[Image description: A raging fire in the background. In the foreground is the silhouette of a wooden chair and some branches. Image obtained from Pixabay.com]Hi everyone. If you have been reading the news this weekend about the white supremacists, hooded KKK members, and Nazis protesting in Charlottesville and the car the plowed into counter-protesters, killing several and injuring dozens of others, and our president’s cowardly response blaming “both sides,” you may be feeling a combination of weariness and hopelessness and anger. And fear for the people we love and for our country, the United States. This feeling has become familiar these past few months. I don’t really know what to say in this post. I know the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends…I don’t know. In recent months it seems that this arc is bending the opposite way, toward injustice, racism, misogyny, bigotry. “The heat here is nothing compared to what you’re going to get in the ovens,” says a white supremacist in the protest. It seems our side, the side that fights for inclusivity and justice and compassion, is losing.
A while ago, a colleague of mine, Nancy Long of 501 Commons, shared with me her philosophy of cultivating gratitude and impatience and how we must work toward a balance between the two, the balance of appreciating what we have, but to be impatient and to use that energy to push for change. This concept has stuck with me over the years; it is wise counsel on some of the darkest days.
Reflecting on Nancy’s words, I realize the horrible events and the state of generalized fear and anxiety of the past few months require us to balance something more difficult than Gratitude and Impatience, and that is Grace and Anger.
We must be angry, because the danger of not being angry is that we become complacent. We acquiesce to injustice instead of confronting it. We accept racism and xenophobia as normal, as part of the natural order or free speech or whatever, instead of seeing these things for the horrors that they are.
But we must also have grace, which is something I’ve been finding harder and harder to summon of late. Without grace, we turn on each other instead of on the wrongs we are committed to righting. Without grace, we see “the other side” not as humans, and we get confused about who is actually on the other side. Without it, we don’t forgive ourselves for our failings and we give in to despair and hopelessness.
It is this balance, this gracious anger, that we must work toward, and it is hard to achieve. If we are too gracious, we get walked all over. If we are too consumed by rage, we lose our humanity. But if we are to fight against this level of hatred, each of us must strive for this balance. We have to get angry and speak out and condemn the awful things we see, even if that means confronting our friends and families and colleagues as well as those in power. If there’s one thing I have learned as an immigrant in this country, it is that the angriest and loudest people often get what they want here—whether that’s at a local school board meeting or in national elections—and the quietest, most humble people often get screwed. And so it happens, those with the smallest megaphones are often Black, other people of color, immigrants and refugees, those with disabilities, LGBTQ individuals, and others from marginalized communities. In the face of injustice, we must be angry for one another, beside one another, all of us, all the time.
At the same time, we have to have grace. I’ve seen too many activists attacking one another, using social justice principles to shoot down colleagues on the same side of the struggle. I’ve seen the competition to see whose community has suffered the most or who is the “wokest.” Then there’s the one-strike-you’re-out thinking, where people are not allowed to make mistakes and grow, but are automatically labeled evil and ostracized. All of these things play into the hands of the racists, white supremacists, KKK members, Islamophobes, homophobes, transphobes, anti-Semites, xenophobes, and other peddlers of hate and violence. When we are divided, they win. We outnumber them by a wide margin, and yet they keep advancing.
Our sector, the nonprofit sector, as a whole, must also strive for this balance between Grace and Anger. But maybe the balance has been too tilted toward Grace, and we need to shift it back toward Anger. We are significant, making up 10% of the workforce. We do incredible work each day. But because we tend to attract nice, community-centered people, we often don’t get as angry as we should be. We put up with crap and work around it instead of confronting it.
I think in many ways we are afraid of anger. We see it being unleashed by the side that revels in hatred; we see the destruction is sows. But like Impatience, Anger can be a tool for good. As my colleague Rodney D. Foxworth Jr. wrote in his essay “The Need for Black Rage in Philanthropy”: “Black anger has often stoked the flames of progress in this country.” The flames that we are still warmed by, even as they are being threatened by the cold water of racism and bigotry.
Rodney calls for philanthropists to be angry. “It stands to reason that in our pursuit of justice and progress, philanthropy, however it manifests itself — a national institution, a small family foundation, or individual donors with or without significant wealth — would be well served to embrace [anger] as well.”
We should all be embracing our collective anger. We as a sector need to get angrier at the ridiculous expectations put on us that tie our hands while people suffer and die, like society’s destructive insistence on low “overhead” and on “sustainability.” We need to get angrier at funders’ risk-aversion and 5% minimum payout and lengthy processes and intellectualizing while people are getting deported and children are being torn from their parents. We need to be angrier at leaders who want to play it safe, who refuse to see race, while people are threatened with Nazi salutes and Confederate flags and references to ovens. We should be angrier at donors and fundraisers who insist on seeing the people most affected by systemic inequity as “others” and the object for pity and condescension, not justice. We must still be grounded by Grace as a sector, but we need to channel more Anger.
I’m tired. I’m thinking of the woman who was killed. Her name was Heather Heyer, and she was 32. I’m thinking of her family and friends. And the dozens of people still in recovery. I’ve been checking the news constantly, feeling hopeless. Seattle had our own march of white supremacists. It is sad and draining. If you feel this way, you’re not alone. I know it seems this week, just like the weeks after the Orlando shooting or after the murders of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, that the hatred is too strong for us to fight. It’s OK to feel this way. If you veer more toward anger than grace at this moment, like I am, you are not alone.
But, at every racist march and protest, we have counter-protesters fighting on the side of justice. Often the counter-protesters vastly outnumber the bigots and racists. For every hateful person trying to tear our community down, at least five good people are working to build it back up.
When I lose hope, I think of all of you out there every single day working to make the world better. You give me hope. We are part of the group that’s lifting up families and building communities. We are bigger and stronger than hatred and terrorism. Our work is critical, and it makes a difference. The arc of the moral universe bends towards justice, history has repeatedly seen, because WE bend it that way.