There is a growing tendency, especially in “leftist” spaces, to silence anger in the name of civility. Phrases like “Do not engage” may be appropriate in some moments, but when they evolve into accusations like “you are making us unsafe,” they become tools of oppression themselves. These statements often shift the blame away from fascist violence and redirect it toward the people most harmed by it. What is being labeled as dangerous is not the violence of power, but the rage of the oppressed.
This is not new. Black and brown people have long been villainized for our anger. From the stereotype of the “angry Black woman,” to the “spicy Latina,” to the “hot-blooded Arab,” our emotional responses to centuries of violence have been ridiculed, criminalized, and dismissed. These tropes are not just offensive—they are dehumanizing. They strip us of our right to feel, to respond, to fight back. They teach us that our rage is irrational rather than righteous, and that our fury must be pacified in order to be taken seriously.
But our rage is not unwarranted. It is not dangerous. It is not reactionary. It is a survival mechanism, an emotional inheritance born from generations of resistance against colonization, imperialism, slavery, occupation, and systemic dehumanization.
Yet today, too often, we find ourselves in rooms meant to be safe, meant to be radical, where we are still policing one another, where we are debating whether someone’s anger at fascism is too loud, too disruptive, too much. This is by design. The empire works tirelessly to turn us against each other, to fracture our solidarity, to make us internalize its fear of our power.
But there is a raw strength, unteachable, sacred, that lives in our anger. A strength that must not be silenced for the sake of fragile peace. Because peace without justice is not peace. No justice, no peace. There is no peace without liberation, there is no liberation without a fight.
The fight for justice demands that we embrace the full spectrum of our emotions, especially our rage. It demands that we reject the false binary of respectability versus radicalism. It demands that we recognize anger not as a failure of character, but as a compass pointing us toward what is intolerable—and what must be changed.
Let us channel that anger. Let us organize it. Let us wield it with clarity and purpose. Our rage is not the problem. It is part of the solution.
