There is an infinite well of anger go be drawn from. There is so much to be angry about. Not just in one situation, but for everyone, about so many things. The whole world, other people, ourselves, history, chance, life.
Anger can be useful. And it can destroy us. We’re all always holding our anger at bay, about everything, and sometimes something opens a crack in the wall. Sometimes the whole edifice collapses and we can’t keep it in or control it any more.
If you open yourself up to connection with and identification with others, you open yourself up to anger and shame and disappointment just as much as you open yourself up to joy and pride and community.
Some popular categories like race maybe too broad and too vague and too undefined to serve as a nexus for the kind of connection and identification that we’ve loaded it with. Other kinds of categories, like the various miceo-sexualities, maybe be too narrow.
The lesson of history is that race, in broad, color-based terms, simply doesn’t contain enough content in itself to serve in the role we’ve assigned it. Especially in a country of 300 million and a world of 7 billion, it’s simply too large and abstract and contains too many elements over which we have little influence and with which we have little contact for it to stand in for the categories of community and identity that humans feel they need.
There’s power in that type of mass-aggregation, but it is the power of the faceless, impersonal juggernaut. In relation to you it’s millions of times bigger, and the amount that you can influence it or even understand it is limited simply by your own finitude. You’re far more connected to your own family. You have far more influence and agency. You likely understand your neighbors and coworkers and people in your church more than many people with whom you share only a racial connection.
And while the greatest of all similarities and differences exist at the individual level, mass agregation based on color is about as low resolution as you could go. That is the wisdom we gained in the past…and have already lost. If we stake our lives and identities and the lives and the identities of others on the matter of race, we are bound to be disappointed.
Not that isn’t a dimension of life, even an important dimension of life. But as John McWhorter once observed when he was in Europe, he was far more of a curiosity for being an American than he was for being black. And many black Americans have struggled to find common ground with Africans, and even with recent African immigrants to America. The category of blackness fails to create much common ground outside America, and maybe less than is claimed inside it.
There is value in staking a claim to a racial identity. It gives you a stake and some power within a group. For better or worse, that’s something both Glen Lourey and John McWhorter have both done, in their own ways, despite their objections to a lot of the current ideas surrounding black identity. They’re trying to do good by means of this connection. But it can come back and bite you, too. That’s the price identification exacts.
That’s the price all connection and identification exacts. But race, especially today, is one of the most vague and pernicious identities. It can load you up with dubious connections, both positive and negative. Pride and shame that have little to do with you, or that you want little to do with. Needs you are not equipped to fill, limitations you shouldn’t accept, honors and burdens you don’t deserve to carry.
Our lives and communities are so complex these days. And we don’t make them clearer or stronger or more effective by forever aggregating them at the level of least connection and agency and specificity. We’ve lost our faith in the power of the individual, the close knit family, the proximate community, and believe only in the overwhelming power and significance of the teeming mass.
And that is a sad faith, that breeds frustration and a feeling of helplessness and insignificance. It breeds anger. Anger without a clear home, the most dangerous kind. And that’s something we should all fear.
Making Nobody Happy 