Anger Is a Gift

“Then he saw them, the red and blue bolts of light, and that’s when the dread filled him, overflowed, squeezed his heart to dust. His hands started to sweat, and Moss backed away from the windows, nearly tripping over Esperanza. She grabbed his right arm to steady him as he stumbled.” 

In the opening chapter, as throughout the novel, Oshiro shows the visceral effects of trauma, highlighting how police brutality has vast, debilitating consequences not only for the direct victim but for friends, family, and loved ones. He also uses this to show how important Esperanza is to Moss, foreshadowing how difficult it will be for him to admit that she does not understand the realities of his life. 

“It’s like people want me to be this version of a person that isn’t me. Like, always ready to fight and march and rally, and I don’t even get to be myself.” 

It is not only the ever-present threat of further police violence that triggers Moss’s anxiety and panic attacks. He gets anxious whenever people expect him to respond to his father’s murder in a certain way, to take up his father’s mantle and fight oppression. In some respects, Moss’s whole story is a process of coming to terms with this and growing into his own role as an activist. 

“‘So what are you going to do about it?’ ‘Me?’ Moss said, surprised. ‘Nothin’, I suppose. What can I do?’” 

Throughout much of the book, Moss does not believe that communities, let alone individuals, can do anything to fight back against the corrupt power of institutions. He has allowed his grief and his anger to convince him that it is hopeless and pointless to resist. However, Wanda gently guides him towards believing that something can be done. 

“You saw someone else in peril, and you prioritized them. I think you knew you could deal with yourself later, so you just pushed your own needs aside to help someone else. I ain’t an expert, but that sounds pretty noble to me.” 

After Moss attempts to intervene when Shawna is assault by Hull, he is highly critical of his own actions, believing that he was not looking after his own mental health as he was taught by his therapist. However, Wanda questions this view, suggesting that anger against injustice and efforts to save someone in distress are actually admirable qualities, something that Moss will slowly come to believe himself as the novel progresses.

“It always began in his chest, a swelling anxiety that blossomed through his veins, gripped his heart, spread up is spine, pressed against his eyes, the pressure often morphing into a migraine. It was the same unwanted tourist most days, not because he saw no need for it, but because he was tired of it consuming him so often.” 

In the earlier chapters, Moss views his anger and anxiety as inherently negative things: products of his trauma that he wishes he could escape. However, much of his character development revolves around learning, with Wanda’s guidance, that his anger can be a positive thing, a force for change. 

“I’m gonna have to have that conversation with him, he thought, and it sank in his stomach. Had Javier ever dated a black guy? Was he just an experiment to him, something exotic to try on for size?” 

Throughout the novel, Oshiro highlights the fact that oppression is intersectional, that forms of social categorization interconnect to form unique forms of exploitation and abuse. In this case, as at other points, he highlights how race and sexuality intersect, examining how gay Black men can be treated as an exotic novelty within the gay community. 

“Whenever he came to this part of town, someone clutched their pearls so hard that it was impossible not to notice it. It gave him a little thrill, knowing that his very presence could upset someone’s walk or their afternoon searching for craft toilet paper holders and heirloom tomatoes.” 

Esperanza’s neighborhood is populated by rich white people and Moss experiences constant microagressions whenever he visits her there, such as white people avoiding him out of a racist fear that he is some kind of dangerous criminal. He has managed to reframe this as something slightly thrilling but it still adds to the sense of disconnect he feels from Esperanza and her relative privilege. 

“Moss’s own blood heated his body in anger, and it gave him the strength to finally move forward, toward the blond cop, who was no backing away with his green eyes full of fear. He felt the tingling in his hands, the lightness in his head, the heaviness of his heart, and it consumed him, filled him to the brim with a bitterness and voracity that burned his throat.” 

Moss’s trauma manifests in a great deal of anxiety and frequent panic attacks which have a great impact on his life, preventing him from being able handle cope with certain situations. However, as the novel progresses, his anger and his fierce desire to save others from danger and injustice allow him to overcome his fears to take action. While this initially still feels like an unfocussed consuming rage, he is later able to channel it and use it more constructively. 

“‘What do we even protest at this point?’ Njemile said, bitterness in her voice. ‘Our school? This country? Our whole lives?’”

Moss’s skepticism about the capacity of individuals or communities to bring about meaningful change is not unfounded. As Njemile highlights, the violence and oppression they experience is deeply embedded in society, enabled and excused at the highest levels. 

“‘Anger is a gift. Remember that.’ She stood. ‘You gotta grasp onto it, hold it tight and use it as ammunition. You use that anger to get things done instead of just stewing in it.’” 

Wanda supports Moss in numerous highly-significant ways. However, perhaps the most important contribution she makes, certainly in terms of how his character develops, is in helping him reframe his anger not as something consuming that has been forced upon him but as something positive that he can harness and utilize to bring about change.  

“He knew that Esperanza’s parents had reacted much more strangely when she had told them that she was a lesbian. On the surface, they were accepting, but they didn’t ever seem to want to talk about their daughter’s interest in girls. As long as she kept the details to herself, Esperanza was tolerable to them.” 

Interestingly, Oshiro does not address homophobia much throughout the novel. Moss and Javier’s sexualities are completely accepted by their mothers and their friends and seemingly face no bullying at school either. However, he does highlight the fact that homophobia can take subtle forms such as Esperanza’s ostensible “acceptance” of her sexuality but apparent shame at actually discussing or acknowledging it.

“‘I’m serious though,’ she continued. ‘If you two get involved, you have to sit back and listen. You have to make sure not to make it about you.’ Moss experienced a flash of memory then: Esperanza, days earlier, making the college fair about herself. She takes after them and she doesn’t even realize it, he thought. He said nothing.” 

Oshiro highlights the problematic tendency of white people to play “white savior” by adopting the causes of people of color but failing to actually listen or take direction from the people directly affected by the issue, instead taking over and making it all about themselves and their displays of liberalism and supposed anti-racism. He adds complexity to this issue by showing how, although she is critical of her parents doing exactly this, Esperanza has also learned to a similar level of entitlement and ignorance from them. 

“He never imagined a reality where these two groups of people would ever meet, but here they were, all to support Shawna and Reg and the kids at West Oakland high.” 

Part of Wanda’s faith that ordinary people can bring about change even against the most powerful institutions comes from her understanding and experience of community and solidarity: the idea that people will come together to help their neighbors, to support a cause even if it does not directly affect them. Moss has no experience of this up until the meeting after Reg’s assault where he suddenly sees people united. 

“The crowd gasped, but Kaisha’s head jerked upward, and she dealt the audience a fierce glare. ‘Please don’t feel sorry,’ she said and Moss knew she wasn’t reading from her notes. ‘He doesn’t want your pity, he wants you anger.” 

Some of Moss’s friends understand the reframing of anger as something positive before he does. When Kaisha breaks off from reading Reg’s prepared statement to the activist meeting to tell them not to pity him, she reflects precisely this understanding: that Reg wants, and needs, them to be angry, to use their rage to bring about change to stop events like Reg’s assault happening again. 

“All the anger and anxiety gave way to something new: hope. Maybe it wouldn’t last long, but he wasn’t going to fight it. Not this time.” 

One of the results of Moss’s trauma, of watching his father be murdered, and then watching the police get away with it and the struggle for justice fizzle out, is a sense of hopelessness. Perhaps even more damaging, he learned to suppress hope, to fight it down, and to seek the seeming safety of only expecting the worst so that he is never disappointed. When they decide to stage the walkout, Moss actually starts to allow himself to feel hope again, something that will make Javier’s murder even more jarring.

“I think some people think being gay here in the Bay means that all our problems are solved.” 

Through Moss and Javier’s conversation, Oshiro provides a commentary on the white delusion that liberal areas such as San Francisco, or marginalized communities such as the gay community, are somehow free of other prejudices, including racism. Moss and Javier highlight how they have both been discriminated against by gay white people and that being gay does not excuse white people from looking at their other prejudices and biases.

“Listen to the damn language. It’s all so passive. A police officer ‘discharged’ a weapon. A student was ‘fatally injured.’ It all sounds like separate events, you know? And that’s how they start.” 

Oshiro highlights the ways in which the media collude with the police in working to deny police culpability for the murder of people of color. Wanda’s observations to Moss and the others not only help to educate the characters, shaping their development and the development of the plot, but also helps to build the sense of tension and raise the stakes for Moss. 

“‘It’s an insidious thing,’ Wanda said. ‘It never happens overnight. This kind of thing crept into our communities long ago. It latched on. It fed on prejudice. Selfishness. People’s inability to see life through someone else’s eyes. And it grew, bigger and bigger, util we got to a point where some people don’t even question why a cop should be allowed to shoot first and ask questions later.’” 

Although several of them have some form of experience with police violence or at least the neglect of their communities, Moss and his friends—especially Esperanza—still struggle to understand how things reached such a level where the lives of people of color are treated with such little regard. Wanda, who has seen this process as an activist and a community member, shares her understanding, showing how it creeps in gradually and subtly hinting at the fact that a sense of community and solidarity is necessary to combat it. 

“‘I thought I was helping,’ she said, and the worst part, Moss knew was that she believed herself. ‘I didn’t want them overreacting and hurting anyone.’” 

Rebecca’s betrayal of the protest is based on her ignorance and her white privilege. As a wealthy white person, she believes that the school authorities and, especially, the police are there to serve her, to protect her, and, in her ignorance, believes that this would be the same for everyone. She cannot see that this relationship is the result of her white privilege or that for poor people of color, the police do not represent a form of safety but a very real threat to life and liberty. 

“‘And I’m sorry about yesterday, too, she added. ‘I really need to learn that sometimes it’s best if I just listen. It’s a compulsion of mine, always wanting to be involved.’ She laughed nervously, then conceded, ‘Just like my parents.’” 

After her mother betrays the protest, Esperanza begins to recognize that she shares her habit of taking over causes and not listening to those directly affected by the issues being addressed. However, she still fails to fully believe Moss when he talks about his lived experiences of institutional oppression and police brutality and will do so until she has experienced it firsthand. 

“There was blood. Bodies bent in ways they should not be. He wanted to turn around and run away, to save himself, and the urge sent shame through his body. But as more people succumbed to the Silent Guardian, the more certain he was that he didn’t want to know what that thing felt like.” 

Oshiro does not attempt to mask or sugarcoat the realities of the police violently breaking up a demonstration. Indeed, he takes pains to show not only the physical damage of such violence but also the fear, intimidation, the desperate desire to escape punishment, especially from the directed-energy weapon, the Silent Guardian.

“He watched her gasp for breath, watched her lean her head back, desperate for air, watched her cry openly. This was what it took. This was the line she had to cross. He didn’t know if it was enough.” 

As Moss watches Esperanza in physical and mental distress after being beaten and arrested by the police, he realizes that such a direct experience was the only thing that would make her understand the realities of police brutality. However, he remains uncertain whether it will be enough for her to actually learn to believe less privileged people when they describe their experiences of oppression. 

“‘It should not have happened,’ the man continued, his eyes red and watery. ‘I’m sorry about what was done to you.’ ‘Did you do anything to stop it?’ The words fell out of Moss’s mouth before he could even think about what they meant. The cop’s expression changed, morphed into shock and confusion.”

Like Mr. Jacobs and others before him, one of the police officers at the station tries to apologize for Moss’s treatment, for the police murdering his father and his first love and his violent arrest. However, Moss is tired with people apologizing for things to make themselves feel better and, as he did with Mr. Jacobs, demands to know why they did not do anything to stop those things from happening. 

“‘Are you telling me a white girl had to get killed for you to finally pay attention?’ Wanda said, stern and certain. ‘Now someone will get held accountable?’” 

Throughout much of the book, the police refuse to take responsibility for their actions, instead continuing to violently oppose those fighting for justice. The fact that they only begin to take responsibility when they accidentally kill a white person helps to highlight the fact that they, and wider society, only see white lives as important, treating the lives of people of color as expendable.