In April 2016, Beyoncé released her sixth solo album and I was forever changed. The album was Lemonade, and while its true purpose was to showcase the Black woman’s experience (and to call out her unfaithful husband and his lover, who will forever be known as “Becky with the good hair”), it also served another purpose: it allowed Black women to stand up and state that they were angry. It allowed Black women to claim a feeling that they may have been afraid to claim for years because they didn’t want to seem unbearable or threatening. Watching Beyoncé stroll down that street, smashing car windows at random, with a big smile on her face, was therapeutic. It was refreshing.  

For a race of women that have had our emotions stereotyped and thrown back in our faces for centuries, it was necessary. I feel as though an apology is needed. Why, you ask? Because for every offhanded comment calling a frustrated Black woman “an Angry Black Woman,” there are white women dancing in cowboy boots, singing along to Carrie Underwood as she depicts keying “the side/Of his pretty little souped-up four-wheel drive.” If we compare the two videos, both Beyoncé and Carrie Underwood are livid that their respective partners are cheating on them. Both resort to violence, although Carrie’s character’s violence is a lot more personal. She’s destroying the actual car of her boyfriend, as opposed to Beyoncé’s character. I use the term “character” here because that’s also important. While we may not know any of these women personally, nothing in the tabloids have shown us that either one of these women would willingly destroy your items. In fact, Beyoncé might prefer you to place “everything you own in a box to the left.”

While Beyoncé and Carrie are feeling the same emotion, and demonstrating their anger in the same unhealthy manner, only Beyoncé receives the label of “Angry Black Woman.” Only her anger will be addressed. I would ask why that is, but a smart aleck would reply that it’s all in the name: Beyoncé is Black, and Carrie Underwood is…well, not, and “Angry White Woman” isn’t a universal trope. The idea that a Black woman sharing her frustrations deserves a term, but not a white woman doing the same thing, is racist.

Think about how Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) is treated when she expresses her disgust with Trump, and other members of the Republican party. Her name is dragged through the mud. Trump famously called Waters “an extraordinarily low IQ person” after she publicly called for people to confront White House officials on their immigration policies whenever possible. However, Bill O’Reilly said it best, reducing his feelings towards Waters’ comments about our president back to her appearance: “I didn’t hear a word she said. I was looking at the James Brown wig.” I would like to apologize to Rep. Waters and to every single Black woman who has had their arguments reduced to a punchline about their appearance. It’s a cop out. It’s something that we have all faced. Whenever a man attempts to call me out of my name, I remind him that I was “a fat bitch” before he showed his ass. He’ll continue being an ass and I’ll continue being right.

The idea that a Black woman sharing her frustrations deserves a term, but not a white woman doing the same thing, is racist.
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Growing up, whenever I expressed my unhappiness with an issue, I would get called an “Angry Black Woman,” even if angry wasn’t the word that I would use to describe my emotions at that time. I tend to be vocal about my feelings, and sometimes, people—usually White people, but not always—believe that I’m acting aggressive towards them, even if my anger isn’t geared towards them.

When Serena Williams was accused of coaching at the U.S. Open, she argued back, calling the umpire, Carlos Ramos, a “thief” and a “liar.” She was tired. She worked hard, and to accuse her of cheating was too much for her. She has kept her mouth closed for years, but no longer. She was ready to speak, and she was angry. But Williams lost, and commenters attacked. A cartoon by Mark Knight that depicted Williams stomping on her racket was called racist, because it depicted Williams as a brute; her opponent, Naomi Osaka, a Haitian-Japanese woman, was depicted as blonde and white. The whole story was a mess, but Williams has been targeted by the media for years. Everything from the fact that she married a white man to her strong, built body have been insulted all over the Internet.  

A Black woman is never supposed to show her anger. In fact, showing her anger outright can lead to her being “objectified and dehumanized” in comparison with her white female counterparts. A Black woman needs to make sure she isn’t seen as a threat. She needs to be “strong” and “independent” but never angry unless it suits a narrative that is being used against her. I’ve had men tell me that they love it when I’m angry, because it makes me seem so sexy. They view my anger as passion because it excites them in ways that they haven’t been excited before. However, that narrative quickly changes when I’m angry at them or angry about something that has affected me in a negative way. Then their tones change, and suddenly I’m acting defensive or I’m being too aggressive. I have been called threatening by a partner before, all because he didn’t like my tone of voice. He had dated Black women before, but he hadn’t dated a Black woman that was so quick to call him out on his shit. Men view my anger as sexy until it doesn’t benefit them in the bedroom.

I’ve had men tell me that they love it when I’m angry, because it makes me seem so sexy.
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I truly believe that if you ever used the term “Angry Black Woman” to describe a Black woman who wasn’t looking to take your shit anymore, you need to sit back and apologize. Maybe you don’t know how to. It’s not the easiest thing to do because it requires you to eliminate racist and sexist bias, but it can be done. I want you to go back and think about how much garbage this woman has had to put up with before she decided that this was enough. Black women must calculate the risk that will surely present itself when she decides that she is ready to call someone out. In an opinion piece for the Guardian, Ruby Hamad discusses the “strategic tears” that white women use against women of color to make themselves play the part of the damsel in distress. It is seen as a power move, and coupled with men dismissing Black women’s feelings due to their skin color and the issue of likability, it doesn’t make Black women eager to raise their hands and voice their discomfort with an issue. It isn’t as easy as one would think.

Give this woman the chance to express herself and listen to her. If you listen closely, most of the time, she isn’t attacking you personally; she’s most likely asking you to treat her with empathy. Stop touching her hair. She is not a Chia Pet. If she isn’t being physically or emotionally abusive, let her be angry. Let her scream from the mountain tops if that’s what she needs to do. Let her take a walk around the block or take a long car ride if that’s what she needs. Confront your own issues with her before you attempt to confront her personality. Now, take a deep breath and let the fear wash over you. You owe her an apology. She deserves it.

In a culture steeped in male violence against women, whether it’s physical assault or online harassment,  the concept of violent female revenge can sound exhilarating. Given the high rates of women murdered by male partners, and the simultaneously low rates of male rapists given jail time, it’s hard to not fantasize about a vigilante giving these men their comeuppance, or at least, a female figure that invokes the same fear in cis men that women face daily.

Feminists have been grappling with the complexities of these fantasies for decades. On one hand, it’s clear that more real-world violence is not the answer to a culture already poisoned by it, regardless of justification. But also, can we at least imagine unbridled revenge?!

The existence of, and potential for radical female violence is one of the many difficult subjects psychotherapist, author, and longtime feminist Phyllis Chesler tackles in her latest book, A Politically Incorrect Feminist: Creating a Movement with Bitches, Lunatics, Dykes, Prodigies, Warriors, and Wonder Women, The book itself traces Chesler’s journey from her Orthodox Jewish childhood in Brooklyn up until the present day, primarily focusing on her experiences during the heyday of the second-wave feminist movement. While it’s clear her writings come from a place of passion and respect, Chesler doesn’t shy away from giving a realistic picture of the movement’s in-fighting and the topics that caused derision between women vying for justice.

One of the most fascinating subjects in Chesler’s book is the movement’s division over the overtly violent rhetoric of Valerie Solanas, the woman who penned the infamous SCUM Manifesto and later attempted to murder Andy Warhol. In later years, a similar division would spring up surrounding the trial of serial killer Aileen Wuornos, a woman plunged into sex work as a teen, who later murdered seven men. Her first victim, Richard Mallory, was a convicted rapist Wuornos claimed she murdered in self-defense. Her narrative around the other victims shifted throughout the trial, regardless, the story of a serially abused sex worker reaping revenge on a violent man both enlivened and divided the feminist community.

Given the cartoonish conflations often made between feminism and man-hating, some feminist leaders, Betty Friedan in particular, did not support the notion of aligning with either Solanas or Wuornos, particularly because neither IDed as feminist themselves. Their anger was, let’s say, bad for the brand. However, Chesler and many others, felt empathy towards both women, kept an open dialogue with Solanas and later wrote the forward to a collection of Wuornos’ letters.

In conjunction with the release of her new book, I was lucky enough to interview her about how the feminist movement has evolved, why arguing is crucial to a movement, and the allure of violent female vigilantes.

Isaac: Do you think the internet has created greater understanding between feminists with different ideologies and priorities?

Chesler: I think if feminists of my generation had understood that people with ideas are always fighting with each other, and taking ideas very seriously, it would’ve helped. If you look at military history, you’ll quickly see that in every movement there was a falling out of line. What I never liked was incivility, or never speaking to someone again because you disagree on one issue. The ideological demand for saluting to one flag fully with your whole heart is somewhat totalitarian. We’re all going to have different priorities. Intersectionality is not new. We didn’t have a word for it at that point, we just understood that everything was related and that each woman chose her priorities.

I was thinking about how people talk about intersectionality like it’s a new issue. Looking at the history of feminism, the issue of intersectionality was always there.

Totally, but Kimberle Crenshaw had to coin the phrase for it to really enter the conversation on a mainstream level. Sometimes I’ll hear people condemn feminists for openly disagreeing, but I think disagreeing is fine, if only the women of my generation understood that. Sexism is like racism and homophobia, you have to actively try to unlearn it. Even if you’re a woman, you have to unlearn your own bias against women. We didn’t want to understand the “Mean Girl” stuff when I was younger, which is why I wrote about it in Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman.

There were many feminists at the beginning, I was one of them, who said “we have to praise and uplift women because we’ve been kept down for so long.” But since there are so many differences between individual women, there will always be fighting. I think your generation is much more accepting of that truth. But my generation felt like our hearts would break if other women betrayed us right after we found the language for sexism.

Since there are so many differences between individual women, there will always be fighting.
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I was really fascinated with Betty Friedan’s desire to keep Valerie Solanas out of the movement because of her violent radical rhetoric. Would you consider Friedan’s concern an issue of respectability politics?

Betty wanted the feminist movement to stay above reproach, to have an impeccable image. Valerie was a legitimate lunatic. She was brilliant, the SCUM Manifesto is brilliant, but she was serious—she wasn’t kidding. So, Betty was horrified by it, she was afraid people would start believing the feminist movement was full of lesbians who wanted to kill men. But Valerie stirred our imagination because she was so out there, she was our outlaw. She wasn’t actually a feminist herself, she thought that NOW was a lady’s luncheon. In a sense she was right, because we weren’t breaking up buildings or rioting at NOW, but we also passed some important legislation.

I was also fascinated to read that a similar dynamic played out later with Aileen Wuornos, that feminists were divided about whether to support her trial.

Wuornos had a worse childhood, she had one of the worst childhoods I’ve heard about. Valerie, like Wuornos later, thought feminist interests were a form of social climbing, that feminists wanted to get famous off of her. I got involved in Wuornos’ case because I wanted to expand the Battered Woman Syndrome defense to apply to sex workers. I believed that she killed the first man out of self-defense. She inspired an opera, two plays, books, a movie. I wrote an op-ed about her because while she wasn’t the first serial killer, she felt different, women tend to kill husbands or children and we don’t hear about it as often. This was about killing a series of strange men, white men, adult men, that was never heard of. I wanted to check her out, I had to move a lot of pieces to get her to call me from jail. I called her and I said “Lee I’m from a feminist government from the future and we need you” and she was on board.

Lee wanted to sell her story and make money, she was a capitalist, and I was an abolitionist. I had nothing but compassion for her. It’s interesting that women, feminists, lesbians, were thrilled by this notion of an action hero. There was this sense that she died for our sins, that we secretly wanted to reap the same violent revenge on men but never would.

Totally. I think there’s a natural fascination with the idea of female vengeance. I’m curious, with your experience writing about mental health and violence, do you have any theories on why there aren’t more female serial killers of Lee’s caliber?

When women kill in self-defense in a marriage or partnership, they go to jail. No one is visiting them, no one is marrying them like male serial killers. This is a very powerful punishment. Oftentimes women who are traumatized and abused as children who may be violent take it out on other women or children. But they’re statistically less likely to go up against men violently, and if they do it’s just one, usually a partner.

Women often turn violence against ourselves, women who have been incest victims are often angrier at the mothers who couldn’t save them than they are at the father who raped them. They feel the mother who looked the other way, because she needed the support of the father. Women are very tightly controlled, we get treated as lesser early in life, and then we become surveilled and manipulated by the sexual harassment that is completely normalized everywhere.

When women kill in self-defense in a marriage or partnership, they go to jail. No one is visiting them, no one is marrying them like male serial killers.
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We’re still fighting for a lot of rights that you were fighting for in the 1970s. What is one thing you’re surprised we’re still fighting for?

One is obliged to undertake the struggle, but not to complete it. You do it for your lifetime, and then the other generations come and pick it up. That is, if feminist knowledge hasn’t been systematically disappeared—which it has. Sadly, I think that our inability to stop pornography, torture pornography, has increased the normalization of it. That may make me a feminist of the unfun kind, I like fun, and I have fun. But I think not pushing for greater regulation of the content of porn was a loss and it was a very divided issue because feminists feared censorship and feared an alliance with right-wing forces that were also against pornography. But in my opinion, that was a loss on my watch. I wish we could have stopped the sex slavery of children and women featured in certain venues of porn, on our watch that traffic has proliferated and been normalized.

What is one thing you’ve seen progress the most?

I think progress has been made with LGBTQ rights. I always thought being gay was like being an artist, very bohemian. There’s a huge improvement in lesbian custody battles and gay male custody battles.

I would love to be able to say there’s been a proliferation of women’s thinking and artistry, quantum leaps. And yet it’s also been disappeared in my own life time, some of the most radical voices from the late 60s and early 1970s stopped being taught by the 1980s. When I ask younger women about Mary Wollstonecraft, Joan Stewart Mill, Matilda Gage, if you don’t start with that you’ve got nothing. There’s a couple of major historians of women’s—Mary Beard, Eleanor Flexner, when I discovered them I was so excited. We didn’t read Sojourner Truth, we read African-American men, we read maybe Virginia Woolf and George Elliott.

Not all changes are made by going on the street, that’s an important expression, it’s theater. Real change can be made that way, a lot of change is made in boring meetings and courthouses.

Looping back to the gendered culture of violence, and its effects on mental health, do you think the conversation about mental health has evolved and moved in the direction you were hoping?

We’ve moved away from institutionalizing people, but now we leaving them on the streets homeless. So, two extremes, both bad. I don’t know if my pioneering work that made a difference in the beginning is still being taught in medical school. Do battered women now understand that they’re battered? Yes. Is it understood that abuse causes PTSD symptoms? Yes. Do we have good services for rape victims and battered women? No. We pioneered the conversation about rape, there are rape kits now. The conversation about rape is more understanding and pro-woman, but rape victims are still seen as a drag. There’s this attitude of: “other people have dealt with this, why don’t you be quiet.”

We now understand a lot more about Trauma and Recovery—coincidentally the title of an excellent book I reviewed in The New York Times. The author, Judith Lewis Herman, dignified women’s mental illness by beginning the book with the combat veterans who were WWI shell shocked, and linking their manifestations of PTSD to incest and rape victims. Our work collectively began to give more dignity to women who have anxiety, insomnia, flashbacks, who are self-destructive. The same destroy their own cases in court because they can’t trust themselves. Is there more sympathy and understanding? Yes. Is there enough? No. I think one important progress is there are more memoirs by young women writing about their mental health experiences and their eating disorders, which are often intimately connected to sexual abuse. There are now feminist therapists, there are lesbian feminist therapists, there are lesbian therapists of color. It’s a good thing, but it’s still not enough.

For centuries, women have been encouraged to turn on each other, rather than the men who wronged them.

flickr/Sergio y Adeline

I n northwest England in 1292, Alexander le Wood cheated on his wife, Almaria, with another woman named Almaria (apparently he had a type). His wife discovered this and, according to legal records, “was enraged.” But instead of lashing out at her husband, she hired two women and a man to kill Almaria #2 in exchange for a gift. The team of killers — colorfully named Ellis of Skelton, Lettice Greathand, and Goda Hurlepot — carried out Almaria #1’s wishes and killed Almaria #2. They put her body in a sack and took her on horseback to a moor, where they buried her. Almaria #1 was arrested, paid a fine, and went free on bail. The legal record does not say what happens to her.

What strikes me about this case — in addition to the love triangle, the fact that both women involved with the same man have identical names, and one woman’s hiring of two female killers to kill another woman — is its emphasis on female jealousy and women’s rage. Almaria #1’s actions are clearly named in the legal record as motivated by fury — “commota” in Latin, related to the English word “commotion” — against Almaria #2.

The case illustrates women’s anger expressed as violence against another woman, showing how women have long directed their fury at one another instead of the men who have wronged them.

I was reminded of the two Almarias when I served as an alternate juror in a criminal trial in Philadelphia. Two defendants, a man and a woman in their twenties whom I’ll call Ellis and Almaria, were on trial for allegedly attacking the woman’s ex-boyfriend Alexander — the father of her two young children — and his new girlfriend, Alice.

On the first day of the trial, the District Attorney for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania drew a diagram of the complicated relationships among everyone involved. He was tanned and handsome and douchey in his well-tailored suit, wearing a Fitbit on one wrist and an expensive watch on the other, a gleaming tie clip holding his pink silk tie in place. He told us that Almaria had two children with Alexander. After they split, he started dating Alice, although he continued to hook up periodically with Almaria. She became pregnant with a third child and told Alexander that he was the father, only to confess that it was actually her co-defendant Ellis’s when the baby was two months old, invoking the stereotype of the sexually transgressive woman who deceives men about her baby’s paternity. In addition to having similar first names that start with the same letter, the two women shared the same last name, although they were not kin. The lawyers mixed up their names repeatedly throughout the trial, reinforcing the connections between them.

The trial centered on a violent incident involving both couples. As Alexander and Alice stood outside one summer evening, a white van with its headlights off circled the block twice. The third time, it stopped, and Almaria and Ellis emerged. Another car pulled up, carrying Almaria’s sister and her two best friends. A group of men also appeared. The four women began to beat Alice, while the men attacked Alexander. Someone allegedly said, “Fuck it, get the gat,” and bullets began to fly. A parked car was shot full of holes. Almaria, Ellis, and their friends fled the scene.

A police officer testified that he stopped them shortly thereafter, Ellis sweating and shirtless, Almaria’s three small children in the backseat. We were shown photos of Alice’s scratched and swollen face, mascara dripping beneath her eyes, a large bruise darkening on her temple. I thought back to the medieval Almarias — women with similar names fighting over the same man, sexual jealousy and infidelity, and an angry woman marshaling other women to attack her sexual rival with violence.

Throughout the trial, both sets of lawyers drew repeatedly upon the trope of the angry, competitive woman whose jealous fury against her sexual rival incites her to violence. This narrative goes back to Medea in Greek mythology, sending a deadly poisoned robe to her husband Jason’s new wife after he abandons her. Each side invoked it for their own purposes: The D.A. wanted us to believe that Almaria’s anger at Alice was so great that she attacked her with brass knuckles and was willing to kill her, while the defense lawyers sought to convince us that Alice’s anger at Almaria prompted her to file false charges after a mutual fight. They repeatedly emphasized the fact that Almaria had two children with Alexander, while Alice had none.

Millennials Are Embracing Anger – And That’s A Good Thing

“Do you have any children with Alexander?” asked Ellis’s lawyer when Alice took the stand.

“I lost two babies,” she said.

“I’m very sorry to hear that,” he said, although he did not sound sorry at all.

“And were you angry when Alexander told you he was having another baby with Almaria while you were with him?” he asked.

“I was angry with Almaria for messing with him,” Alice replied, as though Alexander had no role whatsoever in impregnating his ex girlfriend, as though he was utterly helpless when faced by a calculating woman who wanted to sleep with him. The two women glared at each other across the courtroom.

This toxic narrative is pervasive in our language — for example, there is no male equivalent term for “homewrecker” — and in popular culture: After Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck, as well as Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale, announced their separations within several weeks of each other, both couples quickly became the focus of a flurry of tabloid stories about Affleck’s and Rossdale’s respective infidelity with their children’s nannies. But rather than focusing on the husbands’ transgressions, the coverage blamed the nannies and focused on the conflict between wife and nanny. Meanwhile, the philandering men were painted as hapless victims, even though data shows that nannies, who are often low-income women and women of color, are disproportionately vulnerable to sexual harassment and assault by their male employers.

Ask Ijeoma: Is The “Other Woman” Free To Do As She Pleases?

“Ben Affleck’s Nannygate Scandal — Is He a Villain or Victim?” asked one headline, accompanied by a photograph of an unshaven, anguished-looking Affleck tenderly cradling a golden retriever puppy in his arms. Similarly, coverage of the Stefani-Rossdale divorce blamed the nanny and created narratives of jealousy and competition between the two women: “Nanny Who Allegedly Broke Up Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale’s Marriage Gives Birth,” proclaimed one headline several months later; another asked, “Gwen Stefani Jealous? Hot Family Nanny Linked to Ex Gavin Rossdale Has Baby, Engagement Ring.”

The cases of the two Almarias, separated by over seven centuries, illustrate how easy it is for women to hate one another in a woman-hating society, where the misogyny is ancient and toxic and pervasive like lead covering our pipes, our walls, our windowsills. We ingest it day by day until it slowly poisons us, until we are so sick that we cannot even identify who or what is responsible for our harm. It coats the quotidian spaces we inhabit, affecting how we think, shaping our behavior, afflicting every system and organ in our bodies, storing itself in our bones.

These cultural fictions of masculine haplessness and feminine culpability, which we absorb like poisonous water and dust left behind by long-dead builders, have tangible results in cases featuring women’s real-life anger and violence directed against other women instead of the men responsible for their harm.

Alexander, the man involved with both women, finally testified, sauntering insolently to the front of the courtroom. The jurors craned our necks in anticipation, eager to see this prize of a man worth fighting over. He had wispy sideburns and a bright red lipstick kiss tattooed on the right side of his neck.

Several grim-faced women of various ages sat in the back row of the courtroom with their arms crossed throughout the trail. Many had tattoos on their chests, and one had very elaborate bangs. All of them swiveled their heads to glare as one, like a many-headed Fury, at Alexander as he took the stand. This group of women challenged the lawyers’ narrative about female antagonism, as they banded together to support Almaria and directed the full force of their wrath at Alexander.

“So were you seeing Alice at the same time you were seeing Almaria?” Almaria’s lawyer asked in a raspy voice.

“I wasn’t seeing anyone. I was talking to Almaria, and I was talking to Alice,” he said defensively. The grim-faced crowd of Furies looked as though they would rend him limb from limb.

After closing arguments ended, the judge dismissed the alternate jurors. We went to the Chili’s next door to drink margaritas from blue plastic tumblers and gossip about the case, our lips flecked with salt. A large group of the courtroom Furies, now smiling and jolly, entered the Chili’s and sat down together, but they did not see us.

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]]> https://theestablishment.co/i-do-not-need-to-be-surprised-by-bigotry-to-be-outraged-by-it-cc38e60b5d06/ Thu, 28 Apr 2016 15:31:57 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=8521 Read more]]> I’ve had it. I’m going to say this once very, very simply and then do a thorough explanation so we can do away with a common problematic conflation forever:

I do not need to be surprised by injustice or bigotry to be outraged.

Recently, there has been a spike in people explaining to me that a thing I am annoyed about or find infuriating is “unsurprising,” inevitably followed by a “because” clause. As the heat of real, white-hot rage boils up from my toes through my chest and out my ears, turning my head into a tea kettle, I scan back to see if I indicated any surprise in what I said. Inevitably — as I am rarely surprised or prone to unintentionally over-the-top language at this point in my life, therapy, and recovery from childhood — what I find is that I didn’t in any way express surprise.

Of course I didn’t. Injustice is enragingly common. So why dismiss and downplay my outrage with a “oh, that’s unsurprising” response?

To the apathetics who go into rhetorically shallow, verbally deep detail about why I shouldn’t be surprised at the thing they super-wish we’d all stop talking about because they find it so bothersome, I have this to say: Give it the fuck up. I see friends and writers and culture-change advocates who express opinions both in person and online go from zero to boiling over on a regular basis when this happens. Depending on our backgrounds and levels of privilege, we are growing increasingly intolerant of this bullshit — particularly when it comes from “our side,” which it usually does — for a variety of reasons. All of them have to do with where the “unsurprising” shrug-off stems from: We’re being told to calm down about something we see and/or experience regularly.

“I’m not surprised” as an online comment is a close cousin to “Who cares?” The Who Cares People stop by to let you know how much they think the thing they’re taking the time to comment on is a waste of everyone’s time. They don’t get the irony here, and it for some reason doesn’t occur to them to keep scrolling; They simply must let everyone know what is and isn’t valuable or interesting.

“I’m not surprised” as an in-person comment has long been used to announce the necessity of topic change. I’ve heard it in bars, at the Thanksgiving table, in conversations with friends’ obnoxious partners who think they know more than me about topics I cover for a living, and by onlookers in every imaginable public space who aren’t even part of the conversation they’re policing.

When you tell someone you aren’t surprised, it’s the same as telling them they shouldn’t be surprised and, frankly, something about them is lacking or deficient since they are reacting in this irrational and overly emotional manner. This is especially infuriating when the person being dismissed hasn’t expressed surprise or otherwise reacted in any emotional manner other than to say something is wrong, sad, unjust, frustrating, or any other number of pejorative, but hardly inflammatory descriptors.

Oh, and if you’re a man telling a woman “I’m not surprised,” you might as well be telling her to smile.

The “it’s not a surprise” rhetoric acts as if injustice can only register as such if it’s shocking. But in reality, those of us engaged in social justice are more righteously angry about the things that do not surprise us than we are about the rare instances of unexpected awful. This should make sense not just from an experience standpoint, but also from a common sense one. The everyday-ness of certain brands of injustice, from misogynistic advertisements, to the hatred spewed by those who twist religion to suit their bigotry, to the microaggressions where our country’s entrenched racism plays itself out in what should be innocuous interactions, ARE ALL THE MORE INFURIATING due to our lack of surprise. That we as a society have allowed such things to be shruggable, letting the privileged apathetics and the young view them as accepted norms, means that whatever rage we are expressing is more justified, not less, as you would like it to be.

Perhaps it is not we, the unsurprised and yet enraged, but you, the dismissive and actively ignorant, who should pause to consider your reaction to said event or statement. Your condescension and silencing are a bigger problem than the issues we’re raging about. Silence would make you complicit; purposely policing our anger and lived experiences is actively engaging in strengthening the oppressive systems that continue the cycles of injustice we’re upset about and make it unsafe for us to navigate this world.

Even if I were rhetorically off-base (and I’m not) about the justification of our collective and individual rage, you sidling up to say how unsurprised you are smacks of superiority. If you aren’t surprised, you could just listen to Elon James White, who is offering you an alternative:

If you’ve never done it before, today is a really, really great day to start following the 1st rule of #ElonsLAW???@elonjames

So, next time you feel the need to weigh in with how much a thing isn’t a thing, while people are sharing how they’re affected by said thing, pause to reframe your thought: Ask yourself not why we are overreacting, but why you are underreacting. And then reread our words to see if we actually overreacted or if you are projecting that onto us while hiding behind your unwillingness to hear people and participate in making shit better.