“Well pastor,” Cortes says, “anger gives you energy.”

In my community organizing class, we read a book by Mary Beth Rogers titled Cold Anger. The book is about the Texas Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) organization, about Ernesto Cortes, and about public life.

And it is about anger. Cold, patient, relational, optimistic, calculated, hopeful anger.

Alinsky talks about anger a bit in Reveille for Radicals, but Mary Beth Rogers explains the concept very effectively.:

“…it is an anger that seethes at the injustices of life and transforms itself into a compassion for those hurt by life. It is an anger rooted in direct experience and held in collective memory. It is the kind of anger than can energize a democracy–because it can lead to the first step in changing politics.” (p. 10)

The hot anger that gives us energy comes from lived experiences of injustice. On Saturday at the Marion Thompson Wright lecture series, the amazing Alexis Pauline Gumbs urged us to listen to the Lorde; excellent guidance. Audre Lorde gave a powerful keynote address about anger in 1981 to the National Women’s Studies Association.

The speech, titled “The Uses of Anger”, was addressed to an organization in the midst of internal conflict over racism in the women’s movement and within the organization. Audre Lorde was calling on the membership, and especially on the white members, not to fear anger, nor to turn away from it, but to recognize the importance of anger in movements for social justice.

Lorde says: “My response to racism is anger.” And she is specific: she tells specific stories of the racism that she has experienced in academia, and in the world.

In community organizing stories are important to the work: it is one thing to say that the schools in Jersey City are currently underfunded by $100 million dollars per year, according to the state of New Jersey’s formula for a minimally adequate education. It is another thing to say that many of the schools do not have drinkable water, and that this has been true for decades. These schools have bottled water. And public officials at the state and local level have been turning away, refusing to be accountable for this situation, for decades. My response to this lack of accountability for our children’s health and well-being is anger.

What do stories do? They give you information, and they help to capture the essence of a public problem. And the under-funding of Jersey City’s public schools is a deeply public problem, and requires that we collectively step up and take responsibility.

Lorde says: “Anger expressed and translated into action…is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification.” Angers compels us to action. We should not be afraid of anger, Lorde says; we should not wallow in unproductive guilt. We should act.

Part of the action that Lorde was calling for was action within the organization, among the members, seemingly allies, but in the midst of a set of internal tensions that might build relationships and power, create greater understanding and greater ability to act, or might tear the organization apart. Lorde is clear that the process of “translat[ing]” anger “into action” is painful, filled with risk, but also with possibility. And also, that it is the only way forward.

Lorde reminded her audience that, whatever their conflicts, they were united by the larger social forces of oppression at work in creating those conflicts. And she noted that those who want no change to the status quo of oppression, inequality, racism, and misogyny would benefit from the refusal of the organization’s members to face anger, and tension, and to listen to each other, and to move forward toward action for change.

I have been angry about the situation with water in the Jersey City Public Schools ever since my son, now ten, was in pre-school, and I learned that there was no potable drinking water in his school, only bottled water. And that situation was already more than a decade old at the time.

There has been an astonishing lack of leadership on public education in Jersey City on the part of all elected officials. There are a lot of talented young people in this city, and lot of talented educators. Our kids deserve much better leadership from all of the adults in the city.

Jersey City Together needs to stand in the breach, and we need many more people of good conscience to join us. We have to lead. If that causes a little bit of tension, then so be it.

I will leave the last word to the Lorde:

The angers of women can transform difference through insight into power. For anger between peers births change, not destruction, and the discomfort and sense of loss it often causes is not fatal, but a sign of growth.