Why Rage Is an Essential Part of Blackness: Emotions as Melanin
Brittney Cooper has a book, “Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Finds Her Superpower,” which I use to make sense of rage. One way Cooper describes rage is “a kind of refusal.” As an example, she points to Michelle Obama’s ponytail at Trump's inauguration, which was a kind of refusal.
The word “refusal” stands out to me because Marquis Bey, in his paper “The Transness of Blackness, The Blackness of Transness,” describes Blackness as a refusal and fugitivity. Blackness has a desire to escape to freedom.
Bey quotes Amaryah Shaye, from “Refusing to Reconcile Part 2,” who writes, “To be black and to be made black is to take seriously the work of refusal, which is an antagonism, a thorn in the side of the sovereignty of whiteness... To become black is to refuse being made a something—to be and become nothing.”
My rage, which is “a kind of refusal,” is part of my Blackness. This rage isn’t pathological; it’s essential.
Another salient point in Cooper’s book, which she gained from Audre Lorde’s “Sister Outsider,” is that “rage is a legitimate political emotion.”
Here I focus on the words “political” and “emotion.”
Many thinkers say race is a political identity because it's not biological, but the state defines it. Suppose rage is a legitimate political emotion, and race is a political identity, then racialized rage must be a thing.
I've written elsewhere that “Our racist interactions can racialize our emotions, and those racialized emotions can linger with us.”
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva makes that point in the February 2019 American Sociological Review. He argues that people feel race, and we feel the “emotional weight” of our racialized station. Importantly, he also writes, “race cannot come to life without being infused with emotions.”
The statement that “race cannot come to life without being infused with emotions” may seem simplistic or hyperbolic. But there's evidence for the point.
The William Cross Racial and Cultural Identity Development Model, which theorizes how Black people experience Blackness, includes a negative encounter with whiteness and white racism that’s pivotal. Undoubtedly, those negative encounters produce emotions that bring race to life.
In the book, “The Machinery of Whiteness,” Steve Martinot writes that “white paranoia is an essential element of white identity.” White paranoia is a prerequisite for white solidarity to produce and sustain whiteness. And scholars regularly research and write about white fear, anxiety, and ”racial resentment.”
After Bacon’s Rebellion, the historian Edmund Morgan said the colonists turned to racism “to separate dangerous free whites from dangerous slave blacks by a screen of racial contempt.”
In his book “American Slavery, American Freedom,” Morgan writes, “Obviously, it was to the advantage of the men who ran Virginia to encourage such contempt in the colony’s white servants and poor freemen... the (Virginia) assembly deliberately did what it could to foster the contempt of whites for blacks and Indians.”
That contempt continues. That contempt, which is embodied in white identity, is another emotion that brings race to life.
If emotions bring race to life, what does it mean to deny those emotions? Specifically, what does it mean to deny the racialized emotions Black people feel?
Trump proves the point. Trump told Bob Woodward he didn't feel that he had to work his way out of the cave of white privilege to understand Black people’s anger and pain. He claimed he's done so much for the Black community, and he's not feeling any love.
Downplaying, demonizing, denying, and disregarding Black people’s racialized emotions is anti-Black.
With the rage I feel, I'm Blacker every day because emotions are a type of melanin.