S5E7: Layers of Radical Rage

Leen: Oh, no, I clicked on the worst possible button I could have clicked on. I have to what to my computer? Oh, I thought you said change my computer. I was like, "All right, hold up." I'm slowly waking up. My brain is coming online.

Harjit: Sounds bueno. Chloe, can I just start? Okay. Hello, everybody. Blah, blah, blah. Hi, everybody. This is Harjit. Welcome to "Bundle of Hers."

Leen: Hi, Harjit.

Harjit: Hi, Leen. Today in the virtual studio, we have Lina, Ha, and Leen.

Lina: Hi.

Hạ: Hey.

Harjit: You all seem so tired. Did you just come from work?

Lina: Is it not obvious?

Harjit: I'm really excited about today's topic. We're going to talk about radical rage. If everyone's been following us from last season, many of our episodes were tied to radicalism in healthcare, and I just want to redefine what I mean by the word radical.

So being radical is re-imagining worlds that don't exist. And what I mean by that is oftentimes the term radical is seen as negative, right? Because you see radicalism in religion, radicalism in thoughts, but the definition that I'm using for the word radical is about pushing our thinking to a world that is different, is one that's safe, is one that we can live in.

So along those lines, I think something that I wanted to talk about is what do we think rage is? Let's define rage.

Leen: Okay. So I think for me at least, we can take it at like a very base term and say it's more than anger, right? But I think from my background, especially as a Palestinian, we often have days of rage where it's like a national or collective day where we protest, or discuss, or try to get out to the world that some injustice has happened to us.

We can take it at a very blunt term in the sense, "Oh, it's just more than anger." But when you put the two words radical rage together, what I tend to think of is a type of rage that people oftentimes want to dismiss based off of background, culture, experiences, a group of people, outcasting, whatever it is.

And I think that's the type of rage that is oftentimes . . . it's the rage of the voiceless. It's the rage of the underdog that is being very dismissed by society, and it needs to have a place because obviously it's calling out some form of injustice that is going on.

Harjit: Yeah. Leen, I'm really appreciative that that's what you said because when I think of rage, I think of anger, and when I think of anger, I think of pain. And I think that's really the core of a lot of these emotions and these feelings, is that we have felt pain or I have felt pain that then comes out as anger, that then comes out as rage.

I think one thing that I really want to discuss in this episode is how some people's rage is more valued than other people's rage. And I think, Leen, you kind of touched up on why that exists and why that's a thing.

Lina: When I think of the word rage and kind of put it into not an anger level, but more in the term rage, I think of more injustices that have happened or more inequality or something that put the person in a position that they can't just be angry anymore. They can't just settle with anger, or that won't fix their solutions or that won't help them, but they have to feel rage. And with rage comes strong feeling of what is happening to them or what they're trying to get out of.

But then again, you bring up how some people's rage is valued more than others', and I feel like it depends on the person who is feeling that emotion. It can be classified, "Oh, this person is angry, so that's okay," versus, "This person has a lot of rage or this person is irradical," and suddenly it becomes not acceptable.

Harjit: Yeah. I totally understand that.

Hạ: I think you all bring up a very, very true point, and I 100% agree with it. When I think about rage, it's very hard for me to classify it due to the fact that a lot of society tells us that some people can be angry and other people can't.

I grew up feeling a lot of shame for having rage and for having anger. And part of it, as I've mentioned before, is that as a Buddhist, a lot of times we see those negative emotion as being impairing to our development and as being very detrimental to us finding peace.

But what I've been really thinking about a lot deeply is how a lot of our world, we really like to just spoil something that is so complex, as all of you have expressed, with so many layers as rage into just anger and not really going deep dive into it.

I've been trying to have a bit more transformative relationship with my religion and thinking about the ways that it approaches rage. And what I've discovered a lot of times actually is that rage is fine to have, but it's really how we take that rage and how we move forward with it. And I think a lot of people don't look into that and don't see that nuance. They just see an emotion and then they associate that emotion with stereotypes for certain people.

So if you are a person of color, particularly if you're indigenous, or black, or Muslim, or all of that, they'll immediately associate it as, "Oh, this is danger," versus if you're, for instance, someone who is white, it's something that's totally excusable and something to justify and explain.

Harjit: Yeah. So in college I had started learning about systems of oppression. Although I grew up as a brown woman in a pretty brown community, I never knew words or I really never had words for feelings that I felt. But in college, I took this ethnic studies class, which I've mentioned on this podcast before, that really helped me see the world in a different way.

As I was learning more and more and more, I realized there was a point even coming into medical school where I had a lot of rage. And what that rage did initial to me is it brought up a lot of feelings of pain, and that made me distance myself from a lot of people and a lot of communities that I feel like now I'm connected to and I learn a lot from.

But that rage, like you said, it's how you utilize it. I still feel that rage now, but my rage now is different in the sense that I use it to give me power to fight for things that I care about.

And I think I didn't have that understanding before medical school. I think it was a process of growing and also centering love in my social justice work that really allowed me to utilize that rage in a much more healthy way. I'm using that rage to strengthen my power. And I think being a part of communities really is integral to that.

I also want to mention I remember when I was in first year of medical school, comments were often made . . . Not even first year of med school. Throughout med school. Comments were often made saying, "You should talk about that, but make sure you say it like blank, blank, blank," or, "Sometimes your passion comes off as you're angry." That's even more frustrating and in my head, I was like, "Why can't I be angry? A lot of stuff happened. I am angry. Why is my anger a bad thing? I'm just trying to tell people how I feel."

And then people would say, "Yeah, but if you want to explain something to someone, you can't sound angry." And it's like, "Then why are people not having that form of understanding?"

And that's where I really want to bring up this topic, is because I'm pretty sure we've all been told we're too angry and we have to talk a certain way.

Leen: What really makes me more mad, and I used to hear this a lot more in undergrad, especially when I would talk about things that I was very angry about in the sense of social injustices, especially towards Palestine and oppression, and I would try to explain to people who'd come up to me and say, "Teach me more about this." The one comment I got frequently and it made me so angry is, "Oh, but you have a lot of emotion invested in it."

All of a sudden, everything I say is now automatically invalid because I'm angry about it, right? It's like, "Oh, I'm sorry I'm not giving you exact statistics in a very monotone voice at a presentation and then leaving it at that."

You need passionate people to move the world. Humans are built as social beings. Humans are built with these emotions, right? And they're built with these emotions when we experience very negative issues in our life, and especially when it comes to oppression and injustice that is not being heard. That is where we end up having to use our radical rage.

And I think actually going back to medical school, thinking back to moments of where we collectively had "emotions of rage" secondary to some event that happened, and oftentimes it was due to some racial issue, some societal, anything of that sort that was a misunderstanding ended up labeling, I would say, minorities in that sense. And I'd think, "How did the school respond?" And to this day, they put us in a room where we can just rage it out together and then we leave.

To us, at first, we're like, "Wow, there's finally a space for us to be able to talk about this, to be able to bring people into the conversation." But in the long term, now that we're like five, almost six years out from all that, I think to this day, "They put us in a room just for us to be angry alone and then we walk out of that room and then we go back to their system, and we must agree with what they think outside of that system, outside of that room."

Harjit: Yeah, Leen. And I think, unfortunately, that happens in a lot of spaces. It's really kind of this policing of rage. Unfortunately, the policing of people's rage is used as a tool of oppression. It's like, "Oh, don't talk like that. People won't want to hear what you're saying. These aren't facts." And the thing is they are facts because they're our lived experiences. I don't need to write this on a paper to prove to you that I lived through this. And I think that is where issues kind of come up.

Leen: How ironic is that, right? Because the actual subsequent effect of suppressing and policing rage and telling you to discuss something you're passionate about or discuss your own injustices in a very "quiet manner" leads to that rage and it makes it worse.

Hạ: A lot of that made me think of a lot of quotes by Audre Lorde who I really love to refer back to whenever I think about rage and try to process it. And she had a speech in 1981 that was called "The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism." I was reading it again prior to coming onto this and there were so many good quotes for the readers listening. I highly recommend searching it up because I cannot distill her brilliance in just a few minutes to share.

But one of the really interesting things is . . . This is what she says. "To turn aside from the anger of black women with excuses of the pretext of intimidation is to award no one power. It is merely another way of preserving racial blindness, the power of unaddressed privilege, unbreeched, intact."

And she also really does note that when we express . . . as she says, "Anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification. Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals and its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers and its object is change."

And I felt that a lot of her quotes are very beautiful and gets across a lot of what we're expressing. What I loved about her is that, for me, I did used to see rage as anger destruction because, for me, that's how rage has always been told to me.

When, Harjit, you asked about my first instance of rage, it actually started when I was really little, as early as I could remember. I remember watching TV and seeing moments of injustices, sexual injustices, gender injustices, racial injustices, religious injustices, and I would get so angry. And to this day, my mom still brings it up and says, "It's so interesting how angry you would get, and it worried me." A lot of times, for us, the goal was to just not bring attention ourselves. And rage was a way that we brought a lot of attention. It put us into danger.

When I continued to express my rage a lot more, people would say, as you've all expressed, that I'm just being an angry Asian chick and I'm too sensitive and that my rage has no purpose. And instead, I have to go into my arguments being very academic and being very intelligent and citing data and being calm about it. And that was what I really fell back on.

Even to this day, when I get angry, I rarely show my emotion about it. It's kind of a sifting rage in the background. But as I keep reflecting on it, I really do think that it's so critical for us to pull on that rage and to really center it with community too.

First, I also think when we talk about transformative rage, we shouldn't say that there are certain rages that are better than others. For instance, if your rage is you just being angry and painful and it doesn't quite produce change, that is still very valid. But when you center that rage into community, I'm always very hopeful that there is something that is more healing and radical about it.

Lina: I mean, we've all seen how collective rage turns into these protests that create a huge amount of change and impact, or at least make our voices heard. I think my experiences with at least rage is very similar to Leen.

And talking about Palestine, there was always, "You're being too sensitive. You're putting too much emotion. You're being too angry. No one is going to listen to an angry Middle Eastern or no one is going to listen to an angry Palestinian." So it shut me down for a while because I felt I couldn't speak, or I at least felt like I shouldn't be able to speak because I can't control my feelings in a sense.

But this past year, and with every year how worse things were getting back home, I started speaking up a little bit more, and a lot of my passion with what I spoke about came from my rage and more people were listening. The right people were listening, the people who weren't trying to shut me down.

The things I wanted to be said were being heard, and that came from my rage, one, and then also our rage as a community together, creating a big event or a big thing that we need people to hear us, people to see what we're trying to say, and it definitely goes a lot more when it's done as a community.

Leen: Isn't it crazy how very single aspect of our life, including every single human emotion we have, must be quantified and must be presented in a very specific way to the majority group?

We always often talk about the way curriculum is presented, the way people test us on exams, everything. Everything we do has to be in a very certain specific way in order for it to be valid. And now I'm thinking, "Oh my gosh, I'm starting to get radical rage about this whole thing because even my rage has to be quantified in a very specific way." Isn't that insane? Isn't that absolutely mind blowing? Why do we do this to ourselves?

Lina: It is. It 100% is.

Leen: Rude.

Harjit: Rude.

Hạ: This whole conversation has been making me angry too, Leen. And what boggles my mind is I remember in my sophomore year of college, I took a film studies class called Furious Cinema. And the whole course was about these American movies in the 1970s that dealt with a time of furious announcements, furious experiments, furious rebellions, furious mistakes, and it was all made by mostly white male directors and the characters were mostly white men and this was considered art.

And sometimes I think about it and I'm like, "I don't know why I like movies from this era." Maybe it's just because I've never been allowed to be just angry and be considered, "Oh, that's artistic. That's great. That's something for us to celebrate," versus these people are able to do it. And it's so heartbreaking to think about.

Lina: Yeah, because it's not artistic when we do it.

Leen: I know. Minority rage is exotic. W-T-F.

Harjit: Yeah. And I think a lot of these conversations are actually something up that's very personal to me. I feel comfortable sharing this because I think I've discussed it with a lot of people. But I grew up in a pretty abusive home when I was younger, and I remember the individuals that usually inflicted that abuse would get this rage because of injustices and then come at home and process it in a way that wasn't very healthy.

I'm saying this to say that it's important that we feel our emotions, it's important that we feel our rage, and it's important that we talk about it. And no matter what your process is, like Ha said, it's necessary that we feel our rage.

It can be any process, right? It can be taking a walk. It can be talking to your communities. It can be becoming passionate about something and then utilizing that rage in a way. And that's what I think it means to be radical about that rage, is we should feel our rage. Otherwise, it can become unhealthy.

Leen: I think that really brings a good perspective into the fact that oftentimes even between our own communities, we're not good at expressing our own rage, and sometimes we're even demeaned for expressing our own rage because it goes against the way to be successful in a system.

So I think especially coming from an immigrant household, there's a hierarchy of who can be mad, first of all. Oftentimes I'm like, "Where did this even freaking come from?" If you think about it, cultural values without that aspect, as well as everything we're taught from a religion as well, doesn't really say that. It's very, "Talk about these emotions, process these emotions, and then act on these emotions in a positive way to bring change." But yet we have this hierarchy.

And I'm thinking, "Where the hell did this come from?" I think it comes from two things. One, political oppression of these people, like, "This is going to get you in trouble. You will disappear." This is exactly the dynamic that we get in oppressive systems.

And then two, colonialism is the same thing that aspects from that, right? The people in charge of colonialism, they can be mad. They can show the world they're mad. You be mad at them? That's it. You're gone. You're done. And I think that really microprojects into the way our family systems are as well.

Harjit: Thank you so much. I think you made my point much clearer. I think that's exactly what I was trying to say. Sometimes these larger factors due to oppression then seep into our families. And the worst thing is that a lot of times our rage gets stifled and we become invisible.

And when we talk about being authentic in our identities, this what I mean. There's power in our voice and there's power in speaking, and our rage should be heard and it should be processed. We don't need to stifle it so that it comes out in a negative form to other people or we become invisible.

That is why I do think rage can be radical, but we're taught that it's not. And that is kind of the biggest reason that I wanted to have this conversation, is that those emotions are important. They're telling us something. They're making us feel something. They're making us connect to our people in some way and we should listen to them.

We have a lot of power in our own knowledge that I think a lot of us don't . . . No one validated it to us that our knowledge is important, and our emotions have knowledge in them.

I'm very thankful, Leen. Thank you for saying that more concisely. Lina, you had a thought.

Lina: Yeah. I think just going off what you were saying, Harjit, I think the biggest thing that helped me do that for myself and for my community is having people like you, people who share my rage. And that's not just as a Palestinian, but as a woman, as a Muslim, as a minority.

People who share my rage and who are able to help me voice that rage and put it into action where I want it to be put, or also even just validating my rage and being like, "You know what? You are valid for everything that you're feeling and how to go from there," I think that provided me a lot of empowerment, a lot of belief in myself and having confidence into what I'm feeling, and that also helped me move forward with that rage.

Leen: It's protective for us. Growing up, that's the way our parents thought it was. It was protective.

Lina: Yes.

Leen: And I think at the end of the day, they want change. They also instilled the feelings of change within us, but they also want to protect us. If you're the mad one and you end up doing something passionate and changing things, you're automatically the target.

Hạ: Yeah. In in this process of learning and unlearning how I approach rage, it has definitely come from a lot, as you all have expressed, recognizing why my family dismissed my rage growing up a lot and still fears it to this day in many ways, but also receiving that validation that rage is okay.

And I am still constantly trying to think . . . even as we had this whole entire discussion, I was constantly thinking, "How can I make rage be anticapitalistic?" Sometimes when we do talk about rage as being healthy versus unhealthy, it is a bit capitalistic and it is a bit rooted like, "Oh, if rage is transformative and creates change, then that's when it's healthy."

But also I'm starting to recognize it's also very valid to just be in rage. And when that rage is rooted in collective power and collective support of rage and love for that rage, we can do so much more than where we're at right now.

Leen: And it gives meaning to our rage if we don't succeed. Oftentimes, the sad reality is a lot of times in these oppressed systems, we don't succeed. Our rage is out there and it's not heard and we end up dying for it.

But at the same time, when we know that there's a collective community around us and there's a collective love for ourselves as well as for each other, then I think when we don't succeed, that just empowers our memory for those who did not succeed in this rage, and thus it could actually fuel the next future generations of that rage.

Lina: Exactly.

Leen: And hopefully, hopefully, hopefully one day it does succeed.

Harjit: Well said. I also wanted to add that this conversation is nuanced and there are a lot of things to think about, a lot of layers. And this was just an initial conversation. I'm sure, as our listeners, you have thoughts. Please let us know your thoughts. You can find us at bundleofhers.com and also our Instagram @bundleofhers. Please send us a message so we can also grow and learn with you as well.

I just want to end this episode by saying next time you see somebody who is quiet or visibly angry in their behaviors, just think about it. Think about why those people are feeling that way. Just have that thought, if you're listening. I will continue to try to also be mindful of that as well.

Thank you for joining us and have a good day, night, or whatever time of the time it is.

Lina: Thank you all. Bye.

Harjit: Thank you.

Leen: Keep on raging.

Harjit: Keep on raging.