77 pages • 2 hours read
Mark OshiroAnger Is a Gift
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 1-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Moss and Esperanza ride the train from the mall back to West Oakland. Moss, the protagonist, is a gay Black teenager, and Esperanza is a Puerto Rican immigrant with white adoptive parents. She is also Moss’s best friend. The train is delayed due to police activity at West Oakland station. A Latino teenager compliments Moss’s bike and introduces himself as Javier. When they discover that they are both gay, they flirt a little, and Javier reveals that he is on his way to a demonstration protesting the police shooting a young, unarmed man.
When the train arrives at the station, Esperanza warns Moss that they have to be careful, and Moss becomes anxious when he sees red and blue police lights. He almost falls, but Esperanza supports him, and he manages to calm himself by practicing breathing techniques his therapist taught him.
Esperanza asks if he and Javier have exchanged numbers, but Moss wants to get out of the station first. However, they walk into the protest and are surrounded demonstrators. Moss’s father had been an activist and was murdered by police officers, allegedly due to mistaken identity (although Moss’s mother will later reveal that she believes that it was intentional and targeted). Several people in the crowd recognize Moss because of this and approach him, increasing his anxiety so much that he has a panic attack and collapses.
Chapter 2 Summary
A handsome paramedic named Diego puts an oxygen mask on Moss and helps him call his mother Wanda. He asks Moss why the crowd recognized him, and, anxiously aware that Javier is listening, Moss reveals that police killed his father six years ago. Feeling insensitive, Javier apologizes for inviting Moss to a demonstration about police brutality, and to Moss’s delighted surprise, asks if he still wants to exchange numbers. After Javier leaves, Esperanza gently supports Moss as he talks about the panic attack. He discusses explains he cannot be “always ready to fight and march and rally” (30), and the expectation contributes to his anxiety. He then recalls happy memories about his father.
Esperanza is staying at Moss’s house while her parents are away at an academic conference, and when they arrive there, Wanda greets them warmly, hugging Moss and checking that he is okay. Moss excuses himself and goes down the street to sit on the step of the market where his father was killed. Six years after witnessing it, he cannot forget the details of the murder—the sound of the gun, the sight of the blood—but he has found that he can calm himself by sitting on the step and running through a “Rolodex” (34) of happier memories of his father. After a while, Wanda comes up and silently hugs him. They return home.
Chapter 3 Summary
The next day Moss is tired; he had stayed up late talking about the day’s events and then had slept badly, waking from nightmares of police officers in black uniforms. They take the train towards their schools and Esperanza has an altercation with a white businessman who arrogantly refuses to move for them. Moss is delighted by the way she does not “take shit from anyone” (40). They meet more of their friends, but Esperanza has to say goodbye and take her shuttle bus to her expensive school while the others walk on to the underfunded West Oakland High.
Moss’s friendship group represents a number of marginalized identities and experiences. Bits is nonbinary, Njemile is a lesbian with two lesbian mothers, Kaisha is asexual, Reg is biromantic and physically disabled after a car crash, and Rawiya is a Muslim punk sporting a headscarf and an X-Ray Spex shirt, much to the annoyance of other more privileged white punks.
Arriving at school, Moss reflects that the building must once have been impressive but is now severely dilapidated. Frank Hull, a police officer assigned to the school, stands out as a white face among the predominantly students of color. Attempting to ingratiate himself, Hull nods at Moss, but Moss does not return the gesture, shuddering at the sight of Hull’s gun.
Moss and Njemile share the same homeroom class with Mrs. Torrance, an extravagantly dressed woman who had been a community activist with Moss’s mother. Mrs. Torrance explains that the school has lost funding for anything apart from tests, and the school principal, Mr. Jay Elliot, announces through the speaker system that they are implementing a new policy of randomly searching lockers.
Chapter 4 Summary
Since Moss’s father’s death, Wanda has had to work long hours at the post office, and other people often help by cooking communal meals. That night, Njemile is there with her mothers, who are cooking for them, when Wanda asks Moss what is wrong. She eventually gets him to admit that the school has started doing random locker searches, that Hull is still armed despite parental complaints, and that the school is so underfunded that many of their textbooks are now stacks of photocopied pages. Wanda asks what he is going to do about it, but he replies, “Nothin’, I suppose. What can I do?” (53).
Chapter 5 Summary
The next day, Moss attends his English class, also with Mrs. Torrance. They will be studying Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, but ironically, most copies of the book have fallen apart and there is no funding to replace them. Kaisha offers everyone pirated digital copies, and Mrs. Torrance reluctantly agrees. She reveals that the science teacher paid two thousand dollars of his own money to kit the lab adequately. Some students suggest fund raising for the school, but Moss asks why it should have to come to that, resenting the idea that it is their responsibility.
After class, they witness Officer Hull roughly pull books out of a student’s locker and dump them on the floor while the student cries and says that she needs to get to her next class. When he sees students watching, Hull threatens that their lockers will be next if they do not move along. Moss receives a text from Javier inviting him over to his place on Friday.
Chapter 6 Summary
Wanda’s friend Shamika is helping cook that night and jokingly notes that Moss has something he is not saying. Moss sighs about always being so easy to read and reveals that he wants to go over to a friend’s house on Friday. When he reveals that the friend is a boy, Wanda and Shamika slowly realize that he is talking about a romantic interest. They are both fully accepting of Moss’s sexuality but ask for details about Javier.
When Moss reveals that Javier asked for his number after seeing him have a panic attack, Shamika says that he should “Marry that man right now” (69), because “If he’s already cool with you and your head, that’s a step above most people I’ve met” (70). Wanda is more cautious, checking that Javier’s mom will be present and asking if Moss has condoms. She is comfortable with the idea of him having sex and only wants him to use precautions, but Moss says he is not ready yet anyway.
Shamika and Wanda leave for a night out and Moss starts selecting an outfit for Friday. He is extremely insecure about his body, noticing that he can no longer fit into some of his clothes and feeling that he is overweight. He has to remind himself that Javier would not have asked for his number if he thought Moss was ugly.
Chapters 1-6 Analysis
The opening chapters situate the book’s key characters in their respective states of intersectional agency. Moss, the protagonist, is a sixteen-year-old gay Black teenager living in West Oakland. As such, Moss must face oppression from three different salient facets of his identity. We first encounter him traveling home on the train with his best friend Esperanza, a Puerto Rican-American lesbian with white adoptive parents. She also must grow to understand how the salient aspects of her identity afford and strip her of certain privileges depending on the context in which she engages with others. Moss’s love interest is Javier, a young, gay, undocumented immigrant. These three friends encounter racism, Nationalism, homophobia, classism, and objectification in different ways at different times, and yet they are all together on an American train, sharing an American youth.
Two of the book’s key themes—police brutality and systemic trauma—quickly become apparent through Moss’s interactions in these first few chapters. Javier reveals that he is on his way to a protest about the police murdering an unarmed person of color, and this is not surprising to the other characters: as Oshiro will repeatedly highlight throughout the book, this is simply the reality of life for poor people of color in America. While protests are an ongoing feature of Moss and his friends’ everyday lives, their reaction to this lived experience is not mundane. Every facet of their personality, their self-esteem, their worldview, and their agency to engage in the American Dream is affected by the lingering sense of danger—the knowledge that they are not safe in a country that does not consider them a valid part of its society.
The results of normalized violence are also explored through Moss’s response to the police presence at the station and then to the demonstrators themselves. Moss’s panic attacks serve as a motif, reflecting the trauma of police brutality, showing how police violence has a pervasive effect on victims, family members, and witnesses. The fact that Moss’s father’s murder occurred six years prior to the events of the book and still affects Moss in such a drastic, physical, visceral manner shows how long-lasting and significant such trauma is, a key concern of the novel and a contributing factor to the systemic wounds of historically racist practices in U.S. culture. Indeed, Moss’s habit of sitting on the steps of the market where his father was killed and running through a “Rolodex” of memories to drive the sound of the gun and sight of the blood from his head works to demonstrate the great lengths traumatized people often go through to manage the deep psychological scarring brought about by their experiences, even many years later.
Moss’s experiences of police brutality and trauma also offer early insights into the other key characters. For example, Esperanza cares deeply for Moss and is, in this area at least, highly sensitive and perceptive, serving as a bedrock of his support network. Likewise, we learn that Wanda is a caring and supportive mother and that Javier, although he has only just met Moss, is understanding and empathetic, not being put off by Moss’s mental health. Indeed, as Shamika will later say to Moss, “If he’s already cool with you and your head, that’s a step above most people I’ve met” (70). We learn more about Esperanza in these chapters too, particularly that her confidence and capacity to stand up for others extends to challenging those with more privilege and power than herself, leading Moss to delight in the way she does not “take shit from anyone” (40). However, we also learn that Esperanza’s confidence might be due to the fact that she is considerably more privileged than Moss and their other friends thanks to her white parents’ wealth and her own relatively light skin. Homophobia has also historically centered upon men’s practices, while lesbianism has been glorified and objectified by the male gaze. Thus, while Esperanza rightfully feels oppressed by many groups in many contexts (by biological families, by nonimmigrants, by those with lighter skin, and by heterosexuals), she doesn’t realize that she has the agency to react vocally and loudly to her oppression while her friends do not. This briefly introduces another key theme: intersectionality, or the way in which forms of discrimination and social categorization cross over and connect to form different levels of privilege across different life experiences. This too will become increasingly significant to Moss and Esperanza’s relationship, as well as to their friends, who all belong to different marginalized groups that shape the different forms of oppression they encounter.
While Esperanza attends a far better funded, mostly white school, Moss and the others all go to the dilapidated, underfunded West Oakland High. In this sense, the school itself is symbolically significant, representing the institutional racism of the school system that fails to adequately support poor, inner city schools largely populated by students of color and instead, in a return to the theme of police brutality, criminalizing its student body and allowing increasingly stringent and oppressive security policies. In fact, one of the very few white faces present at the school is that of Officer Hull, the armed police officer will later assault one of the students.
