77 pages • 2 hours read
Anger Is a Gift
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Themes
Police Brutality
Police brutality is the most readily apparent of the novel’s themes. It is central to the lives of several characters and plays a role in each of the key plot points. Our first encounter with it comes when we learn that Moss is still traumatized from witnessing his father being murdered by the police when he was ten years old. The fact that this occurs during a protest against another instance of the police murdering an unarmed person of color helps to highlight that this is not a historical issue but an ongoing one; that it is, as Wanda later observes “our reality” (284). One of the most significant things explored in this context is that police brutality is not only a recurrent event but one for which the police—individual officers, specific forces, or the institution itself—are rarely held responsible. The media is repeatedly shown to be overly deferential to the police, helping to pass the blame onto the victim, often disseminating outright lies in order to support the police’s justifications. Indeed, Wanda believes Moss’s father’s murder was a targeted attack performed in retribution for Wanda releasing footage of another murder by police officers. The rest of the novel is also driven by incidents of police violence. The plot’s inciting incident, the catalyst for all else that happens, is Shawna’s assault by the school police officer. The students’ angry response for this is used as an excuse to install a metal detector, which precipitates another instance of police violence where Reg is irreversibly injured after being forced through the machine. This in turn provokes the students to stage a walk-out during which Javier is murdered, and Moss’s protest at this murder leads to the police’s disproportionately violent attack on the demonstrators during which numerous people are brutally injured and one person is killed. The centrality of this theme and the essential role it plays in the plot demonstrates its ubiquity and its long-lasting effects on marginalized communities.
Institutional Racism
It is not possible to fully understand the theme of police brutality without recognizing the institutional racism involved. Violence and murder are disproportionately targeted against people of color, and hegemonic powers excuse these atrocities by perpetuating racist stereotypes. This operates on various levels throughout the novel. It can be seen in West Oakland High, a school primarily attended by poor people of color and, as a result, avoided by the high-ranking colleges and drastically underfunded. Indeed, the school appears to care more about setting up metal detectors than about providing the students with a functional work space or adequate educational materials, sending the message to the students and the community that they are not worth being educated but instead worth fear and subjugation. This reflects institutional racism by showing how poor communities of color are underserved in terms of resource allocation and by highlighting the way people of color are routinely criminalized and treated as a threat requiring pacification and surveillance.
Institutional racism is also seen in the media of coverage of police violence, which works to shift the blame onto the victims while denying police culpability. Not wanting to lose viewers or listeners and therefore being unwilling to offend their audience, the media’s gentle treatment of police brutality fails to ignite the mass response necessary to create change. Moss and Rawiya highlight the media’s treatment of people of color when they joke about Moss appearing on the news to “placate your white listeners and make them feel as if they’re not personally complicit in any corrupt systems” (244). In other words, it’s one thing to passively feel outrage listening to a story, and it’s another to actively take part in social change, standing shoulder to shoulder with those who experience violence.
Finally, institutional racism is of course present in the actions of the police themselves, who fail to listen or respond appropriately to people of color. Perhaps the most telling example of this is the fact that, as Wanda observes, police refuse to take any responsibility for their acts of violence until a white girl is accidentally killed during the demonstration. The hegemonic powers send the message that a white life is worth an apology and a step towards change, while lives of color, specifically Javier’s and Moss’s father’s, are not.
Intersectionality
Although racism is central to the experiences of the novel’s main characters, Oshiro also highlights the fact that their oppression is intersectional. That is to say, he shows how different systems of oppression operate in different forms of social categorization; in fact, forms of oppression cross over and interconnect so that people experience different levels of privilege and marginalization in various settings for various reasons. For example, Shawna’s experiences are shaped by the intersection of racism and transphobia and Reg’s are shaped by the intersection of racism and ableism; these intersecting prejudices lead to different forms of abuse in different moments. Moss’s friendship group of queer people of color is extremely diverse, and they all experience different forms of oppression that are at least alluded to in the novel, such as the principal angrily demanding that Rawiya remove her hijab during the Pledge of Allegiance. Importantly, Oshiro shows that even marginalized people and oppressed groups can be ignorant to the experiences of others, benefiting from their own relative levels of privilege in these areas. For example, Moss and Esperanza fail to consider accessibility when choosing a venue for their meeting, and Moss, Reg, and Bits are ignorant about how it feels to be on the receiving end of anger from figures like Hull and the principal until Rawiya and Shawna highlight the issue. Although the characters appear to quickly learn from their mistakes in these instances, Esperanza’s ignorance about the realities faced by those people of color who do not have rich white parents takes a lot longer to shift. Unaware of how much relative privilege she has compared to her friends, she unknowingly fails to listen to them or believe them when they talk about the realities of police violence against poor people of color until she is actually exposed to such violence herself at the protest.
Anger
As the novel’s title suggests, anger is a central thematic concern. It is primarily explored through the protagonist Moss, and the reader experiences it through his changing attitudes towards it. Initially, Moss views his anger as something negative, as another regrettable product of his trauma like his anxiety and panic attacks. He describes it as an “unwanted tourist” and attempts to suppress it “because he [is] tired of it consuming him so often” (100). However, Wanda disagrees with this view. When Moss reports that his anger caused him to try to intervene when Shawna was assaulted, he is hard on himself, blaming himself for losing control. Wanda tells him that such anger could actually be seen as noble, as a righteous anger against injustice. Later, she admits that, when his father was murdered, she had been consumed by her anger to such an extent that she could not get out of bed. However, she also says that it does not have to be this way; anger can be something active and positive; it can be harnessed to drive one to take the brave and dangerous actions required to challenge an unjust system. In this sense, she tells him that “Anger is a gift” (169), a fuel to be used to bring about change. This conceptualization of anger appears again when Kaisha tells those gathered at the church that after his assault and injury, Reg “doesn’t want your pity, he wants you anger” (213). That is, she recognizes that pity is a passive emotion while anger can actually motivate the action required to change things for the better. Although Moss is still consumed by his anger at times, he ultimately manages to channel it into something active and productive when he chains himself to the flagpole in protest at Javier’s murder.
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