What Is It About My Anger That You Are Afraid Of?
My anger lives in my throat.
Not because I don’t have words — trust me, I do — but because I have learned what it costs to use them.
There are things I wanted to say, things I should have said, moments where my whole body burned to speak — but I swallowed them. I swallowed them to stay safe. To stay employed. To stay acceptable. To stay alive in rooms where my presence alone already felt like too much.
I have been taught — in Ghana and in Britain — that my anger is dangerous.
In Ghana, it was: You’re a woman. Don’t raise your voice. Don’t embarrass anyone. Don’t disrupt the peace.
In Britain, it became: You’re a Black woman. Your anger is threatening. Unreasonable. Aggressive. Be careful.
So I learned how to speak softly even when I was burning.
How to smile when I was being disrespected.
How to nod when someone crossed my boundaries.
How to stay calm when someone was talking down to me.
I learned how to hold my rage inside my body like a stone.
And the thing about swallowing your voice is that the body remembers.
Gabor Maté talks about that — how the refusal to express emotional truth turns inward and becomes illness. I live with Graves’ disease. I didn’t need a medical journal to make the connection. My body has been telling the story for years.
Because it’s not just the anger.
It’s what happens to us when we express it.
Every time a colleague speaks to us in a condescending tone.
Every time we are expected to understand, to be patient, to be professional.
Every time we are told we’ve misread something racist.
Every time our pain is minimised.
Every time our boundaries are treated as inconveniences.
We are allowed to serve. To help. To support. To uplift.
But the moment we say No or Stop, or I don’t like the way you’re speaking to me — we become unreasonable.
And yet — here is the irony:
When society needs strength, resistance, truth-telling, and the courage to stand in the fire they turn to Black women.
Black women have been central to liberation movements for generations. We have built the frameworks that shaped modern feminist thought — only to watch them be repackaged and credited elsewhere.
A black woman created Me Too — Tarana Burke did — and when the world finally paid attention, the spotlight shifted to others.
We see the same story in workplaces where “women’s networks” are led by women who want proximity to power, not transformation.
And when Black women speak about what we face — the conversation goes quiet.
Everybody wants the strength of Black women when it’s time to fight for them. But not when we are fighting for ourselves.
They are not afraid of our anger.
They are afraid of what our anger reveals.
Because our anger is not violence.
It is clarity.
It is boundary.
It is the truth that says:
We are human. We are worthy. We are allowed to take up space.
So now, when someone implies I am angry, I ask:
What is it about my anger that scares you?
When someone suggests aggression, I ask:
What have you seen in me that suggests violence?
Or are you responding to a story you were taught about women who look like me?
I no longer absorb their discomfort. I return it to its source.
Our anger is not the problem. The conditions that demand we swallow it — are.
And so I ask you:
Where does your anger live in your body?
What stories taught you to silence it?
How have you learned to make yourself small to survive?
Because we deserve to tell the truth of what we’ve lived.
Together.
This is Change Through Shared Experiences — not to make ourselves smaller, but to stand in what we know and to stop swallowing ourselves quiet.
Your story belongs.
Your anger belongs.
You belong.
Koya Nkrumah 