Sapphire as Praxis: Toward a Methodology of Anger

178 Feminist Studies 45, no. 1. © 2019 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Bettina Judd Sapphire as Praxis: Toward a Methodology of Anger I begin with her: she who meets me before I have had the chance to get properly riled up. Sapphire, the angry Black woman, explains me to myself through television, through everyday interactions; she renders my adult inner life a caricature animated by white supremacist fears and patriarchal mores. The mental image of her—hands on hips, rolling eyes, wagging finger—stops me from being heard, for she has already spoken as white noise. She is my shame before I am allowed anger or any feeling adjacent. My shame is shameful because I love her for her power. She is, for many Black women, “our heroine,” and yet her antics make her our adversary.1 With this figure and her baggage ahead of and within me, how can I be angry? What do I have to do with that feeling, with her, my unwanted avatar speaking over and within me, questioning whether I, truly, am feeling at all? Could I—should I—repress feeling in an effort to escape her projection? Eat anger’s bile two times over to escape my shame? All options seem to be in favor of my obliteration, so I return to her. This article is about angry Black women and Black women’s anger. It demonstrates how the angry Black woman trope is a distortion of Black women’s knowledge. This distortion makes apparent the immediate threat that Black women experience by speaking and being. I argue that tracing 1. Patricia Spears Jones, “Sapphire,” The Black Scholar 38, no. 2/3 (2008): 42. Bettina Judd 179 anger in Black women’s creative work and speech is a way of reading Black feminist thought that is otherwise disregarded, and I propose that creative production makes legible Black women’s articulations of being through anger. Broadly speaking, this article is about Black women’s emotional lives. By asking you to consider Black women’s anger, I have invited you into recognition of how Black women be human through emotional labors enacted for our own survival. It is a seemingly simple step—to acknowledge that Black women have rich inner lives, that we work for them, that they are ours. But when we come to the subject of anger and Black women, the stereotype of the angry Black woman signals that there must be something about the inner lives of women who are Black that is dangerous. Why else has such an emotion been so surveilled? Our utterances cut short at the root of experiencing this particular feeling. To be clear, I am not interested in negotiating whether or not Black women are human and how we can prove it to be so. I am interested in how Black women’s peculiar anger demonstrates that the idea of the human is troubled by Black women’s knowledge. I am interested in Black women’s anger in order to sharpen a lens on the experience of racism, sexism, and misogynoir and to examine how knowledge is produced through these experiences.2 I am interested in the constellation of these matters because it seems as though the very idea of angry Black women as a type of any kind suggests that Black women are inherently angrier than other groups, and are therefore less capable of reason since anger is understood to be an irrational emotion; consequently Black women are regarded as being further from human. By thinking seriously about Black women’s inner lives, we can shift the focus from the modes of knowledge by which the angry Black woman trope is meaningful to Black women’s selfhood and contribution to knowledge. I am dubious of any claim that Black women’s anger is a particular enhancement of our abilities to know. The prefixes of the human, whether super- or sub-, do us no service here. If we are gifted with a special power 2. The specificity of the term angry Black woman makes it a concept by which Black women are uniquely affected. I use the term misogynoir, coined by Moya Bailey, to highlight the specificity of the...