Black Rage

"The righteous is not innocent of the deeds of the wicked"?!?

Jul 27, 2023

Image from *Catch the Black Sunshine* at IMDB.

CONTENTS

Introduction
History
Black Rage in CRT
Lauryn Hill’s Black Rage
Black Lives Matter Exploiting Black Rage
Further Reading

Introduction

Black rage is defined in the glossary of Critical Race Theory - An Introduction by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic1 as the

legal defense notion, as yet unrecognized, holding that a criminal action that results from understandable racial anger or indignation should qualify for partial excuse.

As we’ll see the concept of black rage as a defense has existed since before CRT emerged as it’s own branch off of from critical legal studies which, in turn, came from critical theory.

History

Apparently,2

the first recorded black rage defense took place in 1846. The parties involved included the son of an ex-slave and the wealthiest family in Cayuga County, New York. The prosecutor was the son of a U.S. president, and the defense lawyer was a former governor of New York.

James Baldwin was quoted as stating,

To be a negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

This appeared in the August, 1965 issue of Time.3

There is a book from 1968 titled Black Rage: Two Black Psychiatrists Tell It As It Is-- in the first book to reveal the full dim. of the inner conflicts by William Grier and Price M. Cobbs.

Back Rage in Critical Race Theory

Critical legal sudies would come into its own in the 1970s, a branch off of critical theory (also see cultural Marxism). Some years later (some say it was in the late 1970s, others say it was in the 1980s) critical race theory branched off on it’s own.4

Black rage does not appear in Critical Race Theory - An Introduction, outside of the glossary (quoted above). Nor does Ibram X. Kendi’s book How to be an Antiracist mention it.5 Critical Race Theory - The Key Writings That Formed the Movement6 does not have have an essay dedicated to it nor do any of these formative essays discuss black rage. This would suggest that black rage is not among the most important tenets in CRT. It is, however, a concept employed by CRT.

Black rage is discussed in the 1997 book Black Rage Confronts the Law by Paul Harris. According to Charles Jones writing in 1999 for Critical Law Forum in The Defence of "Black Rage”7, Paul Harris

clearly identifies with critical legal and critical race scholars in purpose for writing.

Jones also writes,8

One of the tenets of critical race scholars, which Harris fully exploits, is that law is political

and writes about Harris’ Black Rage Confronts the Law,

It is a book written not just to inform the reader about how the “black rage defense” has been constructed, but to engage the reader to political activity, to show how lawyers and defendants may collaborate in the construction of a criminal defence that display’s society’s role as an agent of certain kinds of crime.

In Black Rage Confronts the Law, Harris wrote that9

many lawyers have argued that there is a causal relationship between suffering from racism and engaging in a criminal act. Some of those attempts, such as Clarence Darrow’s defense of Henry Sweet for shooting into a white mob and Charles Garry’s defense of Black Panther leader Huey Newton for shooting a policeman, have been preserved in our legal literature. But most of those attempts have been lost to history.

Later, Harris wrote,10

The black rage claim is a political defense because it confronts the myths of the law.

Harris discusses the legal activism angle later on, writing,11

In most legal cases the lawyer has only one concern: the interests of the client. Unfortunately, the legal community has defined the interests of the client in the narrowest terms possible—the client’s best interests equal winning the case. A broader view would include preserving the client’s dignity and empowering her. This broader view is essential in a black rage defense…

Also,12

It is difficult to survey black rage cases because most of them have not been reported in the news or in legal literature.

Harris wrote,13

One of the primary criticisms of the black rage defense is that it opens the door to a white rage defense. In his bookThe Abuse Excuse, Alan Dershowitz presents this critique: “If the black rage defense were to succeed, we would see white skinheads invoking ‘white rage’ in defense of white-against-black racist killings. Rage is simply not a valid excuse for violence against members of a different race.”

I would like to clarify that Harris made the common mistake of conflating racist skin heads with skinheads in general. In fact, he seems to be engaging in the stereotype that white skinhead = racist skinhead. This is not so.

Skinhead culture comes from a mixture of Jamaican and English musical and other cultural influences - rude boy culture, ska, punk and hardcore music.

They have also been called baldheads, shineheads and suedeheads.

Later, in the USA, some white supremacists invented racist skinhead culture. This remained an obscure subculture strongly rejected by other skinheads, punks and so on. Harris is very mistaken about skinheads.

Moving on, Harris mentions that14

there is another criticism that does have some validity. In law school it is called the “slippery slope.” This criticism speaks to the fear that once the legal system permits a black rage defense, we will slide headlong down a slippery slope and find ourselves allowing Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, and poor whites to use a comparable defense.

Chapter 14 of Harris’ book15 seeks to answer the question16

What is the future of the black rage defense in America’s courtrooms?

He states,17

To answer that question we must first look at the social construction of crime. Second, we need to look at how the cataclysmic economic changes taking place today will affect African Americans. We can then look at two areas where the black rage defense is expanding and suggest situations in which such a defense is most appropriate and useful.

Most telling is his conclusion wherein he openly acknowledges his motivation; to blame the innocent and to excuse the guilty. He writes18 that

the essence of the black rage defense may have been best stated by the Arabic philosopher, artist and poet, Kahlil Gibran more than seventy years ago:
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     The righteous is not innocent of the deeds
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          of the wicked, 
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     And the white-handed is not clean in the 
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          doings of the of the felon.
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     Yea, the guilty is often times the victim of the injured,
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     And still more often the condemned is the 
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          burden bearer for the guiltless and unblamed. 
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     You can not separate the just from the unjust 
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          and the good fromt he wicked;
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     For they stand together before the face of
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          the sun even as the black thread and the white are woven together.

Lauryn Hill’s Black Rage

In her song Black Rage, Lauryn Hill sings,19

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    Black rage is founded on blatant denial
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        Squeezed economics, subsistence survival
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    Deafening silence and social control
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        Black rage is founded on wounds in the soul

Black Lives Matter Exploiting Black Rage

In 2022, Too Black wrote in Laundering Black Rage,20

Black Lives Matter Global Foundation Network laundered and embezzled Black Rage to buy a mansion and enrich the family members of their top celebrity-activist leaders.[32] [33] Meanwhile, many local BLM chapters and Black families of slain police victims were initially left destitute despite it being the families and chapters who create the pressure for a donation to be sent to BLMGFN in the first place.[34] [35] As of this writing, the BLMGFN director is currently being sued by BLM Grassroots for stealing $10 million.[36] Whether the allegations prove true or false, these Spider-Man meme level conflicts obscure the fact that philanthropic foundations are repository fronts of “twice-stolen wealth”[37] for capital to avoid the taxation of their profits stolen from workers; what remains left is a struggle over crumbling bribes.
Quietly, Black legacy organizational fronts like the NAACP and the Urban League received more "racial equity"[38] bribes than BLMGF as they steered Black Rage towards enfeebled outlets already debunked by professor of communication studies, Dr. Jared Ball such as "buying Black "[39] and Black banking .[40] Prominent historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs ) also gobbled up bribes as some of their students slept in tents to avoid their molded dorms.[41] [42] [43]
Most of the funds pledged were about undirting the rage rather than scrubbing the problem. Of the $50 billion pledged by the top fifty corporations, only $70 million directly went to fight so-called criminal justice reform.[44] In comparison, $45 billion was "allocated as loans or investments they could stand to profit from." Much of this blood money intersected as the principal State fronts funneled their funds through their Black subsidiary fronts including the above-mentioned entities.
Often, the charge is made that said institutions are "profiting off Black death." This is only half true since Black people are killed daily with impunity yet not a single donation, grant, loan or thought is generated on most days. It is the threatening response to death—Black Rage—that activates the laundering. Black death is merely an ingredient.
At the core, Black Rage was the source indirectly financing the entire heist. The failure here is not in any one fronts inability to deliver but in the extractive structure that funnels the money in their direction at all. The general public may have believed a donation to these State carve-outs was a net positive for Black people, but white capital undoubtedly knew any serious resistance to their rule ceased with the first transaction.
Laundering Black Rage phases
As established prior, laundering is the maintenance and perpetuation of imperial conquests administered by the white capitalist State. Rage is an inescapable outcome of conquest. To enslave, steal, and kill is to become your own gravedigger. This is not lost on the conquering class of white capital. As Walter Rodney once said to a crowd of Guyanese comrades, "when you dedicate yourself to oppressing others, you cannot sleep."[45] This means long before police precincts scorch the stolen earth or the colony is amassed with revolution, mechanisms are developed to bring Black Rage to heel.
Therefore, what many call co-optation is the regularly scheduled laundering of the State developed over centuries of conquests. Materializing from this development are the three primary phases to laundering Black Rage: Incubation, Labor, and Commodification.
Incubation, via the State, places Black Rage in circulation by setting both the oppressive conditions for rage to be expressed and seeding the contradictions for it to be cleaned. Labor, sets mass uprisings in motion. Threatened by the Black masses, the State layers the narcissistic rage of the Black elite overtop the illegal militant rage of the masses to conceal class interests and collapse the labor of Black Rage into the grips of capital. Commodification, the now-laundered Black Rage— managed by the Black elite—is integrated within the State, ready to be withdrawn as a labor-crushed commodity to be bought, sold, or repressed by white capital for the next cycle.

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