In the USA, black rage refers to a purported psychological phenomena and innovative defense proposed, but not used, for the 1994 Colin Ferguson mass murder trial. Ferguson's lawyers (William Kunstler) argued that he should not be held criminally liable, for actions which broke the law, because he was overcome with rage by his perceived society's racist discrimination against black people. Ferguson rejected the advice of his lawyer and represented himself, arguing instead that he was completely innocent; he was found guilty and imprisoned.
Black rage was first proposed by psychologists William Henry Grier and Price Cobbs in their 1968 book Black Rage (ISBN 1-57910-349-9). Grier and Cobbs argue that black people living in a racist, white supremacist society are psychologically damaged by the effects of racist oppression. This damage causes black people to act abnormally in certain situations.
Famous quotes containing the words black and/or rage:
“The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder—in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)
“I do oppose
My patience to his fury, and am armed
To suffer, with a quietness of spirit,
The very tyranny and rage of his.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)