Break the Silence and Rage Cycle

I have found that when I default to silence in the face of bias, prejudice, or bullying aimed at me, I can fall into a vicious silence and rage cycle. Someone says or does something offensive, and I default to silence.

When I don’t respond, I feel powerless, I lose my agency, just a little. Since I haven’t said anything, the other person is likely to repeat the offense, making me feel angrier with each repetition.?

But each time, I default to silence, and so as I get angrier, I also feel more and more powerless. The more powerless I feel, the more silent I am, the angrier I get, and pretty soon, I’m in a vicious cycle. In the words of Simon and Garfunkel, “Silence like a cancer grows.”

Don't Let Your Anger Silence You

In retrospect, I realize that often I would’ve been better served to speak up than to default to silence. That doesn’t mean that my calculus is the same as yours. I have a lot of unfair advantages. I’m straight and White, which shouldn’t but does make speaking up safer for me; I have degrees that give me all kinds of unearned credibility; and I have financial resources that buy me lots of options that should be available to everyone but are not.?

What may be true for me may not be true for you. One thing is almost always true: being silenced is invalidating and enraging, and having your emotions squashed by others is invalidating and enraging. In an ideal world, it’s better to speak up before you’re enraged than after.?

But this world isn’t ideal. So don’t let your anger silence you. If the only response you can manage to being silenced is to rage, then rage.

Soraya Chemaly writes in Rage Becomes Her, “By effectively severing anger from ‘good womanhood,’ we choose to sever girls and women from the emotion that best protects us against danger and injustice.”

Rebecca Traister’s book Good and Mad explores how our society tries to compel women to repress their anger, but how important anger has been to galvanizing women to push for change.?

Anger, long cast as unfeminine, has become an increasingly important tool for creating solidarity among women of all classes and races.

Bring Humanity Back to Work

Of course, men’s emotions are repressed at work, too. In his Instagram Curbside Ministries, entrepreneur and brand guru Jason Mayden, who is Black, gave some excellent advice about expressing emotion in the workplace: “Stop saying that us being emotional is somehow regarded as a negative thing in corporate America. . . What’s wrong with being emotional? It means I’m human, it means I care, it means I’m actually present, I’m available to understand with an EQ not just an IQ how to treat people.”

Being constantly on guard against saying what you really think and showing how you really feel can disrupt sleep patterns and diminish one’s ability to contribute at work. Research has only recently begun to measure this toll on the health of people from historically marginalized groups in the workplace.

When one group is allowed to express emotions at work but another isn’t, it makes it difficult for the people who have to repress their humanity to do their best work. The double standard is that men’s anger is “strong and reasonable” but women’s anger is “hysterical”; or that I as a White woman can say what I think, but when my colleague Michelle did the same thing, she was “an angry Black woman.”

Of course, it’s also not great if everyone is allowed to use their emotions as an excuse to bully each other. For example, I thought the investment bank where my boyfriend felt free to scream profanities at his colleagues had a bullying culture.

One problem was that people from systemically disadvantaged groups wouldn’t have been allowed to behave that way while White men were. But the more fundamental cultural problem there from my perspective was that nobody should’ve been allowed to bully others.

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Radical Respect is a weekly newsletter I am publishing on LinkedIn to highlight?some of the things that get in the way of creating a collaborative, respectful working environment. A healthy organization is not merely an absence of unpleasant symptoms. Creating a just working environment is about eliminating bad behavior and reinforcing collaborative, respectful behavior. Each week I'll offer tips on how to do that so you can create a workplace where everyone feels supported and respected. This week's newsletter was adapted from my forthcoming book Radical Respect: How to Work Better Together.