on anger

I wrote this a few days ago in my journal and posted it on my personal blog, but I thought I’d go ahead and post it here.

I stopped watching corporate news television years ago. I become too angry watch it. Now the only time I watch is when I’m at the gym on the bicycles. I get so worked up about the way white people are portrayed as charitable; the way people of color are portrayed as criminals, except, that is, when they conform to Anglo norms; the way children are portrayed always as someone to fear or someone to pity; the way our news programs refuse to question neoliberalist jingoism; the way women are underrepresented. I think my friends have stopped listening to me rant at the gym: my anger goes into pumping the pedals faster and harder.

Over the last year I have had five close friends, all of them women, come out to me as victims of sexual assault, abuse, or rape. Sometimes this hits me as I am walking down a street or in the library, or when I am biking home after a long day. I have to stop sometimes and compose myself. Anger rises in me. I have to focus on my breathing to control the tears.

This last year I read an opinion column in the college newspaper in which an undergraduate student made sweeping assumptions about homosexuality, implying that it was all about sex in public and pedophilia. An earlier column in the same paper had accused Mohammed, the prophet of Islam, of being a terrorist. I can hardly pick up the college newspaper these days without getting angry at the ignorance and pain in this world.

Why is it that we never talk about anger in composition? Indeed, in our society, it seems that anger (along with fear) is the emotion that we are the least comfortable with. We assume that people “have nothing to get angry about“ when we see them angry. The student that makes us the most troubled is not the happy student, not the depressed student, not the lazy student, but the angry one. Anger is pathologized in our society: Oppositional Defiant Disorder being one form of this pathologization. Our popular culture teaches us that anger is something to be avoided. Didn’t Yoda tell Luke that he must not have fear? Fear leads to Anger, which leads to Aggression. When we see someone get angry, or express any negative emotion (and indeed, the use of the term negative shows how little we value these emotions), we become uncomfortable.

This devaluing of anger is especially dangerous in a society wrought with so much pain. When women, queer people, working class people, brown people, youth, and transgender people are angry, they are told, in effect, their anger is not valid: “Why are you so uppity? You have nothing to be angry about.“ This is especially troubling in a society that, I would argue, hates these groups of people. When so many women are sexually assaulted and raped, when so many queer people are beaten, ostracized, and told they are “sinners,“ when so many brown people fear walking in certain parts of town and are told, either subtly or explicitly, that they are criminals, when so many of the working poor are told that their health and well being are less important than the pockets of billionaires, fed with tax cuts to the rich and corporate welfare, when transgender individuals are told they are “sick“ and mentally ill (the DSM still lists gender dysphoria as a disorder), when so many young are told that they are people to be feared (see Giroux), there is a right to be angry. When these people are told by dominant culture that they are not fully equal to others to begin with, it is doubly damaging when they are told their emotions are not legitimate: “Not only are you not as worthy as me, you don’t even know how to feel correctly.“

Indeed, it seems that the only people in this country who have a right to be angry are white heterosexual men, who complain that women and minorities are taking their jobs (presupposing that these jobs are white men’s jobs to begin with), that gays and lesbians are asking for “special rights“ when they want equal rights, that racial minorities are taking their spots in colleges, that poor people are raping the system and wasting our tax dollars.

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy — John Updike