The concept understood as race is the foundation of a continuous socio-political structure that entraps Black people within the racist confines of the United States of America. While race is a social construct that is continually being challenged, the othering of Black folks has not been dismantled since the involuntary migration of enslaved Africans. This systematic structure helped produce emotions and characteristics that have become symbolic of the Black American experience. This emotive reaction to a vicious plight of injustice understood as “Black Rage,” manifests in the everyday experience of Black folks. When race and racism are the topics in public discourse, the voices that speak are often that of men. While there are hardly any large bodies of social and political critique by women on the aforementioned topics, there is inherent value in examining the intersections of race and gender in the many ways that address the complexity of Blackness in America. Whereas Bell Hooks—a Black, feminist scholar— encourages Black people to claim their rage, for it is linked to a passion for freedom and justice that makes redemptive struggle possible, James Baldwin ultimately finds the results of the internalization of rage to be fruitless when not soaked in love with a governing sense of Black pride.
The role of rage in public discourse is particularly important to post-colonial feminists. The rage that scholar bell hooks centralize in her collection of essays, Killing Rage: Ending Racism, is rooted in a powerful acknowledgment of the violent nature of colonization and the accompanying crimes of classism, racism, and sexism. As hooks states, “To perpetuate and maintain white supremacy, white folks have colonized black Americans, and a part of that colonizing process has been teaching us to repress our rage, to never make them the targets of any anger we feel about racism” (14). She argues, “Perhaps then it is that ‘presence,’ the assertion of subjectivity colonizers do not want to see, that surfaces when the colonized express rage” (12). This internalized loathing yields an expected end: socially there is a given insistence that Black folks remain nameless, void of humanity, and simply invisible. Black Rage is born of internal resistance and self-value that operates as a creative response to insidious injustice; it is a resistance in which the constant struggle has left traumatic and communal scars. Black Rage is not pathological but a socially fed rage, born from the constant victimization of the Black community through generations of legalized and accepted injustices—Black Rage is forged out of a necessity for Black folks to combat racial injustices in a climate where white Americans are born into a culture which contains the hatred of Black folks as an integral part. In her collection of essays, hooks have provided a means of articulating rage that leads to a discussion on what is rage rather than suppressing it. In her title essay, “Killing Rage,” hooks argues that repressing and annihilating rage is rooted in the desire to assimilate and reap the benefits of material privilege in white supremacist capitalist culture, therefore making Black folks complicit with dominant society’s efforts to colonize, oppress, and exploit.
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James Baldwin’s identification of Black Rage is perceivable through his many literary works. His ability to articulate the emotive response to structuralized racism with clarity and worldliness is of the utmost importance when regarding contemporary race relations. Baldwin’s statement “to be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time. So that the first problem is how to control that rage so that it won’t destroy you” serves as a defining epitaph for Black Rage. While Baldwin recognizes the inherent existence of Black Rage—a rage that engulfs the lives of Black folks—he argues that love has the power to annihilate the disconnect between the self and its perceptions of itself. Baldwin’s “My Dungeon Shook,” the opening essay in The Fire Next Time, gives poignant instruction to his namesake nephew on how to navigate the racist terrain of America. Ultimately, the critiques of America phrased with rage present new theoretical and pedagogical objections for his nephew. Baldwin’s overarching theme resonates in his words to his nephew, “You can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a nigger.” (4) Baldwin, therefore, insinuates that his nephew’s socially constructed Black body and political identity serve as a blatant indicator that he is a predetermined threat to dominant white society while presenting the issue that he can neither misplace his self-awareness in the white world nor misplace his own identity. In the text, Baldwin further emphasizes to his nephew,
There is no reason for you to be like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For those innocent people have no other hope (8)
The assertion that hope, reconciliation, and love rest in the hands of the Black community is a radical statement of purpose and identity.
In “Down at the Cross,” the final essay in The Fire Next Time, the Black Rage that Baldwin demonstrates to his nephew is recognized as one that is soaked in love, a love that he describes:
Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word “love” here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth (95)
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