Brother, did you forget your name?
-Zack de la Rocha, Rage Against the Machine, “Freedom”
My senior thesis, way back in the free-wheeling days of the year 2000, when I was still just a little whippersnapper (lol– as if I ever was), started with an anecdote about how I’d always wished my inner voice was melodic and beautiful, like my mind communicated to me with a internal monologue that was like a Silko poem. I wanted that because that was how I thought it was supposed to feel to be eloquent, to be a talented writer. That’s what I thought the world expected of me.
But my inner voice isn’t like that. It’s staccato and sometimes ferocious, the opposite in many ways of my spoken voice which can be rapid but is very low and not particularly loud. My inner voice growls.
I’ve been thinking for a long, long time about getting a tattoo of my favorite quote. It’s probably not the quote many of you would expect from me. It’s not from MLK. It’s not from Silko. It’s not from Aristotle. It’s not even from Star Wars or Batman or anything.
It’s the whispered lyric from “Freedom” by Rage Against the Machine. My inner voice, in my most troubled times, is Zack de la Rocha whisper-growling “your anger is a gift.”
Your.
ANGER.
is.
a.
GIFT.
Generally speaking, I don’t get mad at people. Sometimes I do, and it’s a kind of deep, horrifying “this is not going to end well” mad. But I am often mad at conditions, at situations, at ideas.
I have a sense of how I think justice should work. And this world does a bad job at that justice. So, deep inside, I am angry about that. Much like Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk, I am angry ALL. THE. TIME. I don’t just get over things like Leonard Peltier being in prison, the Dakota pipeline, the Washington Redskins, this DeVos woman being Secretary of Education, etc. I don’t let it go. It’s there, bubbling under the surface.
When I was in graduate school, I tried a few times to argue for a rhetoric of rage. Other people likely have as well. I couldn’t find any at the time, back in 2010, but I haven’t exactly kept on top of it. I used as my example the idea of riots after unfavorable political events (Rodney King, for example, or closer to home, the OTR riots several years ago). My argument was fairly simple, and it’s really something that is impossible to refute if you go to a place where people are rioting (Ferguson, perhaps) and actually TALK TO PEOPLE. The poor riot because that brings cameras and police and attention. It is a form of protest, a way for the powerless to manipulate power.
I was summarily shot down by one of my mentors with the glib response that “riots never prove anything. They’re not an effective response.”
At the time I didn’t have the nerve to say it, but now I can give my actual response, all these years later.
That’s what a well-off white man says to a minority about riots. Of course wealthy heterosexual white men who are either Christian or don’t talk religion at all can’t see the value in rioting. They’re the same people who have never had to fear a police officer when they were pulled over. They already have built in power. To them, breaking their stuff would obviously be stupid, because if they complain about a street light being out there’s a crew of men in a truck there the next day to fix the light. If their kid goes missing there’s a news event and a huge search party. They rarely get randomly shot in their homes. They don’t get followed around stores or denied seats. No one crosses the street to avoid them.
I know discussions of white privilege aren’t comfortable for white people, but I think white people have to realize they aren’t comfortable for those of us who aren’t white, either. The last thing I want to do is way “hey, you know how society values you more than it does me? Yeah, that’s not cool. You should be aware of it and stop taking advantage of it.” But we have to talk about it, because you really have no reason to understand it. Why would you pay attention to such a thing? It’s like the sky being blue or grass being green. That’s your world.
If people like me tell you about it, maybe you can start to understand.
For heteronormative wealthy white people, anger isn’t particularly rhetorically powerful. Though to be fair, White America was born from a bunch of people pissed off about taxes dressing up like my ancestors and having the most utterly British sort of riot throwing delicious tea into the ocean. White people knew there was power in their anger at one point. They just haven’t had to really be mad for a long time.
Unless you count the ones who got mad about President Obama. You can see how poorly they harnessed their anger.
But I’m going to a judgmental place. Let me circle back to the point I was trying to make. The point is this:
If a 16 year old rich white kid throws a brick through a window, the odds are very high he simply wanted to break something and feel like a miscreant. As the Dane Cook joke goes, maybe he just always wanted to do a B&E. I grew up around kids who did stuff like that all the time. One of the kids I knew in high school used a bar of soap to make a fake copy of the office key at the high school so he could sneak in and randomly break things. He wasn’t making social commentary. He was just a little rich jerk who knew that his parents could get him out of any trouble he got himself into. And they did. Every time.
But if a 16 year old African American kid who watched a cop shoot one of his friends throws a brick through a shop window… it’s not about the desire to see that window broken. It’s about knowing that no one who can change things is listening to his cry for help and realizing that the white owner of that property will complain about the broken window. If someone else joins in, then someone else, and suddenly the store is on fire, it may not be the wisest choice. It might not be the best way to do it. But in a situation like the Ferguson riots, no one was burning down a store for the sake of arson. White kids in the midwest burn down buildings for fun. There aren’t any downtrodden serial arsonists burning buildings for thrills. They know news crews come to cover fires. They know that cameras mean power.
They want you to listen.
They are angry. And they should be. Ignoring them has never been the right way to conduct business, but it sure looks like we’re headed that way again as a country.
They will remind you that they exist. They will vent their anger. They probably aren’t mad at you. Odds are you aren’t the person who wronged them. I know when I talk about social justice I’m rarely actually talking to someone who directly wronged me (although sometimes…). People who are mad about the social order are mad about something ancient and insipid. Something you probably can’t even see without them lighting it up. Sometimes with a molotov cocktail.
That is the gift they have, their power in this world. It’s a world that belongs to all of us but that they feel like they’ve never had ownership over. They feel like the world belongs to people like Donald Trump and not to all of us. They resent that feeling, and they fucking should. That we made people feel that way is a sign that we never heard them, never stopped to think, never paid the proper attention.
We should all listen.
If we don’t, we might realize too late the whispered lines that were always there told us exactly what we needed to know.