Mark Oshiro: Anger Is a Gift

When you start reading a book, and the first three named characters are a young lesbian, and two young gay men, one black, one Latino, who have just met and are bonding over The Force Awakens, then you kind of know you’re reading something different and good. But I had no idea just how powerful the experience if reading this would be.

It starts out as a ‘meet cute’ scenario. Moss - Morris Jeffries Jr. - and his best friend Esperanza are stuck on a stalled BART train. When the train starts moving suddenly, the passengers are jostled a bit, and Moss connects, literally and figuratively, with Javier Perez. But the light opening gets dark almost immediately, as they arrive at the station to find police confronting a demonstration against yet another police shooting of an unarmed black man. And that sets the tone for what is to come. Short notes of sweetness amidst the bitterness of life as a person of colour in a racist world.

Mark Oshiro’s debut, the young adult novel Anger Is a Gift, is a portrait of growing up in America today, the kind of America that’s multi-racial, where immigrant families from Korean and Ethiopia mingle with black and Latinx families whose roots on the land go back further than most whites. Where your friends at school are Nigerian and Muslim and trans non-binary and one of them needs a mobility device to get around.

Where there’s an armed guard at the school door and random locker searches. Where there’s no money for school supplies and they sold all the books in the school library, so your English teacher reluctantly arranges for you to get pirated epubs of Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. And you have panic attacks every time you see the cops because you saw your father killed before your eyes just because he was black and in the wrong place at the wrong time - which translated means he was just doing the same things everyone does, stopping off at the local market to do some shopping, but he was black and some cop decided he was a criminal.

This is a book about what it’s like to be young and not white in America, to be the focus of unrelenting racial profiling at school, on public transit, in the streets, in any public place. About the school to prison pipeline. About the brutality of the state toward the young and marginalised. About trying to resist and find joy in the midst if it all.

The narrative follows Moss as he navigates both traditional young adult topics like dating and figuring out what to do when you grow up, and far more difficult issues, like trying to block your school from installing metal detectors and discovering that your best friend, despite her Puerto Rican heritage, doesn’t always see past her privilege as the adopted daughter of well-off white intellectuals who send her to private school where she doesn’t face the same things you do every day. And what to do when the cops strike and your fiends are hurt and dying.

The metal detectors are installed because of a “brawl” - students reacting when one of their own, Shawna, is brutally handled by the school’s ‘resource officer’ because he found her epilepsy medication in her locker and assumed it was illegal drugs. On the first day the metal detectors are in operation, Reg Phillips, a student recovering from major surgery after a car accident that left his legs badly damaged, refuses to go through the detector because he is concerned about its effects on the metal pins and other hardware in his legs. The police officers grab him and shove him through the machine, which malfunctions, tearing the metal in his legs out of position and sending him to the hospital, where surgeons determine that not only has the damage undone the progress he’s made, but it’s made his condition worse - he is now unlikely to ever walk again.

It’s the last straw for Moss and his friends. Drawing on the help of some adults, like Moss’ mother Wanda who was an activist and organiser before the murder of her husband, they call a community meeting and decide to demonstrate as a community against the use of the detectors at school. The students plan a mass walkout to co-incide.

One of the few narrative threads that isn’t overtly filed with tension over the coming confrontation with the authorities is Moss’ budding romance with Javier, who we learn is, along with his mother, an undocumented migrant from Guatemala. Their gentle courting, getting to know each other, all the sweet high notes of falling in love for the first time, is like an island of peace in the midst of the heightened anxiety of waiting for the day of the walkout. And yet.... the very presence of this oasis of comfort and hope is a site of tension because what should be unthinkable, that this innocent awakening of love can not survive the brutality of this place and time, is all too possible.

On the day of the walkout, the students arrive to a sea of police in riot gear. When the time comes for the protest, everything you would expect from a military operation primed to view young people of colour attempting a peaceful demonstration as a gang of violent criminals takes place. There are multiple horrors, and tragedies large and small. Armed cops against children. The essence of modern America.

There’s a lot here that hits hard. I’m a middle-aged white cis woman who has none of the lived experience that kids like Moss and Javier and Shawna and their friends know, but this helps me understand as much as I’m able too - that’s the gift of art. It lets you see from other perspectives, feel what it’s like, to a degree, to be someone other than yourself, to live under other conditions. But this book does something else, too, something that white readers need to see and understand. There are white characters in this book. The cops, obviously. But there are white teachers, some white folks who live in Moss’ neighbourhood, Esperanza’s adoptive parents. Some of them even think of themselves as allies, as people trying to help. But the thing for white people reading this book to understand is that allyship is hard. Because we don’t understand. We don’t get it. And the book demonstrates that. There are no examples of good white allies here. Only white people who don’t try, or try and fail, some of them with disastrous results. And that’s the essence of modern America, too.

But one of the most important messages here is right in the title. Because what moves the story past the tragedy and horror is Moss’ anger. Anger is a gift. These days, there’s a lot of what we call tone policing going on. Marginalised people are angry, and yet when they speak up, act on their anger at the years of injustice they’ve faced, the white liberal response is far too often about being patient, engaging in dialog, being persuasive, using the ‘right’ tactics. Waiting your turn. Not antagonising people who maybe could help your case if you’re properly calm and respectful. Anger hurts the movement, they say.

I call bullshit on that. If being polite and waiting your turn could have made this world more just, we’d all be living in a social justice paradise. And as for not antagonising potential allies - if your commitment to doing the right thing is dependent on people being nice to you, your commitment isn’t worth shit and won’t last past the first rough patch anyway.

Anger is fire. It lights the way, it gives us the energy, the determination, the will, to survive and to keep fighting. It blazes against the darkness of injustice, cruelty, hatred. It burns out evil, and makes a space where we can rebuild something better, if we have the will and desire. Anger is a gift.