Emotional Imperialism in Racial Justice Work: Why Our Anger and Joy Matter by Kulvinder Nagre

Kulvinder Nagre is a London-based researcher and writer, and the Research and Policy Coordinator at Race on the Agenda, a race equity think tank. He holds a PhD in Public Archaeology, with a focus on the enduring legacies of British colonialism. You can find out more about Kulvinder here.

I have been to quite a few events recently. Roundtables, report launches, AGMs (Annual General Meetings). We’ve even put a couple on ourselves over the last few months. I’ve seen outstanding speakers delivering inspirational messages of community resilience and solidarity in our uncertain times. Children discussing the racism that affects them in the classroom. Activist veterans reflecting on hard-fought victories. Charity CEOs talking about the need for change. Community organisers spelling out how change needs to happen. But what has been missing from many of these meetings, these spaces of communal celebration, is collective anger and collaborative resolve; it’s the core emotion. The raw, primal emotion that this work makes us feel. The joy of community and our achievements, and rage at the indignities that many of us endure on a daily basis.

This is not to blame those who organised or spoke at these events. Far from it. They get the point across through coded language, tactical eye rolls, and inside jokes. I feel the feelings. I leave these meetings feeling moved, angry, happy, or sad. But in private. Alone. 

Why is this? How has it come to be that we, on the frontlines of racial justice work, mask our true feelings towards the work that we do? Work that many of us are personally affected by. Work that all of us are deeply passionate about. The truth is that the same system we are working hard to challenge is working equally hard to challenge us. To delegitimise us and the work that we do. To destabilise and uproot our collective resolve and our collective feelings. The system of Eurocentric supremacy is designed to deny racialised people the full spectrum of our human emotions, and it needs to change.

Emotional imperialism

Under the Empire, Victorian England's highly repressive emotional norms were exported across their overseas colonies, alongside other means of political and economic exploitation that reshaped the world in the European image. 

Any deviation from the very repressed European standard of expressing emotion was taken as further evidence by colonisers of the ‘native’ peoples’ backwardness, their childishness, and the savage nature of pre-colonial society. Philosophers have called this phenomenon ‘emotional imperialism’. In establishing European traits, behaviours, and ways of being as the standard, other ways of thinking, feeling, and existing were presented as inferior. 

Anger at the colonial regime only served to reinforce their belief that without the European powers, Africa, Western Asia, the Subcontinent, and the Americas would be lawless, “uncivilised”, violent countries populated by primitive and angry people. As such, the only way to be taken seriously by colonial powers was to hyper-perform the traits and behaviours of the coloniser.

This was a classic no-sum game. Either resist through anger and violence and reinforce the colonisers’ perspective of you and your people, or emulate the coloniser and risk losing yourself in the process. 

These racist worldviews did not simply go away following the end of the Empire. Instead, they morphed into some of the familiar ways in which we are used to having our emotions and expressions of them repressed. Tropes like the Angry Black Woman, which initially emerged during the trade of enslaved peoples in the US, continue to prevent members of our communities from having their voices heard. Ideas around the inherent violence of Black or Muslim men in the UK prevent us from expressing our full emotional range, for risk of embodying dehumanising colonial stereotypes deemed as “dangerous” or “terrorist”. Myths of the passivity and submissiveness of South Asian populations mean that expressions of anger are either not taken seriously or ignored altogether. Emotional imperialism prevails. 

Misremembering the struggle

These myths and their damaging effects are reinforced in how the racial justice movement is discussed and remembered today.

In school, I was not taught about Malcolm X and the Black Panthers, and instead only learned about the dignified actions of Rosa Parks on the Montgomery bus boycott or Martin Luther King at Selma. I did not learn about the First War of Indian Independence, and was only taught about Gandhi's civil disobedience. I was told about the white-majority abolitionist movement but not about the angry revolts and uprisings led by enslaved people across the Empire. Some now learn about the stoic resilience of Nelson Mandela, but not the radical dissent of Steve Biko. Even Bob Marley’s contribution to racial justice is probably more widely seen as ‘one love, one heart, let’s get together and feel alright’, and not ‘dem belly full but we hungry, hungry mob is an angry mob’. 

This selective remembrance of the racial and anti-colonial justice movements sows the idea that the only way change is achieved is through calm, dignified resistance. That emotion has no place in our work. That anger, sorrow, joy, or sadness may actually work against our interests since so many of our forebears could bring about change without expressing their emotions.  Liberation is presented as a logical application of principle a to situation b, carried out in an orderly and dignified fashion.

This continues to affect how our movements are discussed in the present day. The infamous Sewell Report, published in 2021, blamed the “anger that bubbled up in [2020’s] BLM protests” on minorities’ sense of detachment from the rest of society. Our anger was misplaced, unproductive, and self-inflicted, despite the endless and ongoing evidence of police brutality. Recently, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign’s pro-ceasefire protests in London were dubbed “hate marches” by the Home Secretary in 2023. 

The problem is not that racial justice protestors are characterised as angry – many were and continue to be. It is the idea that anger itself is not legitimate and/or delegitimises any form of protest associated with it. This method of undermining our political emotion is felt by the racial justice community, yet is seen far less in other groups. The anger of WASPI (Women Against State Pension Inequality) is widely acknowledged as justified across the British press. The anger of the farmers protesting the inheritance tax is echoed by opposition politicians and some Labour MPs. Even last August’s riots, which saw far-right violent mobs who attempted to burn down hotels occupied by migrants, were legitimised by some as ‘justified anger’.

We feel more than just anger

So yes, our anger is justified, and we are prevented from feeling and expressing it by a structure which would rather see us reduced to passive stereotypes. But we are more than just angry. We feel and express a full range of emotions in our demand for justice; including joy. 

The work that we do and the experiences that we have do not immediately lend themselves to public outpourings of joy. The increasingly hostile backlash against EDI (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion) measures that we are witnessing out of the US, the broad political consensus on anti-migrant rhetoric, and the growing visibility of far-right actors in our society are all reasons to feel scared to feel insecure, and yes, to feel angry. Couple this with a centuries-long history of racism, colonialism, enslavement, brutalisation and dehumanisation, and it can be difficult to feel anything but negative emotions.

But this same history makes feeling joy in celebrating ourselves and our achievements an even more important, rebellious, and powerful act. The white supremacist structures that have left their mark on our society were not set up to allow racialised people joy. Our colonised forebears found their festivals curtailed by the European administration to be replaced by crudely imposed Anglican or Catholic celebrations. Enslaved people in the US were not told their dates of birth, making birthday celebrations impossible. Hindu festivals were viewed as potentially dangerous by the British in their capacity to bring the community together. 

Some of our most impactful protests have also been our most joyous. Notting Hill Carnival was initially organised as a response to increasing racist hostility in the ‘60s. The ‘70s saw the rise of the Asian Youth Movement, and the ‘80s the two-tone scene. Sadness, hopelessness, and despondency are natural responses to the stresses that our communities are being placed under. Still, these feelings alone are rarely enough to drive the real change that we need.

We need to feel, express, and enact our feelings. Our anger is justified, and showing it should not allow us to be reduced to one-dimensional, colonial-era stereotypes. The joy that we have in ourselves, our communities, and our movement is regenerative and deeply needed. The next time we gather – at a roundtable, a protest, a celebration – it’s okay to get angry. It’s good to show you are still a human with a range of valid and proportionate emotions.  Let us bring our ideas and our full selves. Let us embody our rage, our love, our tears, our joy. Let us feel and be felt.