58 • HECATE The Uses of Anger: Wanda Coleman and the Poetry of Black Rage Shanna Greene Benjamin In late 2014, black people in the United States took to the streets in protest. Spurred on by the failure of grand juries to indict neither Officer Darren Wilson for shooting and killing Michael Brown, nor Officer Daniel Pantaleo for choking Eric Gardner to death, black people gathered en masse—marching, chanting, and hoisting placards—to declare that #blacklivesmatter. 1 Public responses to the grand jury decisions, and then to the resulting protests, say much about how respectability politics, a term coined by Harvard historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, circumscribe expressions of black rage. Following the grand jury decision in Ferguson, Missouri, Michael Brown’s parents asked protestors to “channel [their] frustration in ways that will make a positive change” (“Profoundly Disappointed”). President Obama concurred: “We are a nation built on the rule of law,” he said. “We need to accept that this decision was the grand jury’s to make. There are Americans who agree with it, and there are Americans who are disappointed, even angry…. I join Michael’s parents in asking that anyone who protests this decision, do so peacefully” (“Obama Calls”). The call for black people to engage in peaceful responses to state-sanctioned violence against black bodies is part of a broader narrative that requires black people to respond respectably to their degradation, to rise above the fray and assuage the fears of white people intimidated by, or fearful of, congregating black bodies with the collective potential for mass vengeance. The life and work of Wanda Coleman, a black writer who expressed her anger about white supremacy and black elitism in equal measure, reflect the social risks and creative possibilities bound up in being a black woman poet who breaches African American social etiquette around anger. “Since Black Sparrow Press released [Coleman’s] first chapbook, Art in the Court of the Blue Fag (1977),” Jennifer Ryan-Bryant explains, 1 The #blacklivesmatter movement emerged to draw attention to the killing of unarmed black men and women and the ongoing disenfranchisement of African Americans in the United States. With a slate of demands and action items organized around the a desire to have the human rights of black people recognized and protected, #blacklivesmatter provides allies of the movement with an opportunity to organize, protest, and fight against white supremacy and its institutionalized legacy.