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JInduObiofumathird 2 - 29 Apr 2016 - Main.JinduObiofuma
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> | Rage and Respectability: Conflicting Masks in the Halls of Civility and Layered Racial Injustice | | | | |
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< | -- JinduObiofuma - 11 Apr 2016 | >
> | Black woman are never supposed to be angry. Sassy? Absolutely. Funny? But of course. Shady? Maybe just a touch, but no more than that otherwise people start to get their feelings hurt. But we are never supposed to be angry. In predominantly white institutions where safe spaces are prime, Black women are often forced to fold themselves (ourselves?) into nearly impossible positions so we are never perceived as threats, even as we ourselves are placed in positions where we feel threatened. We are constantly toeing the line, walking carefully between the shores of rage and respectability. | | | | |
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> | Anger, which is by no means unique to the Black woman oft has to be suppressed by us in predominantly white settings, buried and built upon until it explodes. And then we are dismissed, Black women don’t get angry. We become enraged. The difference between the two lies in the level of control we are able exercise over both emotional states. We believe anger is the more transient of the two states and one we don’t allow ourselves to indulge in too often. We wrongly assume that if we ignore it or push it down or “rise above it” (as we are often told to do which is PWI coded language for do not engage because “nothing is more dangerous than playing into a stereotype” and by having feelings we “let them win”), our anger will pass. The more pressing belief is that our anger must pass. Perhaps this would be true if we were allowed the fullness of freedom to feel and express a full range of human emotions, and thus being allowed to feel angry in those trying moments, we could in fact get past them. But the world has little patience for us and has little tolerance for the angry black woman. In every historically steeped sense of the phrase, we are given a very short leash. In law school and the larger legal field, the leash—like the limit—does not exist. Black women have no opportunity to express our anger in a safe and accepted way. | | | | |
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I remember my first time going to six flags with my dad. I was young enough then that he still had his heavy accent. Truthfully, I still had mine. When my daddy spoke, he was a storyteller and a poet and a comic all at once. He could make strangers smile and he loved to make his family laugh. I remember that afternoon, jumping out of the car and running up to the trolly that would take us to the park’s main gates. My siblings followed close behind and as we clambered into the car, taking up an entire bench, we grinned at one another, barely able to contain our excitement. Our parents climbed in behind us, wheezing after running to keep us in sight. They were excited too. We had never been anywhere as cool as Six Flags before.
As the trolley began to move, I jumped up and ran across the aisle to sit with my dad. I swung my legs up onto his lap and asked him what he thought a roller coaster would be like. He could tell I was more than a little nervous, so true to form, he started cracking jokes. As I laughed, I felt the tension in my belly loosen a little. Pretty soon, he had our whole family laughing in that aisle.
At one point, I noticed we weren’t the only ones laughing. I looked over my shoulder at a group of white teenagers who had begun laughing with us. I smiled shyly at them, encouraging them to share in our happy moment. They didn’t smile back. Their laughter wasn’t like ours. Their faces were sneering,
Maybe this was also the first time I began to study strange faces.
As the trolley began to move, their laughter continued. It had an edge.
One girl burst out, “oh my gosh, can you hear his accent?” In response, one of the guys attempted an accent I didn’t recognize. I watched them for while without blinking, my eyes barely skimming the top of the bench. I wondered who they were talking about. My stomach dropped to the floor when I realized they were talking about my dad.
I whipped around and tucked myself back into his side.
“Daddy,” I whispered. My dad, still in the middle of his routine, smiled down at me before finishing his joke.
“Daddyyyyyy.” I whispered with urgency this time.
“Mhm..?”
“I think those people are laughing at you!” I whisper shouted. I was angry but still scared enough to whisper. Anyone bold enough to make fun of my dad was someone I didn’t want to tangle with.
My dad cast a worried glance at my siblings, too busy playing amongst themselves to notice or care about anything I was whispering. Smiling only with his mouth, he cast a glance over his shoulder before looking down at me.
“Sometimes you just have to ignore people like that. What they’re laughing at isn’t my business.”
They were still laughing as we got off the trolley.
When I think of that moment, some 13 years later, I invariably become enraged. It never fails. I will spot a face that looks nothing like those faces from long ago—faces I have no hope of ever remembering—and that anger that was yet unavailable to me on that trolley, an anger that exists very distinctly in the self I wish had existed that day, forces its way through.
Even then, the anger is never fully allowed to surface. To be sure, it emerges in varying degrees, but when I recognize it for what it is, I can tamp it down to an icy arrogance. When I don’t recognize it-- when it is triggered, unchecked--it is something else.
When I remember my father whispering to me on that trolley, I wonder what he was saying to himself, even as he was speaking to me. I wonder if he could recognize the novelty of my awareness. I wonder if it was control that allowed him to forestall his own angry, humiliated or even apathetic response to focus on his child. To be sure, he should have been focused on me. That moment was my rock. Upon it, I built every experience of racial humiliation. | >
> | This of course has consequences.
When anger is built up over time, it collects and it is no longer so easily pushed aside. It simmers, flexing and expanding with each and every unwanted advance, every micro-aggression, every ignorant comment, every run in with hoteps who champion Blackness at the expense of Black womanhood. To be a Black woman in predominantly white spaces is to be constantly and continually besieged with bullshit. All the while putting on a brave face.
Black women don’t get angry, we become enraged.
Unlike anger, which may be wrestled with, rage is much more difficult to control. Anger is prompted. Rage is triggered. And when it is, it is something else. You can spot a face that looks nothing like those faces from long ago—faces you have no hope of ever remembering—and that anger that was yet unavailable to you in that moment fights its way to the surface, no longer the acute anger that you knew but an uncontrollable by-product of your collective experiences. In the legal world, there is no room even for that. When Black women even approach anything that looks like anger, red flags go up, and we are forced to find shelter in the respectability doctrine: one must go along to get along.
This became evident during a conversation I had with a friend last month. As another woman of color who had been through the job search, she wanted to make sure I knew as much as she did about Big Law. I listened attentively while she schooled me on everything from practice areas to the kinds of things I would “have to deal with” in the office. I pushed her on the latter and was dumbfounded when she told me about how one of her co-workers had referred to one of her friends in the office as a “fucking nigger.” I bit back my immediate response--as my training dictated—and asked her what her response had been. Essentially, she had reported the woman to human resources, while declining to give HR the woman’s name.
“I didn’t want to rock the boat.”
When she said this, the corners of my mouth turned down. I immediately flashed back to my time abroad—as the only Black woman in a 12 person house--when one of my flat mates made a joke about me being a nigger . I remembered jumping over the small living room table that separated us, slamming my fist into the wall by his head and screaming “how fucking dare you?!” I remembered telling him that if he ever did anything like that I would kill him and seeing the shocked faces of my flat mates who had never seen anything but the happy person that I was (and still am). I remembered walking calmly back to my room and locking the door before falling to the floor, crying so hard my shoulders shook, partly because of what had been said and partly because the person in the living room was so completely outside myself.
I remembered that and tried to imagine myself in the office scenario. I shuddered at the idea of being in a place that forced you to control the uncontrollable. I realized she was still waiting on my response.
“That sounds horrible.” |
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JInduObiofumathird 1 - 11 Apr 2016 - Main.JinduObiofuma
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-- JinduObiofuma - 11 Apr 2016
I remember my first time going to six flags with my dad. I was young enough then that he still had his heavy accent. Truthfully, I still had mine. When my daddy spoke, he was a storyteller and a poet and a comic all at once. He could make strangers smile and he loved to make his family laugh. I remember that afternoon, jumping out of the car and running up to the trolly that would take us to the park’s main gates. My siblings followed close behind and as we clambered into the car, taking up an entire bench, we grinned at one another, barely able to contain our excitement. Our parents climbed in behind us, wheezing after running to keep us in sight. They were excited too. We had never been anywhere as cool as Six Flags before.
As the trolley began to move, I jumped up and ran across the aisle to sit with my dad. I swung my legs up onto his lap and asked him what he thought a roller coaster would be like. He could tell I was more than a little nervous, so true to form, he started cracking jokes. As I laughed, I felt the tension in my belly loosen a little. Pretty soon, he had our whole family laughing in that aisle.
At one point, I noticed we weren’t the only ones laughing. I looked over my shoulder at a group of white teenagers who had begun laughing with us. I smiled shyly at them, encouraging them to share in our happy moment. They didn’t smile back. Their laughter wasn’t like ours. Their faces were sneering,
Maybe this was also the first time I began to study strange faces.
As the trolley began to move, their laughter continued. It had an edge.
One girl burst out, “oh my gosh, can you hear his accent?” In response, one of the guys attempted an accent I didn’t recognize. I watched them for while without blinking, my eyes barely skimming the top of the bench. I wondered who they were talking about. My stomach dropped to the floor when I realized they were talking about my dad.
I whipped around and tucked myself back into his side.
“Daddy,” I whispered. My dad, still in the middle of his routine, smiled down at me before finishing his joke.
“Daddyyyyyy.” I whispered with urgency this time.
“Mhm..?”
“I think those people are laughing at you!” I whisper shouted. I was angry but still scared enough to whisper. Anyone bold enough to make fun of my dad was someone I didn’t want to tangle with.
My dad cast a worried glance at my siblings, too busy playing amongst themselves to notice or care about anything I was whispering. Smiling only with his mouth, he cast a glance over his shoulder before looking down at me.
“Sometimes you just have to ignore people like that. What they’re laughing at isn’t my business.”
They were still laughing as we got off the trolley.
When I think of that moment, some 13 years later, I invariably become enraged. It never fails. I will spot a face that looks nothing like those faces from long ago—faces I have no hope of ever remembering—and that anger that was yet unavailable to me on that trolley, an anger that exists very distinctly in the self I wish had existed that day, forces its way through.
Even then, the anger is never fully allowed to surface. To be sure, it emerges in varying degrees, but when I recognize it for what it is, I can tamp it down to an icy arrogance. When I don’t recognize it-- when it is triggered, unchecked--it is something else.
When I remember my father whispering to me on that trolley, I wonder what he was saying to himself, even as he was speaking to me. I wonder if he could recognize the novelty of my awareness. I wonder if it was control that allowed him to forestall his own angry, humiliated or even apathetic response to focus on his child. To be sure, he should have been focused on me. That moment was my rock. Upon it, I built every experience of racial humiliation. |
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