The importance of anger
From Tarot for Change, Jessica Dore:
Validating fury in ourselves and others isn’t simply a means to an end of making it go away—if your goal is to squash it, you’re not really validating anything. Evolutionary psychology researchers have suggested a thing called the recalibration theory of anger, which suggests that anger evolved to help us increase our social bargaining power and ensure that we demand better deals for ourselves when we’ve either been slighted or might be again. So, when we’ve been wronged in some way, being able to feel and process our anger allows us to procure better treatment for ourselves in the future. And as important as it is to be compassionate, empathetic, understanding, loving, and kind, it is also important and valuable—when necessary—to be angry.
This makes me think of “The Uses of Anger,” Audre Lorde’s powerful essay in Sister Outsider. Although Lorde expands it significantly: anger is not only important and valuable individually, but collectively. Because anger is not the problem:
For it is not the anger of Black women which is dripping down over this globe like a diseased liquid. It is not my anger that launches rockets, spends over sixty thousand dollars a second on missiles and other agents of war and death, slaughters children in cities, stockpiles nerve gas and chemical bombs, sodomizes our daughters and our earth. It is not the anger of Black women which corrodes into blind, dehumanizing power, bent upon the annihilation of us all unless we meet it with what we have, our power to examine and to redefine the terms upon which we will live and work; our power to envision and to reconstruct, anger by painful anger, stone upon heavy stone, a future of pollinating difference and the earth to support our choices.
We welcome all women who can meet us, face to face, beyond objectification and beyond guilt.