It is often a positive sign when victims come to feel anger and acknowledge anger toward their victimizers. Such anger is the victims’ own emerging awareness of having been victimized. Becoming aware of being a victim is a first, indispensable step toward ceasing to be one. It shows that those in bondage are already beginning to cast off their chains. That is why abusers take any display of anger by those they abuse to be insubordination. Whatever offers hope to the oppressed is a threat to the oppressor.
To that degree, victims’ anger at their victimizers is not only justifiable. It is also desirable. It indicates a marshaling of the victims’ resources toward overcoming their victimization. It implicitly advances a claim of independence and personal agency. It says for those feeling it: “I have a right to be angry at what has been done to me!”
Those who maintain power over others only through force rather than through genuine authority are, therefore, correct to see their position threatened if their subjects begin to express anger toward them. It is threatening to the victimizers when the victims of injustice even dare to feel such anger, let alone when they dare to act upon it.
From the perspective of the oppressors, it is much better if those they oppress deflect their anger onto one another, thereby diverting it from its proper target, the target that is the oppressors themselves. Within Black communities, Black-on-Black violence, especially among the Black underclass, and any rioting in which it is predominantly local neighborhoods and Black-owned businesses that are damaged, are examples of such deflection of legitimate anger over unacceptable conditions.
It is understandable when victims of oppression take out their anger over their condition on one another if they are denied the possibility of directing it toward their oppressors, where it belongs. It is understandable, but regrettable. It is also understandable when oppressors grow angry toward those they oppress for expressing their own anger over oppression — especially is they express it directly to the oppressors themselves. It is understandable, but reprehensible.
What’s wrong in the case of the anger of the oppressed is not that the oppressed grown angry about being oppressed. They should. What’s wrong, rather, is that their anger becomes misdirected by being deflected onto one another rather than kept focused where it really belongs. The fact that the oppressed feel anger about being oppressed tells them that they need to do whatever they can to liberate, not destroy, themselves. Their anger tells them something is wrong, not in those who feel the anger (namely, the oppressed themselves), but in something that has been done to them — something that needs changing.
In contrast, what’s wrong in the case of the anger of the oppressors toward those they oppress is precisely the oppressors’ anger itself. Oppressors should not feel anger when those they oppress angrily protest against oppressions. Instead, they should feel guilt — a guilt calling upon them to cease acting oppressively.
The anger of the oppressed is a call for the cessation of oppression. The anger of the oppressors is a defense against their own guilt.
NOTE: This post is an edited version of a passage that first appeared in my book Emotional Literacy, first published in 1997 (New York: Crossroad) and available elsewhere at this website. The passage is still all too appropriate for this Juneteenth 2020.