I have said before that the longer I work, the more simple and the less theoretical my personal politics become. I sit in meetings often and think, “Could you please just treat me like a person?” My colleague Jennifer deWinter is a master of humanization. “Sometimes,” she told me once, “I just say ‘I don’t understand why you’re being mean to me.'” I’ve used it. It works. But, I wish I didn’t need to ask to be treated like a person.

But, too many of us know the exhausting truth of it: Humanity isn’t a given for all of us, so perhaps I am asking a lot. I am asking a lot, but it is so very little: Could you please just treat me like a person? Could you please just treat everyone like a person?

Surfing through bureaucracy

I spent part of yesterday helping a friend outmaneuver the bureaucracy at a university halfway across the country. If there is a loophole, I can find it. If there isn’t one, I can revert to pathos. But, usually, I can get there. My friend was convinced she wouldn’t be able to go back to school in the fall, I promised her she could.

Bureaucracy can be dehumanizing, but I’ve gotten so used to it, both the bureaucracy and the dehumanization. I am a finder of loopholes, an exploiter of systems, an expert in asking forgiveness rather than permission.

I am also, like most women, nonbinary people, LGBTQ people, and people of color working as academics, lowkey angry all the time. It’s anger that keeps me on task to make sure a friend doesn’t have to leave school. It’s anger that gets me thanked by my dean for my “perseverance,” which I’m sure is a polite way of saying, “Wow, you really do not drop anything, do you?” I keep lists of things that need fixing; when something is too upsetting, it drops down the list until I can deal with it again. Change is tedious. It is also a moral obligation.

Anger is powerful

In this piece on the power of anger, Leon F Seltzer warns against seeing anger as a super power, since it often results from efforts to mask insecurities. This makes sense for the examples he gives, but the anger that fuels so many of us isn’t a kind of knee-jerk defense to criticism but a real awareness of existential threat. This isn’t individual, personal anger, but a smoldering fire in response to chronic, systemic brutality. This anger is the coals kept hot, awaiting more fuel.

I love a good self-improvement task as much as anyone else. A couple years ago, I dutifully wrote down what I felt went well, what I thought I could have improved, and three things I was grateful for every night for a year. It helped. But, gratitude is a survival strategy, not a solution. The growing discussion of toxic positivity culture has been a relief. Everything won’t work out. This isn’t all for the best. And, mostly I am a happy person, but I am also an angry one.

I think about being thanked for perseverance, and I think about my childhood love of the Incredible Hulk. I have the same secret: I’m always angry.