Rage On by David Wall Rice

Rage On By David Wall Rice | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
The killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed, Black teenager who was gunned down by a Ferguson, Missouri police officer and left dead in the street for hours, is a horror that pushes on the collective conscience of the Nation –again.  We've been here before.  It is soul stirring, but has become normal for those who understand the angles of living as a Black person in the United States of America. 
Then there is the other, those who privilege remove and respectability.  It must be noted though that the malaise of cognitive dissonance that envelops the 'respectable' in their judgment of the rebellious protester, and even the peaceable one is bound in a National lie.  The lie is that we value Black lives.  And the rage comes because the lie is told with smiles and platitudes, smoking gun in hand and a corpse at the liar's feet.
Michael Brown. Ezell Ford. Eric Garner. Renisha McBride. Trayvon Martin. Jordan Davis. Oscar Grant . . .
The turn, then, is that the protest, the anger, the rage is the truth.  It is healthy and justifiable.  But we are told to muffle it, conflating "there is never an excuse for violence against police, or for those who would use this tragedy as a cover for vandalism or looting."  The statement, wrong on its face, misrepresents the people and core functions of rebellion against a society, and a government, and a city, and its militarized police force with crosshairs trained on the activist as aggressor when terrorism has been visited upon him and her.
Rage here is the real, but not in the Grier and Cobbs (1968) sense, exactly.  It is cathartic and common sense.  Rage is a hammer, a tool that can be situated to effectively confront and ameliorate violent racism that is pushed onto the Black community. It is a truth that we are told to tuck into a perverted democracy that asks us to play equality by an oppressor's standard.
Rage on then.  Inhabit an authentic democratic space demanding the representation of equality. Rage and protest. Rage and read. Rage and write. Rage and learn. Rage and teach. Rage and resist the justified killing of Black people.
With the killing of Michael Brown, to not rage is to lie.
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David Wall Rice is associate professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology at Morehouse College. At the College he also leads the Identity Orchestration Research Lab and serves as faculty for the Cinema, Television and Emerging Media Studies (CTEMS)program.  In addition to social critique and commentary across media outlets, David has is currently at work on his writing his second book, Race, Gender, Class and Context: Being and Becoming More.