Underlying Causes of Anger in the Black Lives Matter Movement
One of my specializations as a therapist is anger management counseling. In my practice, I typically use a three-step approach following curriculum set out by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA):
Find healthy ways of expressing anger (i.e., conflict resolution skills, communication skills, etc.)
Identify and understand our beliefs about anger (i.e., myths that anger is genetic, it has to be aggressive, etc.)
Identify and deal with underlying causes of anger (i.e., trauma, environmental influences, what we learned from our parents/role models as a kid, etc.).
Finding healthy ways of expressing anger is the most immediate step because it ensures safety. Expressing anger in a healthy way helps us avoid getting hurt, hurting others, or ending up with legal or financial consequences.
With that being said, I consider Step 3 the most important.
Understanding Why We Get Angry Helps Us Know How to Address It
Without understanding the why, eventually the how falls apart. It’s like putting a Band-Aid on a deep stab wound. If you don’t have the surgery needed to repair the wound, the Band-Aid might be there, but the wound is still open and bleeding. Eventually, it’s going to bleed out around the Band-Aid.
Step 1 is the Band-Aid.
Step 3 is the surgery.
Humans are complex. We can feel more than one emotion at once, especially during major life events. Have you ever started a new job or moved to a new town and been happy and excited for the upcoming opportunity, but also sad to say goodbye to old friends and co-workers?
Anger is what we call a “secondary emotion.” What this means is that anger often masks a primary emotion, such as sadness, fear, or grief. At some point in our lives, we get the message that it’s not safe to express those primary emotions. We learn that we’ll be put in physical or emotional danger if we express sadness, fear, or grief.
So, what comes out?
Anger.
Anger is an attempt to protect ourselves from danger.
Society Has Failed to Allow Black People to Express Primary Emotions
For far too long, white culture has told the Black community that it isn’t safe expressing primary emotions. We’ve sent the message that if they express sadness, fear, or grief in ways that our white-shaped society doesn’t approve of, then they’ll be putting themselves in physical or emotional danger.
What does that leave them with when they can’t express those emotions?
Anger.
Then, when the Black community boils over to express that anger, they’re still in danger. At some point, if you’re in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t situation, you’re going to say “screw it, I’m just gonna. . .”
Society has sent the message that Black people should join hands with us and sing Kumbaya because none of them are enslaved anymore, and we have affirmative action and integration to “prove” we’ve made it all better. It’s like we expect them to forget that our ancestors owned their ancestors and act like racism ended with the ‘60s.
We’re stopping at Step 1.
Putting on the Band-Aid.
We’re not allowing Step 3 to happen.
Acknowledging White Privilege
I’m sure some will come across this post and think, “but my ancestors didn’t own any slaves!”
I’m a genealogy buff. I’m also, sadly, a confirmed descendant of slave-owners, so I’ve had a lot of time to grapple with this:
If your white ancestors came to the USA before or during the Civil War, they benefited from slavery - even those in the Northern/New England colonies.
They may not have owned slaves, but they bought food grown by slaves; wore clothes made by slaves, out of material grown by slaves. Some slave-owners even rented their slaves out to others, so your ancestors may have rented a human being at some point.
“But there were white farmers back then who didn’t own slaves!” Yes. But they were like our mom-and-pop stores. Plantations were like our Walmart. Which one is making more money and selling more goods?
Much of society is acting like racism went away in the ‘60s. We’re ignoring the fact that people with “Black-sounding” names statistically have a harder time getting job interviews and offers for upper-level jobs with growth potential. We’re ignoring the fact that the poorest schools with the worst success rates and the worst funding tend to be schools where the majority of students are Black, whereas the wealthiest schools with the most resources tend to be schools with mostly white students. This leads to an education gap that also makes it harder for many Blacks to be able to get into quality colleges, even with affirmative action laws. You can’t go to college if you don’t make the grades and can’t afford it.
Oh, and here’s a piece of trivia: There are government programs in place to increase funding for low-performing schools to get resources to raise their test scores and success rates. What happens when that goal is accomplished? Do they get to keep the resources to maintain the progress? Nope. The funding gets taken away. Before long, it’s back to square one because the funding dries up.
We’re forgetting that, although Blacks and whites commit crimes at roughly the same rates, Blacks are arrested more frequently and given harsher sentences for the same crime.
We’re acting like we don’t have the ability to clearly trace our ancestors back pretty much as far as we want (mine have been traced back to at least the 1400s in some branches) and learn about our heritage because we have records going back that far, when up until companies like AncestryDNA came along, Black people couldn’t even be sure of their true heritage, and even now can usually only trace their heritage back a certain distance because of the way records were kept during the slave era.
We’re waving our Confederate flags and crying out “Heritage Not Hate” while forgetting what that flag means to our Black friends. How would we react to people of German descent waving Nazi flags saying, “Heritage Not Hate?” Why is this different?
We’re forgetting about the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, which ran from 1932-1972, in which Black men were intentionally exposed to Syphilis, just to see what happened. That’s a 30-year-long experiment. On Black men. That didn’t stop until my mother was 10 years old.
We’re forgetting that we owe much of our medical knowledge to Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman whose cervical cells were used in research, without her permission or the permission of her family.
And we’re forgetting so much more.
And we’re asking Black people to forget all of that, too.
So, right or wrong, to me it’s no wonder why riots happen. Because when we’re not allowing our society to get to Step 3, the emotions have to get out somehow.
Current events can bring up a lot of unexpected emotions. Contact All Are Welcome Counseling for a free consultation today.
