Alabama as a rage room

  You probably know what a rage room is. People fork over cash and spend time destroying household items like dishes and furniture cabinets.

  They’re marketed as stress relief. But getting violent isn’t a path toward tranquility. It just encourages you to be violent.

  Smash a plate or a teacup or a TV as much as you want. It might feel like you’ve released something. But that’s not calm. It’s a fleeting sense of power, easily confused with catharsis.

  And one destructive outburst feels normal. An appropriate way to manage frustration, whatever comes in its way.  The rage you thought you exorcized becomes fuel for still more violent sallies.

  Alabama’s leaders may not be throwing folding chairs or screaming like a professional wrestler circa 1984. But anger is a key component of our politics.

  The state government is bad at a lot of its duties. It can’t give teachers the resources needed to educate children. It can’t protect incarcerated people from murder and assault. It uses every euphemism for “cheap labor” to hide the fact that there is little else to appeal to business here.

  But it is very good at targeting the powerless.

  We have detailed laws from the antebellum era regulating enslaved people. We have detailed lists of fines for those who taught the enslaved to read and write. Under Alabama law, free Black Americans entering the state faced whipping and, if they remained, slavery.

  The racist authoritarians who took over Montgomery in the 1870s defied the U.S. Constitution for nearly 100 years, suppressing Black Alabamians’ votes through fraud and violence. Until 2022, our state constitution retained language requiring white and Black students to attend separate schools. I don’t need to tell you which schools white lawmakers refused to fund to any reasonable amount.

  This essential operating principle remained after Jim Crow fell in the 1960s. Two state commissions set up to enforce segregation turned toward investigating college students. The director of one later acknowledged at a trial that they spied on interracial couples.

  Legislators wasted years on passing a ban on same-sex marriage; first as a law, then as a constitutional amendment. They subjected immigrants to legalized harassment through HB 56, passed in 2011. One of the backers of the bill said it aimed to encourage immigrants to “self-deport,” a more concise way of saying “flee the state due to legalized thuggery.”

  Centuries of paranoia and cruelty. All as the state remained at the bottom of every measurement of well-being and common decency.

  This is the design of Alabama’s government. Hold down the marginalized. Indulge the privileged. Let the most powerful people in the state work themselves into a rage over fantasies that they’re the real victims in Alabama.

  It explains the cruelties we continue to pile on transgender Alabamians. Earlier this month, Rep. Susan DuBose (R-Hoover) said she would reintroduce a bill to put definitions of sex in the law based on how their reproductive organs work.

  “Because we all know, sex is determined at birth and is determined by God,” al.com reported DuBose saying.

  DuBose’s public career has been an endless campaign to drive transgender Alabamians into the shadows. Her first major bill, signed into law by Gov. Kay Ivey, banned transgender youth from playing college sports. Her definition bill is cruel and pointless, and confuses sex and gender. But advocates have also raised alarms that it could lead to corrections officials putting incarcerated transgender people in dormitories with people of the opposite gender, placing them at considerable risk.

  Under questioning from legislators last February, DuBose hedged on what the legislation would do. She suggested at one point that it would only apply to the state’s equally awful bathroom law.

  I’m skeptical of that. But I’m sure the bill will go far. It got through the House this spring and might have passed the Senate given more time. And if it doesn’t move, I’m sure we’ll see other efforts to punish transgender people for their very existence.

  Because that’s what Alabama’s government is good at. That’s what it does.

  Pick a marginalized group. Lash out. Feel powerful. Pick another. Lash out again. Turn every person not conforming to a narrow definition of an American as a target for unrestrained and unlimited fury. Repeat over decades until our political language has multiple words for “enemy” and none for “compassion.”

  That’s one reason Alabama struggles to improve. The political system doesn’t work to improve the state. It finds delusions for privileged people to get mad at. And it hands them hammers and tells them the state is their target.

  It’s a perfect rage room. But we’re trapped inside, watching people red-faced with rage smashing everything and everyone in Alabama.

  About the author: Brian Lyman is the editor of Alabama Reflector. He has covered Alabama politics since 2006 and worked at the Montgomery Advertiser, the Press-Register, and The Anniston Star. A 2024 Pulitzer finalist for Commentary, his work has also won awards from the Associated Press Managing Editors, the Alabama Press Association, and the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Human Rights.

  This article was published by Alabama Reflector, which is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.