Rage, Contempt, and Justice: The Process of Concentration and Clarity

The target of continual and systematic oppression, victimization, or disenfranchisement typically feels inevitable rage. It has root in the anguish and pain of being put at the hands of wrongdoing.

Rage of the oppressed, by itself, can destroy and consume an individual (or a group), giving vicarious energy to the oppressor. It either gives way to acquiescence (when rage goes untapped properly, or at all, and wears down an individual over time) or to violence (which tends to bring only momentary results and does not win the understanding of an enemy, thriving on hatred rather than love for humanity).

Rage must be, in the words of James Baldwin, dissembled. During this process, two things happen, and they're done by controlling rage with ones intellect. The thing is that rage does not go away, it merely reorganizes in this process. But the process cannot go unfinished, and must be realized through two dualistic means.

First, the intellect eventually does away with the thoughtless in the core of rage. Ones rage is given a rhyme and reason, a relative order. Second, what is left gives way to an undeniable and unquestionable feeling of contempt, often deeply seated. This is the funneled and reorganized way that the target of injustice hones their efforts.

This contempt puts the individual at inevitable war or struggle with its context (this includes, to a degree, with the individual themselves). The struggle, now approached intellectually, has at its end one primary goal: to rob the aggressor of their naivete or make it cost them rather sufficiently. Either case is what tends to bring about what the victim really seeks immediately and fundamentally: an affirmation of ones own suffering, pain, and humanity.

This affirmation, if reached, is the integral step towards the achievement of justice.

Of course, there will be resistance. Oppressors do not typically like to have their often unadulterated power just taken away. There are few, if any, examples of simple and struggle-free emancipation and recognition in human history.

One of the goals of the oppressor is to put at a certain human remove the clear understanding of the oppressed individuals own pain and lack of justice (resulting in the lack of dissembling of rage) so as to reduce the effects or boundaries of the victims thought processes and reactions. This is done in myriad ways.

One way is to teach the oppressed persons history or understanding of themselves in a way that delegitimizes their own place in what seems to be a "natural order" of things. This diffuses any sense of self-worth, at both an individual and group level. By teaching history, I don't mean solely rote classroom memorization and academic dishonesty (though this is an unquestionably strong tool). I also mean the culturally conditioned practices in speech, narrative, and philosophical approaches to dealing with the oppressed. This, in effect, diffuses the clarity and realization of oneself and minimizes the retaliation one has of not only oneself critically, but more saliently, of the society/context at large.

There are of course, several other ways in which the oppressor seeks to downplay the effects of their actions. The point is that these tactics reduce the chances of the oppressed in gaining the self-concept (and social concept) needed to overcome the position they are in.

This quelling of the victims framework comes from a different manifestation of rage: the manifestation through the footsteps of the oppressor. This rage is rooted in fear - the fear of oneself and what one does or does not know to be true about oneself. This, if unchallenged and not faced, eventually tends to evolve into a type of arrogance. This arrogance is what drives the oppressor to misuse what power or control they find in their hands to rein in over the victims they target.

What the fight for eradicating injustice ultimately means is a struggle, one between the oppressed overcoming the systems through which dissembling of rage and channeling of clarity are quelled and getting others to do the same, and the resolve of the oppressor in evading their roots of their rage, and in doing so, denying the fundamental human aspects, reactions, and processes to the very victims they are targeting.