In a Rage Almost All the Time
“To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.” - James Baldwin.
When I think about rage, James Baldwin’s quote comes to mind first.
According to Baldwin, to not experience the racialized rage he speaks of, I'd have to not be Black, not be in this country, or be relatively unconscious. The country isn't changing and I can't leave. That means either my experience with Blackness has to change, or I have to lose the relative amount of consciousness I have.
Both are possible, and both are desirable.
On March 1, 2019, I published an essay on Medium, “Is There a Place to Escape from Race?”
In the comments section, some readers protested that they are always Black. But race isn't about skin color alone or culture. Race otherizes people. So, I could ask the question another way, “Is There a Place to Escape from Otherization?”
When I wrote the essay, I didn't know about the connections between Blackness and escape or what some scholars call “fugitivity.” The desire to be free from race can also be a Black one.
The inspiration for my essay was the book “Writing Beyond Race” by bell hooks.
In her book, bell hooks says as a warning that sometimes we can “overracialize ourselves,” and she says as a remedy and a refuge that “home is the only place where there is no race.”
The idea from hooks that our homes can be a place where there is no race sounds crazy until you hear from Zora Neale Hurston.
In her essay, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” Hurston writes that Zora was no more when she went to school in Jacksonville. Instead, she was “a little colored girl,” and she “found it out in certain ways.”
In the same essay Hurston says, “At certain times, I have no race, I am me...I belong to no race or time.”
Hurston was unapologetically Black, right? And yet, she says at certain times she had no race. Hurston’s words attest to the reality that race is fluid and impermanent. Her words also sound like a privilege of whiteness —to just be an individual at any moment. But those words should be a priority for Black people.
For hooks and Hurston, the answer is yes —there is a place to escape from race. Many, like Lupita Nyong’o, say they didn't know they were Black until they got here. That's because, as Ta-Nehisi Coates more or less says, race isn't who we are but what someone else does to us.
Escaping from race and being careful not to overracialize ourselves can lower the temperature on the rage that comes from being Black in America and relatively conscious.
Baldwin said, “almost all of the time.” Hurston said, “At certain times.”
Those exceptional times count too. And for cooling the rage, more of those raceless times are priceless times.