Do We Call On Our Black Anger or Our Black Love?

Photo https://www.flickr.com/photos/ready2spark/2274911559/sizes/m/

by Ernie McCray

I’ve been thinking of how my people have overcome so many things in this country. For centuries.

You name it, we’ve overcome it. But we just can’t overcome the anger that comes with being Black in this society.

It’s a Black anger, if you will, because it’s ours alone, a form of anger that’s always there, beneath the surface, like a low-burning flame that needs a rush of air to get it really going.

And, since it’s usually the actions of angry White folks that gives our anger oxygen, we can’t ever fully relax it because, in our experience, we never know when we might have to react to what a White person has done – to one of us. Or a number of us.

When it’s least expected.

Like you’re seventeen years old, in Tucson, in August of the summer of 1955, trying to beat the heat, stretched out on a couch in front of the swamp cooler with a frosty glass of red Kool-Aid, thumbing through Jet Magazine aka looking for the picture of the “Beauty of the Week,” to get your horniness on.

On the radio The Platters are singing “Only you,” putting you in a mellow mood as you munch on your mom’s one-of-a-kind vanilla pound cake with a “This sho do taste good” look on your face, the telephone close to you in case that fine looking girl you gave your phone number to, might, magically, call you…

You’re the embodiment of “everything’s cool.”

Then, BOOM, a picture suddenly jumps out at you like a charging rhino, chilling your very soul to its marrow, a picture of a Black boy’s mutilated body.

Emmett Till.

I was initially stunned like a prizefighter who didn’t see a vicious left-hook coming, having to shake his head to get his senses back, slowly realizing that what he was seeing was American justice up close and way too personal.

Emmett was seen as an “uppity” Black boy who didn’t know his place and had committed a White-made Black sin, “whistling at a white woman,” a sin as deadly as “reckless eyeballing,” looking a White person in the eye.

When that all struck home my Black anger took over me like a cult leader assuming power over his gullible followers.

And that anger was directed at White people. Any White person: friends, teammates, classmates, my mother’s boss, my boss, Perry Como, Dinah Shore, Santa Claus, White people yet born…

I took to the streets like a zombie on speed, unable to speak, silently despising every White person I could see.

And then, at a red light at the corner of Stone Avenue and Congress Street, a White woman waited for the green light right in front of me as, in my mind, I hated her up and down crazily.

When the light turned green I continued standing as she walked away from me.

I realized suddenly that I wasn’t being me. I wasn’t wired for hating. And I was raised in a respectful loving home that specifically counseled me not to judge a people by the behavior of a few. My pain had nothing to do with that woman – as far as I knew.

My anger slowly faded away, though, and I went back to my life of being a Black teenager: working a couple of jobs; playing softball and working on my basketball and dance moves; hanging out with my homies and my girlfriend; harmonizing with Ira Lee and Tommy Lee; reading practically every book it seemed at the downtown Tucson City Library.

That was many a decade ago but that anger has been rekindled often since that time as the atrocities against my people continue to multiply.

I mean too many of us still go out for a walk or a jog and end up in the morgue because they looked suspicious in a White person’s eyes.

More than enough of us call out “Who is it?” before their front door is knocked down and they’re shot several times.

There’s more than our unfair share on a list of people shot by a cop responding to a neighbor’s call.

To borrow from and paraphrase Marvin Gaye: “It make you wanna holler!”

And it doesn’t lessen our anger when so much extreme out of control White anger dominates our protests, taking up space on our TV screens with scenes of burning and looting and an occasional shooting while just a few steps or a block away people are gathered peacefully, fully committed to the Black struggle.

Along those lines, we have to, in those moments when our anger isn’t too pressing, think about how, after who knows how many centuries of “I can’t breathe” situations, George Floyd dies underneath the knee of a renegade law enforcement officer, and these people, representing all races and ethnicities, have continuously taken to the streets, marching to the beat of “Black Lives Matter!” Finally.

And they have not gone away, a hint that we need to silence our anger as much as we reasonably can and embrace such an outpouring of love with as much purpose and grace as we can.

After all, our pursuits for social justice have always been carried out in a spirit of love.

A most powerful love.

Black love.