To celebrate our ten year anniversary, we are inviting back former writers back to tpc in order to hear what they’ve been thinking about since leaving the post calvin. Today, please welcome back Sabrina Lee. Sabrina (’13) returned to the Calvin English Department in August 2023 as an assistant professor. She is currently finishing her dissertation and teaching “Ways of Reading,” the department’s introductory theory course.
In “The Uses of Anger,” Audre Lorde makes a distinction between hatred and anger: “Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is the grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change.” Lorde is speaking about racism within the women’s movement in the US. Hatred belongs to patriarchy, to white supremacy. But, anger belongs to the struggle for coalition, to the fractured relationships between women who are trying to work together, even though they are not the same, even though they are unevenly privileged, unevenly dispossessed. Anger belongs to the relationships you care about, to the people you want to love and by whom you wish to be loved in return.
Lorde gave “The Uses of Anger” as the keynote address at the National Women’s Studies Association Convention in 1981—a decade before I was born. Lorde was writing in a different time, a different place, and yet I am turning to her work now because anger has been my companion for years.
A decade ago, I did not anticipate this. Had the post calvin (which, at the time, was going by the working title of Thirty Under Thirty) asked me to predict what I might write about in ten years as a retrospective post, anger would have been the last thing on my mind. Even now, part of me is surprised: I do not consider myself an angry person, nor do I believe others perceive me that way.
There are reasons for this. A decade ago, I did not know how to be angry. Instead, I translated my anger into grief. In fact, most intense moments manifested as tears: Stress? Tears. Exhaustion? Tears. Shame? Tears. Love? Tears. Anger? Tears. Around five years ago, my best friend pointed this out to me—the way my tears dissolved different emotions into one drained mess. At the time, it was a revelation. In retrospect, for me to translate anger, and all those other so-called negative emotions, into grief makes sense. Tears may be embarrassing, but they are far more acceptable than rage, especially for a white, Asian American, middle-class, Christian woman. Grief may be exhausting but how much better to absorb pain than to disagree or confront. How much more often was I told the lesson about turning the other cheek, rather than the lesson about Christ flipping the money changer’s tables in the temple courts.
My twenties were filled with anger on national and institutional scales: The #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements swept the country, articulating anger against sexism and harassment, racism and police violence. My union went on strike, in part, because the university where I was working was aiming to take away tuition waivers from incoming graduate teaching and research assistants, a key component of the compensation for such positions. On a personal scale, I experienced what I imagine to be a rather mundane assemblage of dismissals, betrayals, disappointments.
At first, my anger exhausted me the way my grief exhausted me. But the longer I was angry, the more I realized that my anger did not only come from a place of pain but of love. Anger is often dismissed as violent or irrational, and sometimes it is, but anger can also stem from care—for others, for one’s own inherent dignity, for the desire for righted relationships. This is the anger that Lorde is talking about. And this kind of anger—understood, pruned, sharpened, embraced—can lend intense energy for change. Because this kind of anger is also a kind of love.
As I write this post, I am sitting in my office, thinking of my students, some of whom will be graduating soon, some of whom may even begin writing for the post calvin soon. I do not know if they need to read these words. They have grown up in a different moment than I did, and perhaps they have already learned to harness their anger, to wield it when necessary, to let it spur them toward greater love rather than sink them in the exhaustion of despair. But, if they are at all like my 22-year-old self, I want them to know that it is ok to be angry, that they should not shy from their anger but learn from it and use it and cultivate it for love and change. And I want them to know that in this endeavor they are not alone.
Cover image by freepik
Sabrina Lee (’13) returned to the Calvin English Department in August 2023 as an assistant professor. She is currently finishing her dissertation and teaching “Ways of Reading,” the department’s introductory theory course.
This article is stunning, Sabrina! Anger is so often treated as a negative emotion. I was taught to hide anger. How important it is to embrace that anger can lead to love and change. Thank you for writing this article!
This certainly is a tricky subject. I don’t think most people know how to use anger positively. Because it takes a lot of inward focus and awareness, which often aren’t present when anger emerges. It would take a lot of time and introspective to even come to this point, and holding on to anger for long periods of time is particularly damaging and I think leads down the road of ‘hatred.’
But I do like that you bring it up and that you put this positive light on it. It is good to make it more aware, to start a thought process.