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I recently watched a video piece on the “angry young man” trope in cinema. It focused on how society and film had distorted what was once noble into license for white male rage to run amuck. It inspired some thought. It coincided perfectly with something I’ve also recently begun to notice: white males currently existing in a state of pseudo oppression and angst.
Anger is a natural reaction to a deeply disturbing and annoying set of circumstances. But over the last couple of years, our eyes have opened widely to the alternate universe full of alternative truths that America has now become. In this universe, anger is not for the oppressed and marginalized — it is reserved rather for rabid, deranged white males that seek to equalize this time of uprising and protest with white nationalist vigilantism. Doing so in all of its ‘Birth of a Nation’ heroism, similar to the Klansman crusading through on galloping horses to rid the land of the left.
Of course, the optics have evolved a little with the times. Enter Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old white male from Antioch, Illinois, facing multiple charges, including first-degree intentional homicide.
Rittenhouse is accused of killing two people and injuring a third during a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin. These events followed the August 23 police shooting of Jacob Blake. The latest trend of countering a history of oppression with their own white male rage has just received a huge endorsement by none other than president Trump and a million dollar GoFundMe towards Rittenhouse’s legal fees.
And just like that, who gets to be angry in America becomes a whole lot clearer. It’s whoever aligns with an agenda of destructing the resistance.
To fully understand the extent of America’s issues, I realized that you must recognize not only which group of people benefit the most in America but also ask ourselves who gets to be angry in America? It’s in answering this that we get into the depth of the system and how much work actually needs to be done.
A rather glaring and overlooked foreshadowing came in the form of the movie Joker. Although a massive international success led by a huge following and a brilliant performance by Joaquin Phoenix, it just never sat right with me. Perhaps it was due to its Alt Right fandom. As a Black woman, I couldn’t help but ask myself, could I have gotten away with this? Could any Black man or woman in America? But I was admonished whenever I brought up the point and dismissed as not seeing the “universal” message. For me specifically, the way people responded to him bothered me. The sympathy. It bothered me.
Every time I brought these concerns up, I was told that Joker’s plight transcends race. But, society’s response to the pain and disenfranchisement of others (in real life) seldom, if ever, transcends race.
Times have intensified even more since then and the world has had to awaken to this nuanced scope. Gotten with the program. The reality is that there are millions of White dudes in America running around and screaming on some Joker s**t. Half of them with little to no substantial oppressive issues facing them.
When you remove him from the comic book realm and place him into the modern world and in front of an audience, there’s an underbelly that is reflective of some problematic things. Someone who looks like me with that same experience in real life doesn’t get to break like that and become a hero. Not even in a damn movie. I can use Killmonger as a reference. And to this day, people are still asking Spike Lee why Mookie threw the garbage can into the pizzeria in Do The Right Thing. The answer remains that society is simply not socialized to grant as much grace to Black people — even when we require it mind, body and soul.
As a writer, some of the passages I have written are flat-out blackout rants. The levels I have been tried and tested in America, I will likely never live down. But I can’t actually go postal beyond those pages.
It always feels great being able to release, but what if I wasn’t a writer? What if I was able to make it all eloquent and didactic? What if there wasn’t a greater message I searched to find behind it all to create something relatable and “universal”? I’d be a lot less OK.
Anger is a natural response to being suppressed. It’s my natural response to the majority of what I see. My right.
So, the decision’s mine and for the world to reckon with.
