Negotiating Gender in the Politics of Rage: Black Women and Black Power in the United States, 1950s–80s

The politics of Black rage that emerges in the mid-sixties registers a long simmering affect. James Baldwin articulated the affective disposition that would come to characterize Black Power: “to be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious, is to be in a rage almost all of the time. So that the first problem is how to control that rage so that it won’t destroy you”[1] against the then dominant political focus on transforming white sentiments with black suffering. Stokely Carmichael claims that the shift to rage emerges as a response to the looping scenes of Civil Rights abasement: “Each time the black people in those cities saw Dr. Martin Luther King get slapped they became angry.” If rage characterizes the politics of Black Power, it is also the case that, as bell hooks argues, “freedom from racial domination was expressed in terms of redeeming black masculinity.”

Between what Wallace termed the Black Macho and Robert Staples, in his response to Wallace, calls “Angry Black Feminists,” anger marks both the new Black politics and the unreasonable critique of those that Toni Cade Bambara writes are “encouraged—in the name of the revolution no less—to cultivate ‘virtues’ that if listed would sound like the personality traits of ‘slaves.’” This paper revisits the complex relationship between black women and Black Power which has come under renewed scrutiny in the work of Ashley Farmer and Robyn C. Spencer through the lens of the politics of rage. Based on the autobiographies of Assata Shakur, Elaine Brown, and Angela Davis, I analyze how they negotiate the relationship between the masculine politics of rage and the gendered accusation of being an angry, anti-revolutionary woman.

[1] Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Emile Capouya, "The Negro in American Culture," interview by Alfred Kazin, 1961.