Growing Beyond Roots Of Anger
‘Roots” made me so angry.
It was 20 years ago this month, but I still remember the hush, the tiptoeing of white around black, the day after the first installment aired. People who had laughed and talked together easily the day before suddenly grappled in a vacuum of silence.
Dave, a white guy I worked with, came up to me that afternoon and said simply, “I never knew. I’m sorry.”
I don’t remember if I replied. But I do remember how I felt. Vindicated. Validated. Righteous in my anger.
In those years, I never questioned anger. I took it as my inalienable right, my personal responsibility.
Why was I angry? I had no words for it then. I just felt that crippling sense of nobodiness so familiar to black men and women and knew it was because of things “they” had done.
“They” meaning white people, of course. Mind you, in 1977, I had white co-workers, friends and teachers whom I adored unreservedly. But paradoxically, I also harbored a large, wholly impersonal anger toward “them.”
“Roots” was the first brick in a long road to a better place. It was the first thing I ever saw, that explained to me who I was and from whence I came. It was where I began to think about an anger I had always taken for granted before.
We black folks are funny about our anger. We hug it close like a security blanket, thrust it ahead of us like a shield, cling to it like a lifeline, treasure it like precious stones. But we don’t often pause to examine it. Instead, we feel it the way I once did: by habit and instinct.
It’s worth noting that the working title of the book “Roots” was, “Before This Anger.” I like to think Alex Haley understood what many of us don’t: that we must know what came before in order to get beyond. And that getting beyond is a worthy goal. That we must learn to envision ourselves as we have never been on the North American continent: Free. Body, mind and spirit, free.
It was only after “Roots” that I began to realize that anger in raw form is corrosive. You have to turn the thing, make it serve constructive ends, or it will trap you. It will make you hate. It may even make you die.
After “Roots,” I learned to be angry about instead of angry at - and to make that feeling an engine, not an anchor. “Roots” gave “nobody” a name.
All of which this generation needs more than mine ever did. Not simply because its anger is greater and its straits more dire, but also because its goals are less well defined. We children of the integration age knew what we wanted: to get in, to be accepted, to carve our place in the social, political, academic and economic mainstream of this nation.
But a young man or woman today has come of age at a time when integrating the mainstream is widely perceived as a foolhardy experiment that failed. Worse, no one seems to know what to do in its place. Shall we be Afrocentric? Gangsta-centric? Separatist?
Tellingly, the one thing those philosophies have in common is a rejection of the mainstream, an embrace of alienation. This should come as no surprise. As Washington Post columnist William Raspberry recently observed, “To keep hoping that America will rise above race is to keep being disappointed. Finally, you stop applying for admission to the club that keeps telling you no and make yourself believe that you never wanted to join those snobs in the first place.”
Black America has ample reason to be angry. And yet it also has a crying need to get beyond it, to turn it toward useful ends, and to realize that no matter how righteous the rage, anger is not its own reward, never an end unto itself.
Alex Haley’s story mattered then and matters still, because what is true of plants is true, also, of people trapped in circles of nobodiness and rage. We need roots to grow.
xxxx