‘Don’t show them anger because then they think we are criminals’: unequal conditions of anger for minority ethnic young men

Anger has the potential to create change for whoever has access to its power. Based on interview data, this article analyses the unequal conditions for expressing anger among young men from minority ethnic backgrounds in Denmark. The results show that these young men, who also have brown skin, find it more difficult to make use of the potential of anger when they encounter injustices in their everyday lives. First, this is because these young men often lack access to a nuanced emotional vocabulary, which is partly attributable to the fact that some of them learn at home to hold back their anger in the majority Danish society to overcompensate for their background and appearance through tight emotional regulation. This results in the second point of the article, which, through empirical analysis, shows the ways in which these young men in many aspects of their everyday lives experience injustice that makes them angry, but which they choose not to react to because the consequences for doing so are too severe. The final point of the article is that when these young men do (finally) express their anger, they more often use less legitimate forms of expression in a Danish context. This links to the first finding of the analysis: that these young men have a more limited vocabulary for expressing anger; and the second point, which is that, as they do not react to the injustices that they encounter, they lack opportunities to ‘micro-ventilate’ their anger on an ongoing basis. Overall, this means that these racialised young men do not have the opportunity to make use of the potential of anger to respond to injustices and thus create change for the social inequality to which they are subject. This results in either silenced anger or the reproduction of their weak position through illegitimate anger expressions.