The Truth About Black Anger And Why It's Justified

The next time a non-Black person asks you why Black people are so angry I have a few questions that you should pose to them. Ask them, how would they feel if their grandparents, and grandparents’ parents, and so on and so forth were stolen away from their homelands and forced to abandon everything they have ever known and loved simply because they were of a different culture and color?

To be worked to death and treated like a thing rather than a person, ask them if that would make them angry? If that’s not enough to shut them up ask them, how they would feel if their grandparents who were free American citizens were forced to endure Jim Crow? Ask them how they would feel if their grandparents could be murdered simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or for something as trivial as “reckless eyeballing.” (Looking at a white woman in the wrong way.) Ask them if they would be angry about living in a system that is designed to discriminate, disenfranchise, and destroy their communities?

Ask them about a criminal justice system that protects police officers who randomly murder unarmed Black men and women and very rarely if ever pay for their crimes. What about a prison system that profits from the imprisonment of young black and brown men and women destroying families for generations. I wonder if these things would make them angry? I’m betting they would. Black people for years have lived with at first, fear and now anger for the unjust ways that our ancestors have been treated in the past and the way we are still being treated today.

What people outside of the Black community don’t seem to understand or care about is that our very presence here in America with few exceptions suggests that most of our ancestors were kidnapped and packed on a slave ships like cattle. Forced to endure the hellish journey of the middle passage across the Atlantic Ocean to America where they were beaten, raped, stripped of their religion, their customs, and brutalized in ways that we could never imagine. So yeah, the thought of all that makes me angry.