The moment that news of a verdict in Derek Chauvin’s trial for killing George Floyd broke will be seared in the memories of millions of people around the world. For just over an hour millions were joined in a combination of hope and dread of the outcome.

The experience of waiting for the verdict gives White people a glimpse into the experience of waiting for justice that People of Color in general and Black people in particular have done for centuries in the United States. It is that bated-breath feeling of anxiety and trepidation seasoned with a dash of hope against a systemic pattern not-guilty verdicts.

People of Color endure repeated blows to expectations of fairness, justice, and a balancing of power that are inherent in the collective psyche of the People of the United States. That collective ongoing experience of violence, and the perpetual experience of being wronged that accompanies it, inflicts chronic communal trauma that results in substantive and substantial damage to people marginalized according to race. It also makes brutes of those who benefit from it.

And yet there is one thing People of Color most certainly are not expected or allowed to be: Angry.

On April 14, 2021, Charles M. Blow, an opinion columnist for the New York Times, wrote in a piece titled “Rage Is the Only Language I Have Left”:

“A society that treats this much Black death at the hands of the state as collateral damage in a just war on crime has no decorum to project. That society is savage. . . . I’m sure that pain and trauma are present in me, but I’m choosing to subjugate their import. Rage has ascended to my position of primacy. America scoffed and was unmoved when, for years, we spoke out of our pain. So be it. Now, rage is the only language I have left.”

What are the long-term effects of having to suppress rage in the face of violence that cloaks itself in truth and righteousness? Why is the verdict not enough? Corregan Brown returns to examine these questions with us.