Essay: Who's Afraid of an Angry Girl?

“We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change,” Ursula K. Le Guin Image: ID 343006436 © Aliaksandr Mazurenka | Dreamstime.com

“I do not believe that we can restore and expand the freedoms that our lives require unless and until we embrace the justice of our rage,” June Jordan, 1989 Progressive magazine.

Why are white women so afraid of anger and rage?

Once upon a time I was a volcano who believed she was a girl.

I recently began a new feature on my newsletter. Every day at 8 am my time, I publish a Daily Dose–a shot of feminism to inspire and incite. A few of them have been about the importance of nurturing anger and rage in girls. I’m used to men complaining when I write about anger in girls. They start to worry that I am encouraging violence, that I’m telling girls to imitate boys, and so forth.

It is startling when white women write with almost identical complaints.

“Anger is destructive,” they insist. “Teach girls to be kind. There is too much anger in the world. Don’t add to it.”

It is stunning that anyone, let alone a woman, would be anything but absolutely incendiary in these days of fascism and genocide, and would consider the nurturance of anger and rage in girls to be dangerous or detrimental. It is the refusal to do so which is dangerous and detrimental.

There is an unjustified overconfidence among white women in the U.S., especially about the achievements of feminism and what it has shielded them from. Few women around the world share such delusions about the achievements of feminism.