that one alongside “Some of my best friends are …” Instead of beginning the much-needed dialogue between Black men and Black women, Staples retreats to a defensive stance reminiscent of white liberals of the 60s, many of whom saw any statement of Black pride and self-assertion as an automatic threat to their own identity and an attempt to wipe them out. Here we have an intelligent Black man believing — or at least saying — that any call to Black women to love ourselves (and no one said only) is a denial of, or threat to, his Black male identity! In this country, Black women traditionally have had compassion for everybody else except ourselves. We have cared for whites because we had to for pay or survival; we have cared for our children and our fathers and our brothers and our lovers. History and popular culture, as well as our personal lives, are full of tales of Black women who had “compassion for misguided black men.” Our scarred, broken, battered and dead daughters and sisters are a mute testament to that reality. We need to learn to have care and compassion for ourselves, also. In the light of what Black women often willingly sacrifice for our children and our men, this is a much needed exhortation, no matter what illegitimate use the white media makes of it. This call for self-value and self-love is quite different from narcissism, as Staples must certainly realize. Narcissism comes not out of self-love but out of self-hatred. The lack of a reasonable and articulate Black male viewpoint on these questions is not the responsibility of Black women. We have too often been expected to be all things to all people and speak everyone else’s position but our very own. Black men are not so passive that they must have Black women speak for them. Even my fourteen-year-old son knows that. Black men themselves must examine and articulate their own desires and positions and stand by the conclusions thereof. No point is served by a Black male professional who merely whines at the absence of his viewpoint in Black women’s work. Oppressors always expect the oppressed to extend to them the understanding so lacking in themselves. For Staples to suggest, for instance, that Black men leave their families as a form of male protest against female decision making in the home is in direct contradiction to his own observations in “The Myth of the Black Matriarchy.”*

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  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 eveningtime 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. 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.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Within this society, that group is made up of Black and Third World people, working-class people, older people, and women. As a forty-nine-year-old Black lesbian feminist socialist mother of two, including one boy, and a member of an interracial couple, I usually find myself a part of some group defined as other, deviant, inferior, or just plain wrong. Traditionally, in american society, it is the members of oppressed, objectified groups who are expected to stretch out and bridge the gap between the actualities of our lives and the consciousness of our oppressor. For in order to survive, those of us for whom oppression is as american as apple pie have always had to be watchers, to become familiar with the language and manners of the oppressor, even sometimes adopting them for some illusion of protection. Whenever the need for some pretense of communication arises, those who profit from our oppression call upon us to share our knowledge with them. In other words, it is the responsibility of the oppressed to teach the oppressors their mistakes. I am responsible for educating teachers who dismiss my children’s culture in school. Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are expected to educate the heterosexual world. The oppressors maintain their position and evade responsibility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future. Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people. As members of such an economy, we have all been programmed to respond to the human differences between us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference in one of three ways: ignore it, and if that is not possible, copy it if we think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate. But we have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals. As a result, those differences have been misnamed and misused in the service of separation and confusion. Certainly there are very real differences between us of race, age, and sex. But it is not those differences between us that are separating us. It is rather our refusal to recognize those differences, and to examine the distortions which result from our misnaming them and their effects upon human behavior and expectation. Racism, the belief in the inherent superiority of one race over all others and thereby the right to dominance. Sexism, the belief in the inherent superiority of one sex over the other and thereby the right to dominance. Ageism. Heterosexism. Elitism.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  It is not easy to assess Jesus’s attitude to violence, but there is no evidence that he was planning military insurrection. He forbade his disciples to injure others and to retaliate aggressively.46 He did not resist his arrest and rebuked the disciple who cut off the ear of the high priest’s servant.47 But he could be verbally abusive: he fulminated against the rich;48 cruelly lambasted those “scribes and Pharisees” who served as retainers;49 and called down God’s vengeance on villages that rejected his disciples.50 As we have seen, the Jewish peasants of Palestine had a tradition of nonviolent opposition to imperial rule, and Jesus knew that any confrontation with either the Jewish or the Roman ruling class—he did not distinguish the two—would be dangerous. Any disciple, he warned, must be ready to “take up his cross.”51 It seems that, like Judas of Galilee, Jesus may have relied on God to intervene. While she was pregnant with him, his mother had predicted that God had already begun to create a more just world order: He has shown the power of his arm He has routed the proud of heart. He has pulled down princes from their thrones and exalted the lowly. The hungry he has filled with good things; the rich sent empty away. He has come to the help of Israel his servant.52 Like Judas the Galilean, Jesus may have believed that if his disciples did not shrink “from the slaughter that would come upon them” and took the first step, God would overthrow the rich and powerful. One day the Pharisees and Herodian retainers asked Jesus a trick question: “Is it permissible to pay taxes to Caesar or not? Should we pay, yes or no?” Taxation was always an inflammable issue in Roman Palestine, and if Jesus said no, he risked arrest. Pointing to Caesar’s name and image on the denarius, the coin of tribute, Jesus replied: “Give back [apodote] to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.”53 In a purely imperial context, Caesar’s claim was legitimate: the Greek verb was used for a rendition made when one recognized a rightful claim.54 But as all Jews knew that God was their king and that everything belonged to him, there was in fact little to “give back” to Caesar. In Mark’s gospel, Jesus followed this incident with a warning to the retainers who helped to implement Roman rule and trampled on the poor and vulnerable: “Beware of the scribes who like to walk about in long robes, to be greeted obsequiously in the market squares, to take the front seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at banquets; these are the men who swallow the property of widows, while making a show of lengthy prayers.”55 When God finally established his kingdom, their sentence would be severe.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  In Germany there were no strong, centralizing monarchies, only a welter of forty-one small principalities that the Holy Roman emperor was unable to control. But in 1506 Charles V, the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella and of the Holy Roman emperor Maximilian, inherited the Habsburg lands in Austria and on the death of Ferdinand in 1516 he also became king of Aragon and Castile; in 1519 he was elected Holy Roman emperor. By an adroit series of marriage alliances, skillful diplomacy, and warfare, the Habsburgs had brought more territories under their rule than any previous European monarchs. Charles’s ambition was to create a pan-European empire similar to the Ottoman Empire, but he found that he could not control the German princes who wanted to make their principalities strong monarchies on the model of France and England. Moreover, the towns of central and southern Germany had become the most vital commercial centers in northern Europe.32 Economic changes there led to class conflict, and as usual, discontent focused on Jewish “usurers” and venal Catholic priests who were said to leech off the poor. In 1517 Martin Luther (1483–1546), an Augustinian friar, nailed his famous ninety-five theses on the castle church door in Wittenberg and set in motion the process known as the Reformation. His attack on the Church’s sale of indulgences resonated with discontented townsfolk, who were sick of clerics extorting money from gullible people on dubious pretexts.33 The ecclesiastical establishment treated Luther’s protest with lofty disdain, but young clerics took his ideas to the people in the towns, who initiated local reforms that effectively liberated their congregations from the control of Rome. The more intellectually vigorous clergy spread Luther’s ideas in their own books, which thanks to the new technology of printing, circulated with unprecedented speed, launching one of the first modern mass movements. Like other heretics in the past, Luther had created an antichurch.