a folk manifesto on black rage

rule 4: *whatever

“you got the right to be mad.” [1]

damn right, we do. but to be quite honest, we don’t need anyone telling us that our rage is acceptable. because at the end of the day, we know that our rage is our purpose. it is our reason to act.

black rage is a velocity.[2] it has been building momentum since 1441.[3] it will not go away until this anti-black world is completely undone. 

when the rage inside of us feels like a fiery pit of anger, despair, and revenge, we must exhale, allowing that fire to engulf the world in flames that seeks to destroy us. 

engulf the world that seeks to destroy us

but what will the world think of our rage? black rage has been/will be seen as a sickness. [4] something that needs to be cured or managed. something that white detractors and black capitalists mock as a spectacle of our inherent failure to cope with the conditions of an anti-black world or our inability to see the ‘good’ in our demise. they, too, can be engulfed in our rage. 

it is not our job to make our rage digestible in an 8 point policy plan that will reduce police brutality by 70 percent (what the hell does that even mean, yall?). it is not our duty to make people see our “humanity”. they, in fact, do see it. their violence requires our sentient abilities. our ability to cry out, to suppress, to take the pain, to even forget at times. that is why they must feel our rage. that is why we must make them feel every bit of our liberation. that is why we must make them remember.

if they say our rage makes us something that is not human, then so be it. black rage calls for the destruction of the human as a social category that centers liberalist modes of being. [5] the same modes that required our enslavement, our enclosure, our suppression. 

black rage frees us. it fuels us to liberation.

our rage is the velocity to a new world once thought to be unimaginable— a world without the violence that black folks encounter and experience.

But until then, we rage on.

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citations

[1] Solange, “mAd” A Seat at the table, 2016.

[2] Inspired by Savannah Shange’s quote, “Liberation is a velocity rather than a state of being.” Savannah Shange, Progressive Dystopia Abolition, Antiblackness, and Schooling in San Francisco (Durham: Duke University, 2019).

[3] Sylvia Wynter, Tiffany Lebatho King, and many other scholars have urged us to think before the 1619 benchmark as the starting point of colonial rule and the development of the subsequent ideologies that made European coloniality possible. See Sylvia Wynter, “1492: A New World View” and Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formation of Black and Native Studies. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).

[4] bell hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism, (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996).

[5] Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formation of Black and Native Studies. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).

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thefolk, created by Kelsey Moore, is an online digital curation project centering southern african american folk life both past and present. follow the folk on instagram.