The Utility of Anger?

A couple years ago, I took a class called critical pedagogy. This class tends to be geared towards teacher educators, of which I am not one (I do history of education, and while I might be teaching future educators, my class doesn't deal at all with pedagogy). I didn't necessarily understand exactly what critical pedagogy meant going in, and the class spent a lot of time talking about it. The bottom line is, there isn't complete agreement between critical pedagogues, which already sounds like a parody of the ivory tower. The definition of critical pedagogy I most closely adhere to is that described by Peter McLaren:

The critical pedagogy which I support and practice advocates non-violent dissent, the development of a philosophy of praxis guided by a Marxist humanism, the study of revolutionary social movements and thought, and the struggle for socialist democracy. It is opposed to liberal democracy, which only serves to facilitate the reproduction of capital. It advocates a multiracial and anti-imperialist social movement dedicated to opposing racism, capitalism (both in private property and state property forms), sexism, heterosexism, hierarchies based on social class, as well as other forms of oppression. It draws its inspiration from philosophers of revolutionary praxis such as Paulo Freire, Raya Dunayevskaya, and other philosophers, social theorists and political activists and supports all those who yearn and struggle for freedom. Critical pedagogy is opposed to both state terrorism and individual acts of terrorism. As Freire writes in The Pedagogy of Freedom, "Terrorism is the negation of what I call a universal human ethic." Critical pedagogy is driven by the engine of class struggle in both national and international arenas.

In order to sign on to such a worldview, I believe, a person needs some anger. I have lots of that. Lots and lots. Anger - or rage, as we called it in the critical pedagogy class - comes pretty easily to me. But one of the things we talked about in the class is the combination of rage and hope. I struggle more with the hope part, because it's hard to see how our capitalist overlords committed to the permanent reign of white cis hetero Protestant men is ever going to change.

Hope might just not work for me, as a concept. Gideon Levy - someone with reason to have a great deal of anger, and also a hero of mine - said that you have to be rational enough to believe in miracles. As he says, things don't happen on their own, but the Berlin Wall, the Soviet Union, and South African apartheid have fallen. Mere months before those events occurred, they looked impossible. Without a lot of anger, would they have happened? I think I like "rational enough to believe in miracles" more than "hope," even though I'm an atheist. The miracle here is that humanity will get its shit together and stop kicking each other around, and the rational part is important to me. What I really want is a more rational world, not one in which people find stupid and arbitrary reasons to kick others out of their sandbox.

We also talked about love in that class - specifically, radical love. Understand that I am not always a very squishy person, but I really love people. Well, some people, and that's where my problems with radical love come in. Am I supposed to love transmisogynists and Exodus International? I try to be empathetic and to humanize them, which is more than they will ever do for me, but I'm not sure that's enough. But loving my people comes easily for me, I'm not afraid to tell people that I love them, and I think that's also the source of my rage. When I hear someone tell me that her mom kicked her out when she was in high school, or that his brother is raising children to be homophobic, or if someone harasses one of my friends on the street, it cuts me deep, and I want to fly into a rage. I'm not good at hope in those moments.

You know who's really good at love, though, is Cornel West. What an inspiration. He can refer to people I would rather have a root canal than deal with as "my dear brother/sister." That instantly humanizes people, and isn't that the goal here? But it's never that simple.

Nic (again! I'm telling you, between Nic, Kyrie, and you, probably, I am never without genius people) encourages me to think about anger as not just anger but a set of complex emotions, and that is completely right. Anger is just part of the mix. Love and sadness are also involved. I'm just so sad that some people - my loved ones, yours, someone else's - are badly treated, and that those doing the mistreating will never understand what amazing people they are. The way Nic put it was great, so I wrote it down: "Anger is energetic anguish."

I think anger is something I see expressed a lot by some of the feminist writers I most admire . I have friends who I think find my tendency to anger endearing, and certainly reliable. People post links on my Facebook wall that they know will piss me off because they want to see what tapestry of profanity I will weave. Other times, I think they want genuine reactions (more so since Kyrie and I started this blog - now we both get requests to write about various issues, which we are delighted to honor).

Anger, I believe, is really important to social justice work. There is the basic level of "that pisses me off, I want to change it," without which social justice work cannot happen. But anger, for me, sustains my commitment to social justice and feminism. It keeps me from slacking off or writing things off as other peoples' problems. It's not just Nic's problem if someone tries to run her over on the street - it's my problem, it's your problem, because that's a human being we're talking about. Without anger, or rage, or whatever you want to call it, it's easy to lose motivation and sink into a depression because people you care about or will never meet are being targeted for the dumbest reasons imaginable. I've been depressed before, and let me tell you, I was completely unproductive. Not only could I not do anything for anyone else, I could barely get my own shit done. When I began to understand that one of the reasons I was so depressed was because the world is so fucked up, I started to feel a lot better, because I could focus on action. Now I try not to allow myself to sink into despair. Rage keeps me from doing that.*

If you're an activist, is anger something you deal with, and if not, what sustains your activism? If you don't consider yourself involved in social justice work, what is your perspective on this?

* I have a derby friend named Rage, so this is kind of a funny sentence for me to look at. But she keeps me from sinking into despair, too. Love her.