The One About Anger
We were chattel. Herded, bred, and slaughtered for the convenience of capitalism and greed. Our bodies were battered as we labored in the fields and produced offspring that would inevitably be ripped from our hands the moment they could work. Our “womanhood” was only acknowledged through sexual exploitation when white men raped and pillaged our bodies for their pleasure. “The enslaved black woman could not look to any group of men, white or black, to protect her against sexual exploitation (hooks 36).” This lack of protection would be ever-present as Black women shifted from chattel to personhood to womanhood. This blog seeks to examine what it has meant for Black women to transition from chattel to self-defined womanhood. Part of this examination requires us to explore how Black women have been denied their humanity and the ways in which they have defined it for themselves. For generations, Black women have shape-shifted to survive, learning to temper our expectations and emotions. To prove our womanhood and humanity, we were taught to curtail our anger and be better than our oppressors. As we moved our efforts towards justice and liberation, anger became the emotion most often used to silence, disregard, and belittle the plight of Black women. In Khadija Mbowe’s video “get in loser, we're entering our villain eras,” the author explores why Black women are angry and how to use that anger.
Mbowe begins her video essay by listing the reasons why Black women are angry; she relates the adultification of young Black girls, the micro- and macro-aggressions that come with being racialized, the hypersexualization of the Black woman’s body, and more as the catalyst for stripping Black women of their rights to self-identify. She highlights that these reasons alone give Black women the right to be angry. When Audre Lorde says, “Every Black woman in America lives her life somewhere along a wide curve of ancient and unexpressed angers,” she agrees with Mbowe (Lorde 145). Like Lorde, Mbowe acknowledges the historical and systematic oppressions that Black women have faced on their journey to personhood. Mbowe discusses the importance of first allowing ourselves, as Black women, to feel our rage. She asks us to “feel, interrogate, investigate but do not judge,” this anger so that we can speak the truth about our anger. In Lordes search for an answer to her hatred and anger of Blackwomanness, she looked at her most vulnerable places and acknowledged the pain that she felt so that she could remove that pain from her enemies’ arsenals (146). She did not want her anger to be used as a silencer. She understood that self-acceptance meant power. Mbowe acknowledges this self-acceptance of our darkest parts, of our anger, as a way to fuel our further liberation. She highlights her own struggles with anger and self-acceptance. “It’s gotten me nowhere and it’s caused me much more problems to hide it, to act like it’s not there, to let it fester beneath me, and to resent, not just myself, but people and the greater world around me instead of being honest about how I feel about shit” (Mbowe). She acknowledges that this self-acceptance helps move our consciousness from micro to macro thinking. She explains that acknowledging our internal anger helps us explore the greater themes that come up like capitalism, sexism, misogynoir, etc. This anger can then be used to fuel liberation from these systems, which sit at the “why” of our anger. In agreement, Lorde reminds us that “every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being” (Lorde 127).
To be a Black woman is to persevere towards liberation and self-identity.
Works Cited
hooks, bell. Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Routledge, 2015.
Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press, 1984.
Mbowe, Khadija. “get in loser, we're entering our villain eras.” Youtube, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpUV5ThWdz0&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Ftraversingwomanhood.blogspot.com%2F&source_ve_path=Mjg2NjY. Accessed 6 April 2025.
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