"Our task, of course, is to transmute the anger that is affliction into the anger that is determination to bring about change. I think, in fact, that one could give that as a definition of revolution"
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Deming treats anger less like a wildfire to be feared than a raw material to be refined. The verb "transmute" does the heavy lifting: it borrows the alchemist's fantasy of turning base metal into gold, but relocates it in the psyche and the street. Anger, in her framing, arrives first as "affliction" - something that happens to you, that can corrode judgment and trap you in a private loop of grievance. The political move is not to banish that feeling (a demand often weaponized against the marginalized) but to change its chemical composition into "determination", a word that implies direction, stamina, and tactics.
The quiet provocation is her insistence on discipline as the core of upheaval. Revolution isn't defined by spectacle, purity tests, or even ideology; it's defined by emotional conversion into sustained action. That reading fits Deming's broader context as a writer and activist shaped by feminist and nonviolent traditions: anger is legitimate evidence that something is wrong, but it becomes historically meaningful only when it is metabolized into strategy, coalition, and repeatable choices.
"Of course" is a small, sharp rhetorical trick. She smuggles in a norm: this is what grown-up movements do. The sentence also resists a common binary - anger as either righteous or destructive. Deming suggests it's both, depending on whether it's left to injure its holder or trained to pressure institutions. Her definition of revolution is, in the end, a demand for emotional literacy with political consequences.
The quiet provocation is her insistence on discipline as the core of upheaval. Revolution isn't defined by spectacle, purity tests, or even ideology; it's defined by emotional conversion into sustained action. That reading fits Deming's broader context as a writer and activist shaped by feminist and nonviolent traditions: anger is legitimate evidence that something is wrong, but it becomes historically meaningful only when it is metabolized into strategy, coalition, and repeatable choices.
"Of course" is a small, sharp rhetorical trick. She smuggles in a norm: this is what grown-up movements do. The sentence also resists a common binary - anger as either righteous or destructive. Deming suggests it's both, depending on whether it's left to injure its holder or trained to pressure institutions. Her definition of revolution is, in the end, a demand for emotional literacy with political consequences.
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