Kohn has also given a lot of thought to definitions of anger. She thinks that focusing on black anger or black kindness misses the point: “We don’t have the power to oppress people,” she said. Sow was born in Guinea, and moving to the United States helped her understand this-she said people frequently thought she was angry when she was not. “For black people, just expressing ourselves is coded as anger,” she said. “Nobody has just done things for marginalized people without it.” But she cautions against confusing anger and hate. “Anger can be a productive feeling,” Sow said over the phone. Though she maintains she didn’t say the quote Kohn attributed to her, Sow was willing to discuss the idea behind it. And the people who say, ‘Oh, you need to be more like Martin’ know absolutely nothing about Martin.” But he was a brilliant man filled with love for black people. People will tell me that I sound like Malcolm X, as though that’s an insult. It is a narrative for culture as a whole, and it’s something that I still get. “We were always taught that we wanted to be Martins and not Malcolms, and that if we loved each other then we would move ahead. “It’s the idea that was a separationist and was bad, and was filled with hate, and was good and light, and was led by love,” she said.
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