I could scarcely go more than two or three lines without highlighting or underlining something. Very rarely have I ever read something like this as validating and affirming, but also self critical as this.
I have two reflections. The first is on the use of Anger as a vessel of knowledge, growth, empowerment, and change/progression. I have been told so many times that I am * too angry * and that I should let things go. I should turn the other cheek. I should shrug off some homophobic, religiocentrist, ableist, racist, etc. comments because “they didn’t mean it like that” or I should understand where they are coming from and try to show patience. I’ve been told I don’t know how to take a joke. I take things too personally.
I was one of those “women raised in fear” that she mentioned on page 131 (possibly 121 in your book, my pages seem to be 10 ahead of the ones you list). I was taught through physical, mental, and emotional abuse that “the anger of others was to be avoided at all costs because there was nothing to be learned but pain”. I swallowed my anger. I held so much fury that I dissociated it into a separate protective personality - one named “Fiona” that was with me for most of my life and still at times of high stress manifests as I dissociate. Lorde is nothing but correct when she says “if we accept out powerlessness, then of course any anger can destroy us”.
But that was before Lilith. Even after I presented my chapter to class I was private messaged saying that they hoped that I finally found another way to be other than angry and that I had released all of my fury and could move on. Anger is always deemed as bad - and reading this chapter brought me to such tears. Both in validation and gratitude, but also in regret.
It has also been instilled in me that as a white woman I am not really *allowed* to speak up about racism because I am eliminating the chance for women of color to speak. My voice, as a white woman, is too loud to hear the voices of those oppressed worse than me so I should either whisper or remain silent. There is guilt in that silence. When I do speak it is from the safety of social platforms - when I danced burlesque and helped put on drag shows, social media pages sharing resources and reposting quotes and posts made by people of color. It never felt like enough, the guilt would eat at me but it was better than doing absolutely nothing. I was afraid I would upset the very people (primarily black women) that I wanted to help if I did much more. The one time I tried to march for black lives matter in my tiny city back in North Carolina I ended up arguing with my mother for so long that I missed the march. She couldn’t stop me from joining protests on the college campus though. But it all felt performative, even though I believed in it. Its easy to be loud in anger when you are with a large group of people yelling for justice. Its not so when its a racist comment you overhear from a booth behind you at a diner. Or a backhanded compliment one friend says to another.
Reading her words towards white women, saying to let go of guilt because it only gets in the way and to recognize that their (black women's’) anger was for growth and understanding, has both made me ashamed at how little I have done when it mattered - in the quiet moments when it seems I am the only one around bothered but I remain silent (like on page 127/117) - and encouraged to do better moving forward rather than wallowing in guilt. What is the worst that could happen by speaking up - I make someone angry?
I will close this with a line I recognized in this chapter. Shortly after moving to Madison WI, over on the east side (I now live on the west), someone had painted a mural on their garage with a quote that stuck with me ever since I read it. This quote is on page 133/123:
“I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.”
I am not less moved by those words now reading them in context, when I was when I was walking my dog and saw them painted into a giant work of art.
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