Moss reluctantly agrees but is skeptical that it will achieve anything, having seen the movement to get justice for his father fizzle out years before. Moss’s friends are keen to organize a meeting to respond to the incident. When a police officer forces him through, the magnets pin him to the detector, exacerbating his injury so much that he will likely never walk again. Moss’s friend Reg refuses to go through the detector, concerned that it will agitate the pins placed in his leg after a car accident left him reliant on crutches and a wheelchair. The students react angrily to this incident, and the school responds by allowing the police department to install metal detectors at the entrance. Things quickly escalate at the school when Shawna, a young trans girl from Moss’s English class, is assaulted by the officer when he finds her medication in her locker and believes it to be drugs. He learns that the school has brought in harsh security measures allowing the police officer assigned to the school to perform random locker searches.
Moss’s feelings become even more insurmountable when he starts his sophomore year at his dilapidated, underfunded high school. While traveling back from the mall with Esperanza, Moss meets Javier, a gay Latino undocumented immigrant, and the two hit it off they exchange numbers despite Moss having a panic attack at the train station when confronted with a demonstration against police brutality. As he battles panic attacks and heightened anxiety, he is supported by his mother, Wanda, and his close friendship group of queer and marginalized teenagers, especially his best friend Esperanza, a Puerto Rican immigrant with white adoptive parents. He struggles daily with the trauma of witnessing his father’s murder by police officers six years earlier in a case of mistaken identity. Moss is a gay Black teenager living in West Oakland. Written during the Trump presidency and a rise in the Black Lives Matter movement, Anger Is a Gift offers young readers a means to conceptualize their American experience and illuminate others’, as well as a lens through which to understand the various privileges (or, conversely, lack of agency) offered by their affinity groups.
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