The Costs of Activism: A Review of Anger Is a Gift

Sixteen-year-old Moss Jeffries is no stranger to police brutality in his West Oakland neighborhood. Six years earlier, police shot and killed his unarmed father outside a grocery store. While his mother has continued her activism in what little spare time she has after supporting and raising her only son. Moss only wants to get good grades, hang out with his friends, and find his first boyfriend. He does not want to be, in his words, a “superstar of tragedy porn,” a life that has resulted in disabling panic attacks. Yet, when administrators at his high school cancel clubs and sports and fail to provide proper textbooks – using the money instead for racist security officers, random locker searches, and metal detectors that injure one of Moss’s friends – he feels he has no choice but to speak out, whatever the consequences to himself. In a city with an increasingly militarized police force, though, a walkout to protest school policies goes horribly, fatally wrong. Moss cannot stand by while the adults debate, the media twist the facts to demonize the teens and exonerate the police, and the white parents of one of his best friends betray the cause. He chains himself to a flagpole in front of police headquarters, a daring move that could bring about real change – or could result in even more senseless deaths at the hands of an out-of-control police force.

Mark Oshiro’s gripping debut novel explores the intersectional identities of a protagonist who identifies as African American, gay, and disabled and whose friends represent all these experiences as well. Oshiro shows that queer teens hang together and, in contrast to the stereotypes, Black and brown parents love and support them in both their diverse identities and their activism. The large cast of characters – students at West Oakland High School and friends who attend other schools in Oakland – reflect Moss’s wide social circle and the people who are affected by state violence and the resistance to it. Anger Is a Gift  vividly details how activism works and the perils activists confront, and in this way will inform as well as inspire. Moss is a complex and memorable character, one who has to balance personal safety with his devotion to his friends and to the cause of justice for each one of them.