Rage

I’m hearing a lot about ‘a return to civility and decency’ in our discourse lately. I’m having mixed reactions. On the one hand, elected officials behaving better than my seven-year-old after double-fisting cupcakes at a birthday party sounds like a relief — low bar that it is. On the other hand, it has me reflecting on those words: civility and decency.

Our conventions of communication were established by people of privilege, right? The folks in power make the rules. And the general understanding is that rage is not the way to communicate if we want to be taken seriously — particularly by people in power. Among those people, there are boundaries of good behavior — particularly for those of us who are not male, white and straight.

If I raise my voice in a conversation with the men I work for, I’m an ‘angry woman.’ Or ‘difficult.’ Or even just ‘a lot.’ Any one of those condemnations is dangerous for me in conversations that happen between men about whether or not to hire me. The slightest hint that I may be ‘difficult’ is enough to cost me a job. And since I’m the sole breadwinner for my family (and already paid on average 80% of the salary of my male counterparts) I can’t afford those judgments.

And of course it’s worse for the non-white folks out there — ‘angry black women’ are written off as crazy without a second thought and suffer violence at a rate massively higher than white women. ‘Angry black men’ are considered so dangerous they’re regularly shot by authorities. None of this is news.

But here’s the thing: we didn’t make ourselves angry. We — the not-straight-white-men out there — are angry because we’re unsafe, underpaid, disenfranchised — you name it. The way that the stress of Covid has left everyone afraid, unsure, and impatient? That’s how it feels when you’re not living in privilege — all day every day. It’s a phantom drain — sometimes small, sometimes big, but ever present — that makes attaining those standards of ‘decency’ in communication a huge burden.

In these cultural moments (#metoo, #blm, etc.) when we are called to explain what it’s been like to walk in our shoes, we are also — implicitly and insidiously — called upon to articulate these injustices with civility and decency. If we don’t — if our rage seeps through — we pay a price for it. We can be labeled ‘uppity’ or ‘bitchy’ or ‘aggressive’ and then those in power refuse to engage with us — costing us our voices and often our livelihoods. Or those in power recoil from our anger, saying they’re ‘triggered’ by the way we communicate, making themselves into the victim, flipping the script of the conversation in ways that continue to erase our experiences. Or simply, our anger becomes an excuse to ignore the content of what we’re saying because we’re not communicating it according to the rules they established. And then nothing changes — we are still unsafe, underpaid, and disenfranchised.

What I’m saying is that — on the one hand, civility and decency have been sorely lacking in our public discourse and I believe they are worthy goals. But they are unequally attainable on a person-by-person basis until we get a lot closer to reconciliation and justice. To ask someone to speak about the pain of marginalization is a big ask. To ask them to not express that pain while they do it is asking too much. And it’s both uncivil and indecent to make that request.

Let me propose this: that those in power commit themselves to listening with civility and decency — understanding that the burden of speaking that way may be too much for some marginalized peoples right now. What if folks of privilege devoted themselves to fostering civility and decency by opening a dialogue with marginalized folks that chose to honor the anger and pain that sometimes come out in that communication — because there’s no energy left to hold it in?

I’m not talking about anger as a tool to silence others — that’s bullying. I’m not talking about rage or tears as a means of causing pain in others. I’m saying: how about letting folks express their experience in their own way? I’m saying: how about decolonizing the conversation?

And I’m saying it as nicely as I can.