When Anger Becomes an Ally: Liberation, Juneteenth, and the Rage That Saved Me

Hope Infusion Juneteenth Edition - June 19, 2025

Happy Juneteenth, a day that commemorates delayed freedom! A day that reminds us how long liberation can take to arrive and how much longer it can take to be received.

On this day five years ago, June 19, 2020, I walked away from a workplace that was toxic in ways that had been long existent but took me years to fully acknowledge. It was my final day on the job, but it became symbolic of something more.

Juneteenth, long a symbol of historical emancipation, also became a personal threshold. A crossing. A severing. A liberation not just from a toxic workplace, but from a system that demanded my silence in exchange for belonging.

Like the formerly enslaved in Texas who had technically been free for two years but were never told, I had refused to tell myself the truth in my final two years there, ignoring a plethora of signs. I knew deep down that my time there was up, but it took an act of rage to finally deliver the message in a language I could no longer dismiss.

This is the story of that rage. Not the destructive kind. The sacred kind.

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When Anger Becomes an Ally

My iPhone dinged with a text that would transform grief into rage, tears into fire. It was June 1, 2020, one week after George Floyd's murder, one month after Breonna Taylor's death, weeks after videos surfaced of Ahmaud Arbery's brutal killing in my home state of Georgia. The nation was burning, and I was drowning in tears.

I'm not typically a crier – my children would tell you their tender-hearted father claims that award in our home. But as Murderous May 2020 drew to a close with Floyd's final gasps for breath under a policeman's knee, something in me shattered.

Four hundred years of ancestral trauma, alive in my DNA, staged a hostile takeover of my emotional faculties. I had taken the week off work, unable to maintain professional composure while processing this collective grief.

And then came the text — a request to craft the equivalent of an "All Lives Matter" statement on behalf of the company. The sheer audacity of it awakened something primal within me.

My inner lioness broke free as indignation coursed through my frame – an F5 tornado, a category 5 hurricane, an erupting volcano of justified rage.

This was the same company that had celebrated me as their "acceptable negro" until I began questioning their tolerance of clients' bigoted language and discriminatory requests.

The same "Christian company" that solicited prayers for God's favor while embracing religious and racial bias. My Black presence had been welcomed for the perception of diversity it created, but actually BEING Black, giving voice to Black concerns, was never part of the deal.

I took four days to gather my thoughts before responding with my resignation letter. Looking back, I see now that anger arrived as an ally, staging an intervention I had long needed. The truth was, these issues had ALWAYS been evident – they were the "familiar discomfort" I had trained myself to compartmentalize and ignore. I must and do own full responsibility for that.

Sometimes, anger and endings are twin blessings in disguise, and getting to the next level of personal development requires that we end toxic relationships and move on.

It demands that we stop mistaking familiarity for safety and comfort for growth. It may mean killing off things in which we were invested, uprooting what we once nurtured, tearing down what we previously built.

Anger, in that season, became my bridge over troubled waters, guiding me from a distress-filled yesterday to a purpose-driven today. And what was waiting on the other side? My deferred dreams, forgotten hopes, and postponed passions, all welcoming me home with open arms.

"What took you so long?" they collectively whispered. And for once, I had no answer – only gratitude for the rage that had finally led me home.

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Poetic Resistance: Anger as a Welcome Guide

Sacred fire that burns within,
Not a sin to be contained
But wisdom's torch that lights the way
When truth must be reclaimed.

They taught me peace at any price,
To swallow flames and bite my tongue,
But righteous rage breaks binding chains
And sings those songs unsung.

So welcome anger as your guide,
This fierce and faithful friend.
For in its heat, we often find
The strength to rise, to mend.

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Parting Thoughts

We don’t talk enough about the holiness of endings or the way some doors must slam shut so we stop slipping back into rooms we’ve long outgrown. On that Juneteenth, I didn’t just resign. I remembered.

I remembered my worth. I remembered my ancestors. I remembered the quiet truth I had been taught to overlook: that some storms arrive not to destroy us, but to set us free.

If you find yourself standing at the edge of your own breaking point, know this: Your anger might not be the enemy of your growth, it might just be the catalyst. Liberation doesn’t always arrive gently. Sometimes it erupts. Sometimes it burns. And sometimes, that burning clears the ground for something sacred to take root.

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