“The most disrespected woman in America is the black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the black woman. The most neglected person in America is the black woman,” said Malcolm X, words Beyoncé sampled earlier this year on her album Lemonade. When they were first spoken in 1962, they were spoken in sadness. When they were repeated in 2016, they were repeated in anger.

What fascinates me most about anger is how and why we try to conceal it. Most of us—not just black women—are told to manage our anger. Sometimes I get so angry I wish I could cut the feeling out of my body like a tumor. I work on dealing with it calmly and respectfully. I try to be circumspect about it, identify where it’s coming from and zap it. Most of the time I’m not successful, but maybe that’s a good thing.

Anger can be one of our strongest allies. That’s sort of what Lemonade is about: the way one woman digests her anger into acts of violence, through which she eventually finds resolution, acceptance, and peace. There’s beauty and power in letting anger work its way through you. Suppressing it is ugly and weak.

One of the most damaging things about the angry-black-woman stereotype is how it says that women of color don’t get to participate in this beautiful, powerful, healing process. It suggests that our anger—a basic emotion shared by all humans—is something different, something we should feel ashamed of. It aims to stifle our anger and our power by offering the lifeless and shallow reward of respectability. The consequences, while subtle, can be devastating.

A week before Beyoncé dropped Lemonade, HBO released Confirmation, a film based on Anita Hill’s 1991 testimony during the Senate confirmation hearings for now–Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas. Hill, at that time a law professor at the University of Oklahoma, had worked with Thomas at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in the late 1980s and described to the Senate committee the ways in which he’d harassed her sexually: repeatedly asking her out on dates, bragging about his sexual prowess, discussing pornography in graphic detail, and, once, joking about pubic hair on a Coke can.

In Confirmation, Hill is played by Kerry Washington, who demonstrates black women’s anger weekly on the TV show Scandal. One of the most striking things about her performance is just how calm she is. The real Hill, too, was remarkably unfazed on the stand. You can watch the clips on YouTube: if she harbors any anger, it’s tucked away somewhere underneath her neatly tailored, double-breasted teal suit.

I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if, back in 1991, the year of Operation Desert Storm and the Rodney King riots, Hill had been an angry black woman instead of an aloof, perfectly put-together attorney. What if she’d played the unhinged and irascible mammy? The jezebel? The screaming, foot-stomping bugaboo? Perhaps in a counterintuitive way, with special consideration given to the politics of the time, it would have made her testimony feel more authentic. The New York Times did a poll after her testimony and found that more than half of Americans thought her accusations were “probably not true.” But then again, an angry black woman has always been a dangerous thing. Just ask Angela Wright, another of Thomas’s targets. As played in Confirmation by Jennifer Hudson, she’s loudmouthed and ballsy. You won’t find clips of her testimony on YouTube, though. She never even got to speak.

As we all know, Thomas survived his confirmation battle. He’s gone on to become one of the court’s most conservative justices, voting against women’s rights, marriage equality, and affirmative action. The moral of the story isn’t that Hill did something wrong, though. It’s that she did everything right and that still wasn’t enough.

When black women are angry, we’re invisible. When we hide that anger underneath a nice suit and an education, we’re still invisible. But it’s important to acknowledge that we have a choice, that anger is nothing to be ashamed of, and, as Bey shows us, it can even lead to redemption. Writes bell hooks, what makes Lemonade so distinctive is the “construction of a powerfully symbolic black female sisterhood that resists invisibility, that refuses to be silent.”

When dealing with my own anger, I sometimes wonder, Could it be that I’ve been anesthetizing the pain it causes, trying to pretend that my anger doesn’t exist? So that when someone asks me about things that make me angry, I can respond in a casual, analytical, distant way? So that I don’t have to be the angry black woman? Maybe trying to disappear my anger is more damaging than letting it be. The more I accept that anger, the better I am at loving what it means, and helping others understand why it matters.