77 pages • 2 hours read
Anger Is a Gift
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Symbols & Motifs
Panic Attacks
Since witnessing his father’s murder six years earlier, Moss’s life has been marked by trauma, manifesting in anxiety, nightmares, and especially panic attacks. Indeed, he collapses within the first chapters of the book after being triggered by a protest against the police murdering another unarmed person of color. The fact that Esperanza is so used to them and so well-versed in how to respond helps to highlight both how regular they are and what a debilitating and significant effect they have on his life. The same is true of the fact that Moss has several techniques given to him by a therapist for dealing with them, including sorting through a “Rolodex” of happy memories of his father, without which he cannot get the sound of the gun or the sight of the blood out of his head. In this sense, Moss’s panic attacks are symbolically significant, highlighting the lasting effects of police brutality and the fact that victims of violence and murder by the police extend far beyond those actually killed or injured by them.
West Oakland High
West Oakland High is drastically underfunded. The walls are crumbling and many of the windows are smashed. The sports teams are being cancelled and the school lacks resources to supply lab equipment or books. In this sense, the school stands as a representation of the way young people of color are mistreated by the school system and society at large, helping to highlight the pervasive influence of systematic racism. Because educational institutions exist to foster a bright future for young Americans and to shepherd them into productive members of society, a crumbing school with no educational tools imparts the idea that society has given up on poor people of color. Society is telling the students they are worthless and their lives are hopeless; hegemonic powers will not invest in them. The students are not given access to educational resources and lose even more funding as their low test scores reflect this lack of provision, with respectable colleges not even bothering to attend their college fair as a result. In other words, because they are poor and people of color, the students are not given access to the same opportunities as the rich, mostly white kids who attend Esperanza’s school, helping to maintain a cycle of poverty and discrimination. Worse, the school actively criminalizes the students, treating them as dangerous through invasive and disproportionate security measures that are themselves dangerous and demeaning; the school is not truly concerned with its students’ safety but rather their subjugation.
Metal Detector
Much like the school’s lack of funding and dilapidated condition, the metal detector reflects a lack of concern with the students’ wellbeing and instead highlights their treatment as criminals with low social value. Indeed, the fact that the school cannot afford textbooks but still installs a metal detector truly shows where its priorities lie: with intimidation and social control rather than with education. From the beginning the metal detector represents the criminalization of people of color—the assumption that, despite no history of weapons being brought into the school, such methods are necessary. This becomes even more marked when it is revealed that the detector is actually a piece of military-grade technology designed to be used in Afghanistan, capable of scanning inside the students’ bodies and disabling their cell phones. This is an incredibly extreme and disproportionate response to the students getting angry when one of them is assaulted by a police officer and symbolically highlights the school’s racist disregard for its students’ welfare.
Militarized Police
Like the metal detector, the fact that police attend the protest with anonymous militarized clothing and equipment symbolizes the criminalizing of people of color as well as a disregard for their safety. The officers are armed with an array of elaborate, cruel, painful weaponry and do not hesitate to use them on unarmed students who are simply trying to stage a peaceful protest (against police violence and the criminalization of students, appropriately). The belief that this is a proportionate response highlights their contempt for the students, something that would, as the characters observe, never be allowed to occur at a rich, majority-white school like Esperanza’s, which demonstrates the racism underpinning this extreme policing. The fact that the officers have their entire bodies covered with armor and their faces obscured by helmets, and that they wear no ID or numbers, is intended to intimidate as well as to provide an anonymity that makes it harder for them to be held responsible for their actions, again symbolizing their callous disregard for the lives of people of color.
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