on the suffocating whiteness of female rage and the Sad Girl

female rage and sad girl media has never made space for women of color

I want to see raw, unfiltered emotion. In the books I read and the films I watch, I crave a certain degree of honesty, of directness, that can arguably only be found in art that challenges and critiques reality. I crave a study on human emotion that helps me understand the self in a way that I feel unable to explore in the real world. In the media I crave a raw depiction of human nature that allows me to witness a full spectrum of emotion, a scale that I might never be granted the privilege to see in my daily life. In a weird and embarrassing way, I feel I can only understand myself through understanding others—especially through stories, where characters similar to me live and power through obstacles, so that I might glean some valuable information from these situations.

So I search for media centering “sad girls,” or girls that are deeply, immovably sad, and are allowed to sit in this sadness and live through it. I wonder what that feels like. I search for media depicting female rage, that shows a woman splintered by her anger, that affords her the ability to explode and feel justified to do so. I search for this category in the media, and I see it in literature, in film, even TV. But these results are lost on me, because it feels like every last one of these sad and angry girls I seek are white.

A part of me feels like this is because women of color, despite having all the reasons in the world to be inherently sad and inherently angry, are for so much of their life shielded from such emotion. This is not to say they never feel deep sadness or anger—in fact, emotions will be felt whether or not you have the capacity to understand them just yet—but I do believe to some degree that we are not given the permission to feel extreme anything. I can only speak for myself in this matter. But it is something I’ve observed, that women of color are only allowed to be subtly emotional. Just a smidge happy or a little melancholy. Perhaps annoyed, maybe frustrated. Never unabashedly furious, never overwhelmingly sad, never joyous to the point of feeling like sunlight reincarnate. Too much emotion is dangerous. It means to come dangerously close to what others perceive of us. For Black women, being angry is a risk. It is becoming the Angry Black Girl (who has every reason to be mad.) It is proving them right.

It is never about us. Never about what we feel. No, it is always about something bigger. We are never allowed to feel sad or angry just to feel it; instead, it is always a deeper ploy, a scheme, sometimes a game. It is an embarrassment, a scene. Something for others to feel wary about, to keep an eye on, to look away from, to whisper about. It is never about our feelings, and it is always about the image we are creating. White girls, for the most part, are afforded this humanity. They are allowed the privilege of emotion in its most raw form—their tears are welcomed, they are mourned, their anger expected, respected, feared. For the rest of us, we are handed a scale. We watch as lines are drawn around us, as fingers are pointed and warnings are given. We watch as a part of ourselves is closed off and barred, like bright yellow tape at a crime scene. We are told not to go there. We are told to possess an impossible degree of restraint just for fear of being perceived as wholly human. We are not to ever let this restraint go, to let our rage lash around with a merciless blindness, to wallow in our own sadness. 

But white girls are encouraged to. Lana Del Rey is the patron saint of Sad Girl Music. Her hauntingly lyrical voice and eerie ballads reign over an army of coquette girls and sad romantics. Non-white girls listen and love her music, despite knowing it does not truly make space for them, despite knowing they are not entirely welcome. Sylvia Plath and Sally Rooney and Ottessa Moshfegh are commonly doted upon writers of the sad girl trope, but their sad girls are white, privileged, and lack a relatability through which non-white readers can find a common ground or connection to them. They are distant to us. They are not truly reflective of ourselves.

Perhaps this exclusion and this exclusivity comes from a point of deserving. Do women of color really deserve to feel so angry? Sad? Perhaps our anger and our sadness comes at the cost of another’s comfort. Perhaps we are to blame for that. Our anger makes others feel small and hostile. We are told to lower our voices and speak clearly and never argue. To an extent, we are told our anger strips us of our femininity—it is not something that can coexist. We are either feminine or we are angry. We cannot be both, to be one is to be robbed of the other. Our sadness, perhaps, then strips us of our desirability. Or our ability to be loved. Or tolerated. Either way, we are disadvantaged by feeling and displaying our visceral, extreme emotions, as ugly as they may be. And this leads them to fester into even uglier wounds.

It is a cruel kind of discrimination, to be denied, at least socially, the ability to feel and welcome innate emotions. This policing of our feelings bears consequences that will be continuously felt by women of color for generations. In the media, in the worlds we escape to, the worlds in which we seek safe havens for a time, we should be able to see women of color feel the profound emotions we are otherwise ostracized for feeling. At the very least, we should permeate this concept into popular media to make people conscious of its existence. We should let it trickle in first, show people that non-white girls can be awfully sad and terribly angry and be no less human for it before we let it flood. We deserve a Fleabag of our own. Unlikable but deeply relatable protagonists, morally grey characters, sufferingly sad girls, explosively, femininely angry girls. We deserve to see a woman of color experience the kind of unbridled rage that is not only bestowed upon white women in the media but also justified and understood. 

Some may even say, in a desperate attempt to get us to restrain and leash our emotions, that such emotion is below us. That jealousy is below us, vengefulness below us, teeming wrath and grudge-holding. Self-pity and sadness. And that is all it is—an attempt to get us to restrain ourselves. It is not a genuine plea, not an act of protection or goodwill, because every human feels every emotion and has every right to do so. If we never allow ourselves to feel vengeful, jealous, angry, or pitiful, what do we do with all of it? With the lump in our throats, the pit in our stomachs? Perhaps they believe we have a place to put all this unfelt emotion, that the repression of these feelings will never cost us? Unfortunately, women of color are not fashioned from the womb with a special invincible box to dump our feelings into, for these feelings to never escape and later come back to bite us. Instead, we only swallow it down, and there it sits. And rots. And festers. Slowly, it returns to us, poison in our blood, and we pay the price.

The truth is, there’s a kind of catharsis and freedom found in the outpour of rage and sadness. At a natural, relentless release of such extreme, painful emotion. And women of color deserve to feel that relief. We deserve to feel human in every way. We deserve it.