Why Are You So Angry?

Acknowledgments

Writing this book and completing my dissertation has been a productive and fruitful lesson. It most certainly has been a time of professional and personal growth, but it also took me, as a dear friend and colleague once put it, to the dark places of my own identity position. Writing about Black women’s anger made it impossible for me to block out the ways in which the same questions and concerns that I am raising in this project influence my own thinking about the world and my being it. In the following, I would like to thank all of those who have been with me and supported me on this journey and who have celebrated every bit of progress with me.

First of all, I would like to express my gratitude to Peter Lang for awarding me this publishing contract after having been selected as a joint winner of the Peter Lang Emerging Scholars competition. This award came exactly at the right time and I am so grateful for this opportunity. I would like to especially thank Laurel Plapp, Dani Green, Shirley R. Steinberg, and Alison Jefferson for their support.

I would like to thank my colleagues from the American Studies program at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin for providing a friendly and academically challenging working environment. I have learned so much from you all and you have made my time working at HU an unforgettable experience.

I also thank everyone who I have had the pleasure of meeting and collaborating with over the past years. Writing a book is not an isolated process, and I firmly belief that every encounter I had the opportunity of having in the context of working on my dissertation has made an impact. Special thanks go to my advisor, Prof. Dr. Eva Boesenberg, who has been a source of emotional and academic support. Thank you for believing in this project and for encouraging me to pursue it, your (quite literal) around-the-clock-support in the final weeks before submitting my dissertation, and for guiding me through the initial years of my academic career. I would also like to say special thanks to my second advisor, Prof. Dr. Simon Dickel. Thank you for the wonderful collaboration opportunities you have provided over the years and your invaluable input on this project. I deeply appreciate your guidance and friendship, as well as every opportunity I have had to learn from you. And last but not least, I would also like to thank Prof. Dr. Mita Banherjee for stepping in as a third reader on very short notice and for finding such wonderful and encouraging words for this project.

Next up, I would like to extend a heartfelt thank you to my colleagues Prof. Dr. Elahe Haschemi-Yekani, Greta Kaisen, Prof. Dr. Evangelia Kindinger, Dr. Samira Spatzek, and Jasper Verlinden for taking the time to read, comment, and converse with me about how to turn my dissertation into a book. A very special thank you goes to our student assistant, Wassan Fouad Ali for so diligently reading every word, her extremely insightful suggestions, and for her vital support in the copy-editing process for the manuscript of this book.

I am immensely grateful for Rebecca Racine Ramershoven, an incredibly talented photographer and wonderful human being, who so beautifully captured the essence of this book in the cover art. I am so thankful for you and for our paths having crossed when they did.

An especially huge amount of gratitude goes to my smart, fierce and loving community of friends who have been integral to this project coming to fruition. Each and every one of you is part of why I was able to complete this project and it is for sure that I could not have done any of this without your continuous support, reassurance, and belief in me. A special thank you goes to Christina Rechenberger and Verena Hutchinson, my chosen family, for keeping me grounded and for being such wonderful companions.

I would also like to extend a special thank you to my teacher and dear friend, Christine Vogt-William. I will always be grateful for the many chances to see you do your magic, and for helping me finding my own.

Words cannot describe the gratitude that I have for my parents, who have supported me in every way possible throughout my academic career, but also through every decision that I have ever made in life. Thank you for always believing in me and loving me unconditionally.

I am eternally thankful to my grandparents, Max und Leni Schmid, who have always taught me the value of education. I am thinking of you and I know that even though I wish nothing more than for you to be able to see the completion of this project, you have been watching over me every step of the way.

Last but not least, I would like to thank my partner—my person—Jasper Verlinden, for his endless support in completing this project. You are a well of inspiration and resourcefulness. You have been with me every step of the way, with love, patience, guidance, delicious food, formatting skills, and above all, with your wonderful sense of humor. Our intellectual connection means the world to me and I could not think of anyone I would have rather had by my side throughout this challenging, but also invigorating process.

This is a study of Black women’s anger, its attempted silencing, and its cultural effects. In this project, I am grounding my discussion of the political and cultural function of Black feminist anger in several points of inquiry. I argue that anger at racial oppression and inequality has to be understood as a major affective component of Black people’s interior lives. Whether openly expressed, repressed, transformed or otherwise navigated, anger calls attention to the experience of perpetual injustice and oppression. As we continue to live and experience the afterlives of slavery and colonialism, I understand Black anger not just as a momentary emotional response to racial injustice but as an important affective repertoire and form of historical consciousness. This study’s interest is in the ways in which structures of gendered and racialized oppression converge to produce a climate where specifically the emotional lives and responses of Black women are misrecognized and distorted.

While the focus of my study of Black women’s anger is on literature, a scene from the world of sports offers a useful window into the dynamics that are central to my analysis. At the U.S. Open in 2018, Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka met on the tennis court to compete for the grand slam title. While it was Osaka’s first win of this order, it would have been Williams’s twenty-fourth title. Osaka, who, without a doubt, brought her best game to the court while Williams did not appear to be in best shape, managed to wrest the win from Williams. What could have been a wonderful moment involving two Women of Color playing against each other on this historically white tennis court, and an occasion to celebrate Osaka’s well-deserved win against her biggest idol, however, did not quite turn out this way. The media reports that followed described the events of that day as shocking and heartbreaking. The scenario that unfolded upon Williams’s angry outbursts toward umpire Carlos Ramos giving her several game penalties, added to a long list of incidents in which Serena Williams allegedly lost her temper and thus stole the limelight from her opponent.¹

While Osaka was already well on her way toward winning the game, the umpire gave Williams a game penalty for “coaching,” for having received help from her coach through hand gestures. Williams, in refuting the allegation, first, still calmly, turned to the umpire Carlos Ramos, saying that “I don’t cheat to win, I’d rather lose. I’m just letting you know that,” to which Ramos replied, “I know that.” While Williams continued her game, thinking that Ramos would take back the penalty and leave it at an informal warning, she later realized that he had not actually done that. A second game penalty for slamming and breaking her racket on the court in response to missing another one of Osaka’s serves cost her points at a critical moment in the game. Even though Osaka was already ahead, Williams’s point deduction ensured Osaka’s victory.

This second penalty caused Serena to snap. She called the umpire “a liar” for maintaining that she had cheated, and a “thief” for taking points from her; the whole scenario being accompanied by a chorus of booing coming from the ranks of the stadium as her fans shared in her anger. Williams calling out Ramos, however, resulted in a third game penalty for “verbal abuse.” Seething with anger, Williams called for the referee, accusing the umpire of sexism, seeing as male tennis players have often been known to throw much larger tantrums on the tennis court and calling the umpires much worse names than she did. Serena was obviously upset, her voice breaking as she spoke, tears in her eyes. As the uproar settled and Osaka won the game, however, the two women were shown embracing each other and Williams congratulated Osaka on her win in an effort of putting her own ambitions and frustrations aside. While the scenario that unfolded on the court was widely referred to as “shocking” and “inappropriate” on Williams’s part (although her fans stuck by Williams throughout), the trophy ceremony ended in a heartbreaking scene.² Osaka, in tears over the persistent booing of Williams’s fans, was barely able to speak or enjoy her moment of victory. Williams, at this point still torn up about the treatment she had received, struggled to keep her composure, but also tried to calm down her fans and animated them to cheer for Osaka.

Under different circumstances, this could have been a moment of solidarity and mutual respect between two women of African descent (Osaka played for Japan, because she was born there but had already moved to the United States at three years of age and was raised in New York. Her father is Haitian and her mother is Japanese). Instead, the moment was overshadowed by biased decisions on the part of the umpire, the competition, but also, as subsequent media reports have shown, Williams’s reputation of getting angry, often and excessively, which took away from the events being interpreted in their full complexity.

Whether Williams cheated or not, and whether Ramos was right or not, is beside the point. Whether Williams has a hot temper or not is not something that goes to the heart of what happened, either. Rather, I am arguing that the way in which the event was represented in the media afterwards hits right where it hurts when we look at it in light of how Black women’s anger is perceived and dealt with in the public realm. I maintain that because Williams had been branded as overly angry long before this situation happened, her arguments were not heard in terms of content, but in terms of what was expected of her, seeing as she has so often been stereotypically characterized as an ‘angry Black woman.’ As Bettina Judd writes, the angry Black woman, epitomized by the figure of Sapphire, “produces a paradox by which Black women’s knowledge and feeling is sequestered into chaotic impulse rather than controlled reason.”³ By constructing an image of Serena Williams that makes her appear out of control and unjustifiably angry, her right to feel anger is distorted and her anger twisted into an excessive emotional reaction without cause or merit. The angry Black woman stereotype, thus, is a way to effectively mark the category ‘Black woman’ off from what is appropriate, delicate, reasonable, or human.