AS A BLACK WOMAN born and raised in these United States, I have spent much of my life not just angry, but rageful. It’s the kind of rage that finds me gritting my teeth until my jaw aches even as everything around me seems perfectly safe and serene.
There’s a difference between anger and rage, says Ruth King, a beloved Insight Meditation teacher, the author of Healing Rage and Mindful of Race, and the founder of Mindful of Race Institute. “Anger is primarily associated with a current injustice, dislike, or disappointment”—a driver cutting you off in traffic, a disagreement at work, for example. It’s an emotion that arises for a set amount of time and is usually directed at a particular incident or person. Rage, on the other hand, is accumulated anger. It’s prolonged, extending beyond any one moment. It is, King says, “primarily physical and rooted to unresolved or unknown traumas that shamed us in childhood.”
How many of us, because of our gender and/or race, have been subjected to assaults on both the “micro” level and the macro level? How many of us have had our childhood innocence stolen by members of our families or strangers who could not face their own rage and sense of helplessness, or by people of other races who felt it necessary to vocalize what they thought of us and “our kind”? King’s work helps us understand that the aggressions leveled at us are symptomatic of what she calls “a disease of the heart.”
quite a bit about diseases of the heart. The fifth in a family of eight, her heartbreak began early. She and her siblings had four different fathers, and there was tension around that. In addition, her mother—a Civil Rights activist and choir director of their church—was physically abusive. As such, King grew up terrified of her mother. She
