Righteous anger is a force for good.

We are all prisoners of our mental models and have blind spots. All humans tend to assume other people are like they are, which is always wrong at times.

One of the ways people remain trapped psychologically is they expect a certain outcome, behave accordingly and thereby make it self-fulfilling prophecy.  The path out is by allowing for other possibilities without counting on them.

People who have been hurt tend to want a sure thing and there are no sure things. Someone hurt them, they decide "no one can be trusted" and they become the kind of awful person no one can trust, thus creating a situation in which the thing they crave cannot possibly exist.

So they create "a sure thing" but not a sure thing that makes things better for them. Their own behavior guarantees they can count on other people being awful to them not because all other people are awful but because they are awful.

This is not only individuals cutting their nose off to spite their face. This keeps societal problems alive.

Women who go online and claim all their problems at work boil down to sexism and misogyny actively reinforce gender-based negative outcomes. Many people of color also expect to be shafted by white people and actively make it impossible to find white allies while giving white people reason to distrust and dislike people of color.

Many years ago, I was a military wife stationed in Kansas. Our car was solely in my husband's name, not mine, and he left for Saudi Arabia on three weeks notice. 

I always had power of attorney but our car was registered in the state of Georgia and the Georgia DMV was at that time one of the two or three worst DMVs in the US for being a bureaucratic hell.

I don't remember all the details but my general power of attorney was insufficient in the eyes of the Georgia DMV and after physically driving to Georgia with expired plates and showing up at a DMV office in person, some discussion with a person who worked there ended with me saying in exasperation "I was BORN here!" because every question she asked me resulted in more "Fuck you and the horse you rode in on. You cannot get this fixed."

She was a black woman and she very kindly and graciously promptly walked over to her white supervisor and bald faced lied that I never received my paperwork. So I got to pay a $20 late fee and get out of bureaucratic hell and was thrilled to cough up the extra dough.

I told this story to my parents in the presence of a black friend of theirs who laughed and said nothing in a way that I interpreted as "Yeah, black people have loads of experience with the system being designed to fuck you over. Sometimes a lie is the only solution."

Years later while working at a Fortune 500 company, very poor and living without a car, a black teammate offered to be my ride home. She hoped to get a closer parking spot by participating in a ride sharing program they had.

In reality, it was a lousy program designed by people who were car dependent and had rigid ideas, so her application not only didn't get her a better parking spot, it cost the woman who was picking me up in the morning her better parking spot.

This black woman clearly had baggage and I guess thought she could jerk around a poor white woman and no one would care or something. Every single time I went to her desk promptly at the end of our shift, she was "busy" and left me hanging for another fifteen or twenty minutes. 

The one time I decided to keep working another fifteen minutes myself, she and a snooty friend of hers were waiting on me in the stairwell, apparently talking trash about me. With that I concluded this was intentional and no matter what I did, she would try to make sure it was a negative experience for me.

It was an hour long walk home but as little as seven minutes by car. I rarely walked the whole way home and was typically offered a ride in under ten minutes if I left on foot, so her offer of "assistance" had me getting home later on average than usual.

So probably the day after the stairwell incident, I went to her desk and asked if she was ready to go. I had decided I would no longer wait for her and if she wasn't ready to go immediately, I would just leave on foot.

She gave me an attitude and clearly was looking to pick a fight. I was polite, respectful and didn't take the bait. 

I don't have a sense of entitlement. I don't feel the world owes me a ride home because I'm poor and don't have a car.

So I told her politely that it wasn't a big deal, but I wasn't waiting for her. I was leaving on foot.

I felt good about deciding that I didn't have to accept her shit. I was likely to get home faster if I just left and it was an empowering experience for me to decide that not having a car didn't mean I had to be someone's victim.

She clearly didn't know how to react to someone not letting her gratuitously pick a fight with them. And within two or three days, her cousin emailed me and informed me she wouldn't be able to drive me home anymore because she had totaled her car.

To me that sounded like her encounter with me caused her to total her car for psychological reasons. I didn't care. I was expecting to leave on foot anyway rather than put up with her shit.

I've been poor for a lot of years but chronic poverty is the exception. It's like two percent of the American population that is poor five or more years out of ten when between twelve and sixteen percent of the population falls below the poverty line in any given year.

If you are a person of color and you think shafting a white person who is currently low man on the totem pole will feel good to you because you're angry about systemic racism, odds are good you are cutting your nose off to spite your face because they probably won't stay poor but they will stay white and will remember that although blacks and other people of color whine and cry about systemic racism, a lot of them are perfectly happy to shaft you based entirely on the color of your skin though you have never personally given them any reason to be angry at you as an individual.

A lot of years ago, I read a piece about a woman who would pray during difficult times "God, make me a potato." It is rooted in the idea that if you boil an egg it turns harder but if you boil a potato it turns softer.

It was a prayer asking to use their tough times to make them a kinder, better person, not a hateful, bitter person.

The black woman at the DMV clearly knew something I didn't about how to navigate a situation where the system says "Fuck you" no matter what you do. And that was likely rooted in her experience as a black American.

Whatever other people have done to you, hating on people superficially "like" them in skin color or gender etc. only makes problems like racism and sexism more intractable. It is self fulfilling prophecy because you are now guilty of the thing you want to accuse all (whites/men/whatever) of.

Is it hard to find ways to leave space for the possibility that THIS individual won't be like other (category) you have dealt with? Sure.

But making sure you hurt them before they can hurt you guarantees you won't find allies because only a fool will continue being kind and generous to someone who was intentionally hostile and hurtful to them as an individual without provocation. That's straight up abuse, not "protecting yourself."

Worse, it means they may eventually give up on being idealistic, high minded, wanting to fight the good fight etc. and conclude you're a hypocrite who has no problem with this world being a Lord of the Flies shit pile. You don't want to create a world in which no one shits on anyone. You just want to be one of the people doing the shitting rather than one of the people being used as a toilet.

Why in the hell should well heeled white males agree with a bunch of angry assholes that they should volunteer to be the toilet? If you want a better world, you need to figure out an answer that doesn't ask people more privileged than you to volunteer to be your toilet because someone else hurt you and you're angry about it.

Righteous anger is a force for good. Righteous anger doesn't involve kicking the dog because you're too spineless to do something constructive and effective about the actual "villain" or actual problem.

Righteous anger is aimed at fixing the problem, not pissing on people you feel you can get away with hurting because you're hurt, angry, incompetent and an asshole.