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Analysis Of The Book ' Black Rage ' Essay

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This outburst is fueled by the kind of rage that bell hooks describes in Killing Rage. hooks asserts that for white people, black rage “must always remain repressed, contained, trapped in the realm of the unspeakable” (Killing Rage 12). She critiques black psychiatrists William Grier and Price Cobbs, who wrote the book Black Rage and described such as a sign of powerlessness. hooks argues: “they did not urge the larger culture to see black rage as something other than sickness, to see it as a potentially healthy, potentially healing response to oppression and exploitation” (Killing Rage 12). Because black rage was seen as something that could get black bodies murdered, it was supposed to be contained and hidden. hooks’ view of rage as something vital for the well-being of black individuals is important in the context of Assata’s autobiography. At one point, Assata states that white people could never understand someone becoming a Black revolutionary because “they had so little to revolt against” (119). Later on, in thinking back to having grown up in a segregated south, she remarks: “If i sit and add up all the ‘colored’ toilets and drinking fountains in my life and all of the back-of-the-buses or the Jim Crow railway cars or the places i couldn’t go, it adds up to a one great ball of anger” (138). Writing, then, serves as a form of exorcism, a way to cleanse out the anger from the spirit by channeling it into a creative outlet. The book itself encompasses black rage from

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