What did she mean by rage? “I’m not angry,” I told her. But it was, like, the most eloquent rage ever.” I immediately felt defensive. As we were standing around with a group of others, chatting, she said, “I loved having you as my professor. Erica was a brilliant black girl who wrote great papers and asked really smart questions. Some years ago, I ran into a former student on the college campus where I was teaching. Don’t you just hate when folks yell at you to “Smile!”? I told the last man who said that sh-t to me, “ You smile!” The truth is that Angry Black Women are looked upon as entities to be contained, as inconvenient citizens who keep on talking about their rights while refusing to do their duty and smile at everyone. If you have the nerve to be fat and angry, then you are treated as a bully even if you are doing nothing aggressive at all. The story goes that Angry Black Women scare babies, old people and grown men. We are told we are irrational, crazy, out of touch, entitled, disruptive and not team players. Angry Black Women get dismissed all the time. Owning anger is a dangerous thing if you’re a fat black girl like me. But it’s unclear whether we are really being taken seriously. Black women who hold their communities together also hold our broader American community together. Black women turn to sass when rage is too risky - because we have jobs to keep, families to feed, and bills to pay.

But this is not a sassy black girl’s tale. Not wanting to offend this woman who I otherwise really liked, I simply said, “We’re not all like that.” She looked disappointed. She loved it, she said, when black women put their hands on their hips and swiveled their necks in protest. To her, these stereotypical portrayals made black folks seem understandable, even though to me, her descriptions felt like we were exotic others. My Malaysian roommate, who had seen many episodes of the old nineties sitcom Family Matters, told me that she loved black women because we were sassy like Harriette and Laura Winslow, the main black female characters on that show. Years after that, I was doing a summer abroad in South Korea.

Eloquent rage quotes