Written and submitted summer 2021

by Akua Amponsah

Ever since we read “Who Gets to Be Angry,” I found myself trying to figure out why I continuously brought up Roxane Gay’s statement about productive anger. It’s nothing revolutionary. She didn’t make any new sweeping statements. She didn’t revolutionize the concept of anger or the “Angry Black Woman” trope. All she did, I soon realized, was contextualize the ways in which my emotions were weaponized against me. And if I really think about it, I’m very tired of hearing people “grapple” with disproving stereotypes. Grappling with taking stereotypes with a grain of salt. Engaging with it, participating in it – it feels like I’m reading a Buzzfeed article, but instead of being about something “quirky,” it’s “Here’s how to be Angry without being an Angry Black Woman!” as if any anger I have won’t be used against me. There is no toeing the line, or just dipping your pinky into the pool of respectability. I don’t need to think about why my anger is empowering. I don’t care. It is just me. I understand the ways stereotypes silence people, but ultimately, I need some focus to be on the fact that no matter what side of the stereotype you fall on, you’re stuck being manipulated into silence. There is not enough talk about the silence. There is stuff about the eruption of rage, past the silence, the aftermath and questioning of the silence, but none about the silence’s true goal — not to stop me from tearing everything down, though that is one of the benefits they gain from that, but to strip me from the humanness of emotion. To clarify, I don’t want to be compared to a white person and their anger. I don’t even know if I want to be “human” if it entails the violence that a white understanding of “human” entails. But to strip me of anger strips me of a conceptualization of myself as a being.

I don’t want to think about how my anger can change the world. I don’t want to dispense my anger bit by bit like a bottle of shampoo. Or lotion. Or soap, or whatever else you dispense in a controlled manner for a productive use only when you need it. I deserve every ounce of my anger, and how I choose to handle it should be my decision alone.

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I was an angry child, not much of an angry teen, barely an angry barely-adult. I don’t know what changed, or how it did, but suddenly I didn’t feel an urge to answer foolish statements with my fists, or raise my voice in any way — in fact, I think I lost the ability to raise my voice as loud as I once did. I knew from years of arguing and fighting with my siblings that my anger was useless; it would do nothing to get me heard. Nothing would, really. I didn’t have to be authentically angry outside the house, though. I was already angry in others’ eyes. I am not good with differentiating emotions outside of “negative” and “positive,” and while I know this is something that happens with neurodivergent people like me, this is a box that others have also led me to remain in as well, for lack of a better term. It was a running thing for friends to make me upset and irritated, because it was funny when I argued, or raised my voice. I think my emotions were always a spectacle, to the point where once I was unsure how to feel them, I put on a show to keep appearances. I argued about things I didn’t care about, yelled for humorous purposes. Performed anger as if I remembered how to register it at all.

My mom is a devout Catholic, and as the parent most present, I received her lessons on choosing whether to approach or avoid conflict. Apparently most parents tell their kids, “If someone hits you, hit them back!” Mine took the “turn the other cheek”  approach and taught me to take it. So I became a crybaby. If I were not at home where I could rage in peace, anything someone said that angered me would cause me to burst into tears. I think that means I was still an angry child, I just expressed it differently. Anyways, I hated it — it made me look weak, and made the other person think they were right. It was often in the face of adults as well, which never made sense — I was a child, not an adult. I don’t know how to weaponize emotions, I just cannot control them. That’s one thing, too. Black children are adultified to the point that when they just act like children, they’re conniving, they’re plotting something. They can’t just have had a bad day, it’s because they deliberately set out to make everyone’s day bad. So with that, any time I would cry, I was told to “suck it up,” because I was doing too much.

Another reading we went over, “Debunking the Myth of the ‘Angry Black Woman’”, turns anger into an experiment, a hunt for data and statistics to provide some validity in claiming that the angry Black woman doesn’t exist. The study finds that the Black women in their sample were far less likely to get angry, as if that made things better. An actual quote from the study: “African American women in the current sample are actually less likely to experience angry feelings even when faced with situations in which they are criticized, disrespected, or evaluated negatively.” Earlier I made note of the ways in which stripping away anger can reduce a person to an inhuman state. In analyzing tropes, we’re definitely caught between the Mammy and the Sapphire, between coddling and aggression. Of course there’s nuance, but the absence of anger seems to always reveal docility, as if anger is only feral. That being said, the study was obviously a waste of time. Why would I need this study? Why do I need facts that say, “Well, actually, your stereotype is wrong! You can disrespect me all you want and I won’t say a thing! In fact, I’ll be less angry!”

Despite being perceived angrier than I believed myself to be, I have also been someone who is very often taken advantage of. My perceived lack of emotional expression has allowed people to treat me in ways that I didn’t perceive to be disrespectful until later. There is a form of unloading that I was expected to take on in order to engage with friends that I didn’t realize was unnatural until much later than maybe I should have. Friends repeatedly told me I wasn’t angry enough, I didn’t stand up for myself. Looking back on it now, those were the least helpful interventions I’d ever received. Especially considering that I stood up for myself — against that idea. I think people define you how they want to. I think they saw me as someone helpless, and saw me as someone who needed their guidance in shaping me into the take-no-shit Black woman they needed me to be.

I have a friend who loves that Michelle Obama quote, the one about going high when other people go low. She would say it as a reassuring motto, as if to provide context into her calm demeanor. To be honest, I never got that saying. I never understood the idea that someone who is responding to someone’s harm is now at the same level as the harm doer by retaliating. Of course, there are instances in which that makes sense, but in the general outlook of things, to me, it doesn’t. Why is anger a low? Why is an expression of someone’s wrongdoing so terrible that it now puts you at the level of someone who has disrespected me time and time again? What do I gain from telling myself I’m better than angry people? How can we attach such immorality to something that we all feel and experience?

The first time I returned from my anger hiatus was in January 2019. I was in Ghana for the first time with my brother, and this brought me a great deal of anxiety. I didn’t speak much. No one thought I spoke Twi, which left my brother, who spoke much less Twi than I, with the responsibility of carrying conversations with small translations from me. He yelled at me in the car ride back to my grandparents’ home one day, and told me I looked stupid. I was angry. How could someone have no empathy towards my situation, at all? I tried to yell back, but my grandparents intervened. So I stewed, and let my anger cook.

In another instance — when we went to my father’s town, I sat in my paternal grandmother’s living room as a strange, drunk man stumbled in. He didn’t live there. He asked me to sit next to him, and not wanting to be rude, I did. He pulled me close to him, while letting me know that he liked me. I tried to push away, and sit back up, and he would not let up. I did not feel angry. I felt embarrassed. My grandmother, cousins, aunts and brother watched as I sat in discomfort in the arms of a drunk stranger, all confused at what to do. Not all — I could not tell what my brother was feeling. Overwhelmed, I asked my brother to help. He said, “Just get up.” The man’s grip loosened. I got up. My brother looked at me and said, “I expected more from you.” I was confused in the moment, but as I let the shame he cast onto me fester, eventually it developed into anger. Why should I feel shame at how someone treated me? When the man returned the following day, my aunt came into the room to warn me to stay inside. I remember feeling protected, which was new to me, and the realization burned. Anger, once again. As my brother revealed the day prior, I was not supposed to need protection. I was supposed to be a fighter — Black women can fend for themselves, right?

In my second year of college, I decided to start therapy. I don’t know why I waited so long, it was one of the things I looked forward to when coming to school. My first therapist, Matt Blanchard, supplied me with a feelings chart once we quickly realized I couldn’t verbalize any of my emotions. Though I found a new therapist soon after, I stuck to that chart, because it gave me a glimpse into understanding that the larger emotions — happy, sad, mad, confused, scared — are not just that. There are so many words that fall under anger, none of which cover the same variation in feeling as the other. Under anger falls let down, humiliated, bitter, mad, aggressive, frustrated, critical, and distant. Under those words fall even more specific emotions, all that eventually lead back to anger.

I think the placement of “distant” underneath anger is interesting. Until now, I had not considered what I feel to be anger. Under distant lies withdrawn and numb. I think it’s amazing to think I had done all this work of wondering where my anger went only to realize it was here all along. I am not happy with my anger, though. I expect my anger to protect me, to defend me at the very least. But my anger operates like my sadness, and that is why I almost never differentiated the two. It’s why I became a crybaby instead of a fighter, and why my withdrawal looks like my sulking. Withdrawal is still protection, though. I tend to ask myself why I think I should be so entitled to the fiery rage that I am expected to possess, and I guess this is what I’ve missed amidst the grappling.