77 pages • 2 hours read
Anger Is a Gift
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Chapters 7-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary
Moss is in English again when the Assistant Principle, Mr. Jacobs, enters the class looking exhausted and awkwardly announces that a student needs to come with him and Officer Hull to have their locker searched. He indicates Shawna Meyers, a trans girl who has recently come out. He misgenders her, and Shawna has to remind him that “I told you yesterday that it’s Miss Shawna Meyers” (78).
Shawna refuses to go with them, insisting that she has broken no rules so should not be treated like a criminal. However, Hull puts his hand on the gun in its holster on his hip, and she relents, accompanying them out of the room. Mrs. Torrance is as appalled as the students and speculates about how long the school can keep it up before something goes badly wrong.
After class, Moss and Njemile are discussing how bad the school has become when they see Officer Hull aggressively dumping things out of Shawna’s locker. When Hull pulls out a bag of white tablets, he immediately accuses her of dealing drugs “in my school” (82). Terrified, Shawna tries to insist that she is not, but Hull grabs her by the throat and slams her against the lockers. Despite his anxiety, Moss runs in, trying to intervene, but Mr. Jacobs stops him. Students begin shouting and kicking lockers, and someone throws a chair. When the chaos clears slightly, Moss sees Hull backing off and Shawna lying on the floor having a seizure.
Mrs. Torrance arrives, gently supports Shawna, and angrily explains that the girl is epileptic. She is furious with Hull and Mr. Jacobs. Shawna eventually recovers enough to tell her that her prescription bottle broke that morning so she had been forced to bring her medication into school in the bag Hull had found in her locker.
Chapter 8 Summary
When Wanda gets home from work that night, Moss explains what happened in school. He is terrified about being called to have his locker searched, asking her, “How am I ever going to survive an interaction like that?” (89). Wanda offers to speak to the school, but Moss says she has enough to deal with already. He thinks the school will stop its policy after the incident, but Wanda is more skeptical.
Moss thinks that he should not have suppressed his anxiety in order to help Shawna, but Wanda says it was a noble and admirable thing to do. However, he still frets about how emotional he is and wishes his “brain worked like everyone else’s” (91). He asks his mom if she still thinks about his father, and he feels incredibly grateful for his mother’s love, support, and openness when discussing grief and mental health.
Chapter 9 Summary
On their way to school, Moss, Njemile, and Bits discuss the incident and agree that it may have been might have had transphobic motivations. Njemile proposes that they get together with others to discuss the issue, but Moss is skeptical that any good will come of it. When they arrive at West Oakland High, there are six new police officers standing on the steps, silently watching the students enter.
In class, Moss and the other students discuss the school conditions with Mrs. Torrance. Moss feels the anxiety welling up inside him turning into anger. Seeing it as an “unwanted tourist,” he suppresses it, “not because [he sees] no need for it, but because he [is] tired of it consuming him so often” (100). He does not believe his concern or his rage can change anything.
Mr. Elliot addresses the school through the speakers, responding to what he describes as “the unfortunate incident on campus” (101) the previous day. He announces that all medication must now be given to the school nurse who will distribute it to students when needed, that there will be a new policy on mobile phones because so many students filmed the assault, and that the school has signed up for a pilot program to install a metal detector at the main entrance.
The students and Mrs. Torrance are outraged and discuss the detector throughout the day. Njemile wonders out loud if Reg will even be able to get through it with pins in his leg, and Moss curses himself for not even considering that. She also proposes again that they talk about the issue with others. Moss is still unsure and voices concerns that the administration will target them in retaliation, but he reluctantly agrees to at least discuss it with their friends.
Moss goes to the college fair in the library but leaves when he realizes there are no major colleges in attendance. When he meets Esperanza later, she is excited about the college fair she has just attended at her own, far more privileged school. She cannot see or accept that the major colleges are prejudiced against Moss’s school, and Moss uncomfortably recognizes that she is unaware of the privilege she has because of her rich, white parents. However, he does not want to confront her and decides to put off the issue.
Chapter 10 Summary
Moss is worried as he prepares to go to Javier’s house. As well as his usual anxiety, his concerns about his body, and his paranoia that Javier does not actually like him, he also knows that he will have to have an awkward conversation with Javier and ask him if he has “ever dated a black guy? Was he just an experiment to him, something exotic to try on for size?” (111). However, when he arrives, Javier greets him warmly and says he looks hot. Moss immediately wins over Javier’s mother, Eugenia, by offering to do the dishes for her.
When Eugenia goes out to pick them up some dinner, Moss and Javier sit together on the couch. Moss is nervous but starts to relax a little when he learns that this is also Javier’s first date, and he even eventually kisses Javier. They agree that they do not want to go any further sexually yet, but Moss lies in Javier’s embrace wondering at how right it feels. They discuss the situation at Moss’s school, and Javier pushes Moss to do something about it; he then realizes that this is a sensitive subject for Moss because of his father and apologizes. They embrace again and Moss revels in the momentary suspension of his self-doubt, accepting for that moment that it is actually “possible for someone to like him” (122).
Chapter 11 Summary
Moss and Esperanza are waiting for the others to arrive to their meeting, and Moss is worried that no one will turn up. Esperanza says that if they do not, they could always just do a petition at the local farmer’s market. Moss looks at her until she realizes that she is showing her privilege and naiveté again; they discuss how the white liberal there kicked them out when they were trying to do a bake sale to raise money for Reg’s surgery.
When the others arrive, they jokingly tease Moss about Javier. Moss and Esperanza realize that they should have agreed on an accessible venue with an elevator for Reg, but he is not bothered. As they begin discussing what they can do about the situation at the school, Moss still does not believe that they can do anything against the administration. They continue to talk about how they might respond, dismissing several options as unworkable.
Moss, Reg, and Bits think they should provoke Mr. Elliot into overreacting and doing something that draws enough public attention to force him to change policy. However, Shawna, who has just been on the receiving end of such violent overreaction, and Rawiya, who has previously suffered Mr. Elliot angrily insisting that she remove her hijab in front of the whole school in the middle of the Pledge of Alliance, are not in favor. Moss, Reg, Bits, and the others quickly agree. Instead, they agree to start a private group on Facebook and invite others to discuss responding to the metal detectors and other invasive school policies. On the way home, Moss decides to stop worrying about appearing clingy and tells Javier that he misses him and needs to see him soon.
Chapter 12 Summary
Moss goes to have his hair cut by Martin, a barber and family friend. He finds Reg already waiting for a cut. He talks to Martin about recent events, and Martin expresses surprise that Wanda has not already gotten involved given her history of activism. Afterwards, he goes to meet Esperanza in Piedmont, a wealthy neighborhood populated people who like to say they live in Oakland but would shun Moss’s neighborhood and judge those who live there (143).
Within moments of being there, Moss notices a white couple avoiding him. He is used to it and even feels a certain thrill at upsetting judgmental privileged white people (144). Over ice cream, he and Esperanza discuss how recent events have been hard for him and how supportive she has been. Moss confesses that he “assume[s] the worst once the police are involved with anything, so there’s a part of me that wants to run away from all this” (145).
Esperanza is again extremely understanding. However, she unthinkingly says that she wishes that she went to Moss’s school. Moss is shocked, listing the great facilities at her school. Esperanza is bashful, explaining that she just meant that it would be good to go to school with her friends because she cannot relate to her own privileged neighborhood and its inhabitants. Moss again realizes that she is unaware of her own privilege.
Chapter 13 Summary
Moss, Reg, Njemile, and Kaisha arrive and school and see that the metal detectors have been installed. A huge number of unruly students are stuck waiting to go through them, and they have to wait for forty minutes before they are able enter because Reg cannot deal with the pushing and shoving on his crutches.
When they get there, the police officers on duty are impatient with how long it takes to Reg to empty his pockets and move without his crutches. When it is time for him to pass through the detector, he refuses, both because he is concerned that the machine will aggravate his injuries with the pins in his leg and because it simply feels wrong that they should have to submit to such treatment in school. One officer goes to check that it is safe for Reg to use it but the other one loses patience and grabs Reg to shove him through the machine.
The other officer runs back, saying that it is not safe, but it is too late. The first officer pushes Reg into the machine where he is slammed against the side, pulled hard against the metal by a powerful magnetic current. Reg is bleeding and screaming in pain, twisted in an unnatural shape and begging for them to stop the machine. Eventually, Mr. Jacobs arrives and manages to unplug the machine. As Moss looks at the blood, he has a flashback to his father’s murder and finds himself filling with rage. He turns on the police officer, but Reg tells him that now is not the time before passing out.
Chapters 6-13 Analysis
These chapters contain the novel’s initial moments of rising action. The first of these occurs when Hull assaults Shawna, mistakenly believing that she has been dealing drugs “in my school” (82), illustrating the assumption of ownership a white officer accepts over his surroundings, no matter how many others occupy the same space. This moment is a catalyst, setting off a string of events that will lead to the police violently breaking up a protest at the book’s climax in the penultimate struggle for ownership over one’s space (distinctly one’s educational space, which is supposed to offer a safe platform from which to springboard into productive citizenry).
The students respond to Shawna’s assault with anger, another of the book’s key themes. Indeed, even Moss manages to overcome to his anxiety enough to intervene. In this, we see Moss’s anger for the first time. However, Moss’s rage is often diffuse and caustic—something that lacks the focus necessary to take action, and so it eats away at Moss when he tries to suppress it. He sees it as an “unwanted tourist,” a witness to his life rather than a helpful accomplice, and he attempts to quash it “because he [is] tired of it consuming him so often” (100). However, when he describes his anger in this way, suggesting that he should have kept control in order to better manage his mental health, Wanda questions this, presenting his anger at injustice as something admirable and selfless. This perception of anger as something that can be beneficial becomes increasingly significant to the plot and to Moss’s character development as the story progresses.
Refusing to take responsibility for “the unfortunate incident on campus” (101) or acknowledge the reality of police brutality, the school uses the students’ anger as an excuse to install metal detectors. As such, the metal detectors become a symbol of the school’s negligence and its racial profiling of the student body. In the administration’s (white hegemony’s) eyes, the students aren’t worthy of textbooks, let alone sports teams, and instead only deserve metal detectors; this suggests the systematic criminalizing of people of color and a dangerous acceptance of violent police practices. The ACLU acknowledges in their report “Repression and Criminalization of Protest Around the World” that when people are treated with suspicion (such as the administration’s authoritarian acts at Moss’s school), trust erodes in the entire community, which only heightens tension and can actually incite the violence it seeks to avoid. As a result, Wanda observes the students feel a lack of genuine regard for their safety.
Although racial prejudice underpins the administration’s response to the students, the oppression experienced by the characters in these chapters is also intersectional. Shawna, for example, is misgendered by the assistant principal, implying that she isn’t known or seen by the people employed to help her take part in U.S. democracy. Rather, she is another faceless poor student of color. Additionally, several of the characters believe that she was targeted for the locker search because of transphobic prejudice. Likewise, Reg is a victim of ableism: the officer working the machine pushes him into it because he has become impatient with the speed at which he moves, interpreting Reg’s genuine hesitance about the safety of the machine with suspicious intent. That is, his assault is motivated by his lack of regard for, and his prejudice against, disabled bodies and how they might be differently affected by the spaces through which they move. In essence, the authorities in Anger Is a Gift lack the ability to see the nuanced way one’s identity influences their engagement in their community and society writ large.
One of the book’s more interesting reflections of intersectionality comes in the way several main characters, although marginalized themselves, are ignorant of the realities of their friend’s lives. For example, until Njemile points it out, Moss does not even consider whether the metal detector will be dangerous or difficult for Reg, and both he and Esperanza completely fail to consider accessibility when they choose a meeting venue without an elevator. A similar instance occurs when Moss, Reg, and Bits think it would be a good idea to provoke the principal into angrily overreacting in order to force the issue by inspiring public backlash. This idea is based on them not being on the receiving end of the principal’s rage, and it is not until Shawna, fresh from her assault by Hull, and Rawiya, who has previously suffered Islamophobic violence from the principal, question this idea that Moss, Reg, and Bits realize their relative privilege and lack of awareness.
We see another aspect of intersectionality in the way Esperanza increasingly shows her lack of awareness of her own privilege and the ways in which Moss and the others experience more prejudice than she does. This first appears when Moss reveals the complete absence of major colleges at his college fair, and Esperanza makes excuses for this, trying to explain it away and refusing to acknowledge that the students of West Oakland High are being discriminated against. It appears again when she suggests that they could pass a petition around her local farmer’s market, forgetting that the rich, white inhabitants of her neighborhood (who always avoid Moss, racially profiling him as a dangerous criminal) ejected them when they tried to run a bake sale for Reg’s surgery. Perhaps the most revealing moment, however, comes when Esperanza says that she wishes she could go to West Oakland High, showing a complete lack of awareness of how much worse the conditions are there than at her own school, despite Moss explaining how bad things are for him and the others.
Esperanza’s thoughtless comments serve to further differentiate the experiences of people of color. It shows that racism is not always a result of an “us” versus “them” divide, but instead racist attitudes arise from a complicated web of relationships that allow implicit privileges and biases to grow unchecked. While Esperanza rightfully feels “othered” in her home space as a Puerto Rican adopted lesbian in a liberal if straight-laced neighborhood, she cannot lay claim to the same level of opposition to her engagement in society that her friends face.
There is one more example of intersectionality that is worth highlighting here also: the intersection of race and sexuality. A gay Black man, Moss has to wonder if Javier is fetishizing him due to stereotypes about Black men and racist attitudes of exoticism, exemplified by the likes of Robert Mapplethorpe. Although he later raises the point with Javier, at this stage it appears only in an additional worry Moss must deal with, a concern that he will have to ask Javier if he has “ever dated a black guy? Was he just an experiment to him, something exotic to try on for size?” (111). Thus, even though Javier is Latino, gay, and undocumented, he doesn’t have to negotiate his sexuality in quite the same way as Moss.
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