Righteous Rage

Josh Landy
Coming up, it’s Philosophy Talk.

Key & Peele
I know a lot of people out there seem to think that, uh, I don’t get angry. That’s just not true. I get angry a lot.

Josh Landy
If you’re not mad, you’re not paying attention.

Ray Briggs
If politeness isn’t getting you anywhere, maybe it’s time to unleash your political fury.

Key & Peele
You remember my anger translator, Luther. Why… hello.

Josh Landy
Is anger counterproductive?

Ray Briggs
When someone calls out injustice, don’t criticize their tone!

Josh Landy
Punching up, punching down—what if we all just stopped punching each other?

Key & Peele
It’s all part of rough and tumble politics. I hate you!

Ray Briggs
Where do you draw the line between righteous rage and ruthless revenge?

Myisha Cherry
Usually when we think about anger, we think about fury and not necessarily grief.

Josh Landy
Our guest is Myish Cherry, author of “The Case for Rage: Why Anger is Essential to Anti-racist Struggle.”

Myisha Cherry
Anger at injustice.

Josh Landy
Righteous Rage

Ray Briggs
…coming up on Philosophy Talk.

Josh Landy
Shouldn’t we get angry at injustice?

Ray Briggs
Won’t rage just beget more rage?

Josh Landy
Don’t some things deserve our anger?

Ray Briggs
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything

Josh Landy
except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. We’re coming to you via the studios of KALW San Francisco Bay Area,

Josh Landy
continuing conversations that begin at philosophers corner on the Stanford campus where Ray teaches philosophy, and I direct the philosophy and literature initiative.

Ray Briggs
Today we’re thinking about righteous rage.

Josh Landy
Righteous rage. That sounds like an oxymoron to me, Ray. I mean, is righteousness really about rage and destruction? I think it’s more about building something and building a world that’s kind, fair, and loving.

Ray Briggs
Well yeah Josh, I want to live in that world too. But just look around you. There’s injustice everywhere. Dictators oppressing their citizens, corporations destroying the environment, neo-Nazis spewing racism everywhere. Does it just make you mad?

Josh Landy
Well, okay. I mean, I definitely do get mad sometimes. I’m only human. But, you know, I kind of wish I didn’t get mad as much of the time. Yeah. I mean, I don’t want to be one of those people who flies into a rage every time someone cuts them off in traffic.

Ray Briggs
I’m not talking about road rage. Doesn’t matter if someone cuts you off in traffic, getting upset about that is just petty and self centered. I’m talking about anger at social injustice. That matters enough. You should get upset about it. I mean, how are we ever going to change the system if we just let ourselves get complacent?

Josh Landy
Well, I totally agree that the system’s unfair, but the question I’m asking is, is anger the solution? Think about what Seneca said. He says, look, look at all the people committing all those atrocious crimes. If you got as angry at them as they deserve, you’d go mad with rage and you’d end up with with torches and pitchforks, revenge killings, the whole city’s being sacked.

Ray Briggs
I’m not defending murder, but you don’t have to kill someone every time you get angry. Like, look, there are more productive ways to channel your emotions. You can speak out against injustice, or you can join an activist movement and agitate for change.

Josh Landy
Yeah, but even if you’re not, you know, killing anyone or sacking cities or something, still, aren’t there better emotions to appeal to like, like love?

Ray Briggs
Why not both? You can be angry because you’re sticking up for someone you love. Or you can be angry at someone you love, because you expect better from them. I’m not against love. What have you got against anger anyway?

Josh Landy
Well, okay, here’s one thought. Yeah, sometimes anger can be off putting. So suppose there’s someone who cares about you and wants to help you. But you know, you just rant and rave at them about how unfair the world is, like I do sometimes. Don’t you think they’ll be a little turned off?

Ray Briggs
Well, yeah, some people are just turned off the instant anybody criticizes them or has any kind of difficult emotion. But that’s kind of on them, don’t you think? I mean, if somebody can’t tolerate your anger, do they really even love you? Do they even count as an ally?

Josh Landy
Well, maybe those friends and family members are wrong to get put off, I totally take that point. But that doesn’t change the fact that they sometimes do get put off. In fact, quite a lot of the time. I think that happens. You know, anger sometimes scares away potential allies. So even when it’s completely justified, my worry is it can still be damaging to the cause.

Ray Briggs
Well, okay, but I still think anger has a lot of benefits that you’re not seeing. You know, it can be a sign of self respect. If somebody treats you unfairly because of your race, or your gender or your disability, sticking up for yourself as a way of saying, hey, I’m actually worth something. And sticking up for other people is a way of showing respect for them.

Josh Landy
That’s a really good point, especially when it’s the person getting angry on their own behalf. But I’m not necessarily entirely convinced by cases where it’s someone getting angry, for the sake of other people, that can sometimes just be a way of drawing attention to yourself.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, fair enough. I’ve seen that happen, too. And I don’t really know what to say about it. But I bet our guest does. It’s Myisha Cherry, the author of a new book, “The Case for Rage: Why Anger is Essential to Anti-Racist Struggle.”

Josh Landy
Thinking of anger in the fight for justice, we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter Holly J. McDede to talk to two longtime organizers about how righteous rage has fueled their activism. She files this report.

Holly McDede
The Occupy Movement of 2011 didn’t last long, just a few months. The rallying cry against severe wealth disparities, “we are the 99%,” didn’t go away after the tents came down. It happened that people were still reeling from the financial crisis of 2008. Protesters had set up tent cities first near Wall Street and then in cities around the world. One of them was in Oakland, California.

Protester 1
This crowd has righteous anger. That is a part of being human.

Holly McDede
During the march, there captured on video [is] two people debating the role of anger in organizing. One protester says diversity of tactics is needed. Another disagreed and said you need to convert anger into compassion.

Protester 2
No, anger is a by-product of fear.

Holly McDede
At one point the crowd chants “fight back.” During one of those marches, police fire tear gas and baton rounds, severely injuring one protester.

Cat Brooks
I guess I would define righteous rage as rage that’s justifiable.

Holly McDede
Cat Brooks is one of the organizers there with Occupy Oakland.

Cat Brooks
That rage it’s triggered by the daily micro and macro aggression.

Holly McDede
Now, Brooks is with the anti police terror project, a coalition with a stated goal of eradicating police terror in communities of color. She says any organizer working on social justice issues taps into righteous rage. That’s how you get people out to city council meetings and out into the streets. But anger unaddressed can also make people sick and unhealthy.

Cat Brooks
I’m an older head in the movement. And you know, I was raised in the organizing school of “drink, smoke, work to death, die.”

Holly McDede
She saw people burn out and drop out of the movement. Now she says younger organizers are more clear about setting boundaries and not overworking themselves. Anger is one thing but she also feels a lot of deep sadness.

Cat Brooks
I’m working with a family now where the mother was really adamant that I look at the pictures of her dead son on a metal slab after he’d been beaten to death by LA County Sheriffs, and I stopped for hours. It’s exhausting to be sitting in this work all the time to be, you know, acutely aware of injustice every waking moment of every single day.

Holly McDede
But sometimes anger can be an antidote to exhaustion.

Jennifer Friedenbach
When you’re angry about something, the synapses start going and your energy comes back. It’s very hard to be in a rage and be tired at the same time.

Holly McDede
Jennifer Friedenbach is with the Coalition on Homelessness in San Francisco, a group that organizes with unhoused people. She says she feels every emotion several times a day.

Jennifer Friedenbach
It’s just, you know, defeat, tiredness, and then being energized by something that is really wrong.

Holly McDede
Like last December when San Francisco Mayor London Breed talked about cracking down on drug users and dealers. Friedenbach says a lot of people who showed up at the board of supervisors meeting were angry that addiction was being criminalized.

Jennifer Friedenbach
Have you even talked to any homeless people? Vote no and get something real in writing. But no one near Mayor Giuliani’s war on drugs but no one black lives don’t matter.

Holly McDede
Righteous rage is a tool for organizers, but you rarely hear journalists publicly acknowledging their own anger. That’s what happened recently in an episode of the podcast reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting. It’s during a series looking at racial justice called Mississippi Goddamn.

Al Letson
I think it’s beautiful that you want to inspire people. I do. I love that about you.

Protester 1
That’s host Al Letson, talking to reporter Jonathan Jones.

Al Letson
And in certain ways I do want to like do work that inspires people. But really at this point in my life and where I am, I don’t want to inspire people. I want to infuriate people. I want to make work that make people burn so hard, that they feel like this injustice is wrong. And they want to go out and they want to tear it all down.

Holly McDede
Righteous anger and songs and storytelling can push people to act. The question from there becomes, what’s next? What happens in the aftermath of the rage? For Philosophy Talk, I’m Holly J. McDede.

Josh Landy
Thanks for that energizing report, Holly. I’m Josh Landy, with me is my Stanford colleague Ray Briggs and today we’re thinking about righteous rage.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Myisha Cherry. She is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California Riverside, host of The Unmute podcast and author of “The Case for Rage: Why Anger is Essential to Anti-Racist Struggle.” Myisha, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Myisha Cherry
Thank you for having me.

Josh Landy
So Myisha, your new book, which I love, by the way, focuses specifically on anger as a tool for political change. But you’ve also written about other emotions like forgiveness and empathy. So how did you first get interested in the emotions?

Myisha Cherry
Well, it was 2012, Trayvon Martin was killed. And I was trying to make sense of my own anger. And in response to that, also trying to make sense of the anger of other activists, and also trying to make sense of why people was angry that other people was angry. And so I went down a rabbit hole, and it’s been going ever since.

Ray Briggs
So Myisha, you believe that anger is good, but you don’t believe that all anger is good. So what’s special about the good kind?

Myisha Cherry
Well, the good kind has particular features that is different from the bad kind. And one of the things or one of the interesting things about the good kind is that it aims for change, it aims for transformation. Another thing about the good kind is that the perspective that influenced it or that guise it, it is an inclusive perspective. So it’s concerned not just about oneself but about others. And it’s also directed at a actual wrongdoing: racism, racist attitudes, racist people. But the whole point of the anger is to bring about transformation in our world to make it a better world for everyone.

Josh Landy
I love all of those points. And I wanted to add something back in from your excellent book. You know, another thing that you say is that it’s also rational, which is kind of surprising that maybe you don’t use that word. But you know, you talk about it being you know, the good kind of anger being a considered anger, not an impulsive anger, but it’s, it’s the result of a long time of living, experiencing, thinking, reflecting. That sounds like a really healthy kind of anger.

Myisha Cherry
Yeah, it’s a kind of anger that comes about as a result of evaluating the world. And simply suggesting that what I see, what I am experiencing, is not right. And so it’s more a proclamation to make people aware that an injustice has happened, that a wrongdoing has occurred, and that it needs to be rectified. And to do that takes rational capacities. So it’s not this impulsive thing that’s just all about the emotions. It’s all about feelings, but it comes about through an evaluative process.

Ray Briggs
So Myisha, your view on anger differs from what a lot of philosophers have said. So a lot of philosophers have said that anger is never justified and always destructive. So where do you think they they’ve gone wrong?

Myisha Cherry
So anytime you hear a philosopher that say that something is always the case, or anyone says that something is always the case, we know we have encountered a problem there. So one of the things that I you know, that I’m very conscious of is even as I defend anger, I simply suggest that it’s not perfect. That is that it does not always go right. So you need to make room that individuals that experience emotions are human beings. And so that suggests that we can indeed, make mistakes. But I think the problem with the assumption that it’s always wrong, it’s just inaccurate, right? I think that if you direct it towards the right thing, I’m going to sound like Aristotle here, directed towards the right thing, that you aim it at a particular transformation, like I said before, the perspective that influence it, then you have the good kind, and it will allow us to have positive results. I think that what people are concerned about, as you already alluded to the Seneca, that people get angry, and it leads to violence, but not all anger leads to violence, right? Fear can also lead to violence. So we shouldn’t, you know, pay anger in bold strokes as if all kinds of anger does the same thing, or achieves the same results.

Ray Briggs
I worry sometimes about anger having results that don’t match the aim. Like could there be cases where what I want is a, you know, something politically good. But then I don’t know, my anger is like in the Arab Spring, where some old and deeply unjust government gets overthrown and what replaces it is not something politically better, but some other awful oppressive system.

Myisha Cherry
Yeah, one might say, I mean, who’s replacing it with what? I mean, here’s the thing. I mean, not every you know, we live in a non ideal world. We want to hope that what we witness is wrong. And we want to hope that that wrong can be remedied. But it doesn’t suggest that just because we have the right just kind of anger that I’m referring to that we’re always going to get the perfect results. Right, I think it depends on context. And it’s just not just up to the angry individual, to make sure that the story is perfect, right. It takes a society and for lots of situations, when certain governments get into power. That doesn’t just come about because the people desire it that to happen. Things can go wrong. But I’m simply suggesting that the kind of thing that I’m referring to, that it’s more it’s more prone to go right, given certain kinds of circumstances.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about righteous rage with Myisha Cherry from the University of California at Riverside.

Ray Briggs
Is it ever okay to be angry? Do some things demand our fury? How can we tell the difference between righteous indignation and destructive rage?

Josh Landy
When to get mad, when to stay calm, and how to know the difference, along with your comments and questions when Philosophy Talk continues.

When you remember these kinds of things, is rage the best response? I’m Josh Landy and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything

Ray Briggs
except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and we’re thinking about righteous rage with Myisha cherry from UC Riverside, author of “The Case for Rage.”

Josh Landy
We’re pre-recording this episode. So unfortunately, we can’t take your phone calls. But you can always email us at comments@philosophytalk.org. Or you can comment on our website where you can also become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes.

Ray Briggs
So Myisha, we’re talking earlier about the difference between the good kind of anger and the bad kind. So how can somebody tell which one they’re experiencing or somebody else is experiencing?

Myisha Cherry
So one of the things that I that I hope to accomplish in the book, I mean, even before someone gets to the middle of the book, that’s the first thing that I tried to address. And I think that if you go back to the features that I kind of laid out earlier, is that one can ask oneself several questions. What is that anger directed at, right? So if it’s directed at scapegoats and not really the real issue of the real problem that we know we have encountered a problem, right? If I’m only thinking about justice for myself, then we know we have encountered a problem. If I don’t aim to bring about a better world for everyone, but I ain’t ready to hit back at the world for hitting back at me, then we know we have encountered a problem. And so I’m hoping to build a kind of emotional intelligence. And that’s all that we all have the capability to evaluate if our anger has gone wrong, and I think starting with those questions are important.

Ray Briggs
So I really liked your distinction between anger that’s about getting justice for like, people in general versus anger that’s just about a personal grievance. And I have some, like tricky cases that I don’t know how to feel about where they sound halfway in between. So I’m thinking things like, white women campaigning for suffrage, where like, it really was unjust, that they weren’t allowed to vote. But there was an exclusion of Black women that seems like sort of really parochial, and unfair and wrong. And so, like, what do I say about that kind of anger?

Myisha Cherry
Yeah, I mean, you can’t say that it falls short, right? So if I could build a range that I kind of lay out, I start with something called Road Rage, one might say that that’s probably the most extreme kind. And then I end with kind of defending an account that are called Lordian Rage, which is the righteous rage that I defend in book, but there’s an anger that kind of is almost close to Lordian Rage, that one might say that the suffragists kind of experience, what are called narcissistic rage, right. So it has kind of all the similar features that Lordian Rage has. But as you said, that last part, it doesn’t have an inclusive perspective, right? It’s leaving out other women that exist in society that are co citizens, right? And one can say, hey, it does right. It’s aimed at the right thing. It’s directed towards the right targets, but one can say it doesn’t have an inclusive perspective, and one can evaluate it as such, I think there’s nothing wrong with that. What we might suggest to that person that’s experienced that kind of rage such as a suffragists, is that, hey, that’s good, narcisstic rage is good. But keep moving to the other direction, I want people to move into the righteous rage, and I’m defending, which is the Lordian rage. And that will suggest, hey, you’re almost there. If you broaden your perspective about who justice should include, then we can say that you reach that real righteous anger that I think can really bring about true transformation in our world.

Ray Briggs
So Myisha, you mentioned Lordian Rage. And I know from your book that that’s named after Audre Lorde. Can you explain that for our listeners?

Myisha Cherry
Yes. So the whole book is inspired by the poet, feminist Audre Lorde, from her famous essay the uses of anger. So that’s where I borrow the term from, and just reading that essay. I mean, she kind of inspired the features that I talked about, about the book. And it’s interesting because you asked the question about suffragists. And she writes the essay in response to white feminists that she’s in solidarity with, and they are focused on defeating the patriarchy, but they’re unaware of their own racism. So they have narcissistic rage, right, but not the kind of the kind of anger that Lorde wants to bring them or make them aware of that they should have. So Lordian rageous is inclusive, and those who don’t have a full inclusive perspective, are like the suffragists. They have a kind of semi righteous anger. But they’re not quite there yet.

Josh Landy
One of the things I love in the way you characterize Lordian rage, this good kind of rage, this appropriate kind of rage is the benefits it has, both for society and for the individual. Yeah, for society it raises consciousness, it’s often efficacious, right? It brings about change. And of course, for the individual, it’s energizing, it gives people courage, and it also, I want to say a little bit more about this, if you would, gives people a sense of dignity. Could you say a little bit more about that?

Myisha Cherry
Yeah, I’m gonna try not to go on a tangent with this because I can talk about this all day. But I believe that, listen, there’s a connection between value, respect, and anger, right? That one, when one has a sense of respect, that when one is wrong, that one is going to feel angry and respond to that because they’re going to feel like they are due a kind of respect given the kind of value that they have over their lives. And so Aristotle’s quick to say a person that doesn’t get angry is a fool. Right, it’s very much connected connected with self respect. And so if anybody doesn’t witness my rage, if I never go to a protest, the fact that I’ve responded to a wrongdoing done to me is an expression of respect that I have for myself. So I don’t need white society, or white feminists to proclaim or amend that particular respect, the fact that I am getting angry at the lack of respect that has been given to me, because I believe that I have value is one of the valuable things about anger that I find wonderful. So I don’t need an audience. But audience does matter in a certain kind of context. But it doesn’t require an audience to proclaim that particular dignity and respect.

Ray Briggs
So I have a question about that. So in your book, you’re really careful not to tell anybody that they should be feeling this way or that way. And just to defend anger as a sign of self respect. And one thing I wonder about is whether it’s possible to like, fail by not being angry enough. And like what I should do if I find myself in a situation where I’m like, I should be angry, but I’m just depressed now.

Myisha Cherry
Yeah, so it goes back to the part of the question, we say angry enough. I don’t know what that enough is. And I kind of question and trouble that enough, right? I think it’s in us as human beings. We experience a whole variety of situations and a whole variety of emotions. And they’re not on par with the way that we felt probably the day before, let alone on par with somebody else’s experience, right? So I want to allow for what I call emotional diversity, given our dispositions given about who we are, there’s certain kinds of emotions and a certain kind of intensity that we have in relationship, that emotion that is just different. I mean, I must admit, I’m a very indignant person. Duh, I mean, I’ve got a book on anger. And so, but I don’t, my sister’s not that indignant. My best friend is not that indignant. So what they get angry about, and the enough kind of scale is going to be different given our particular disposition. So I don’t want to, I don’t want to judge someone. The fact that they don’t, they don’t have they don’t have any right. I think anger is a moral emotion. But it’s not the only moral emotion. But I would suggest that I don’t believe anyone who says that they never get angry. I just don’t believe that particular report. And I think a lot of people who say that they never get angry are usually people who are often punished for being angry socially, such as women, such as minorities. And so I hope that they read the book, and they have the desire, and the courage to proclaim the anger for themselves.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about righteous rage with Myisha Cherry from UC Riverside. And we actually have an email, or rather a comment on the website that connects really nicely to this question of how much anger is called for. So Daniel asks, what if someone claims that slavery in the Americas never occurred? And someone objects to this and calmly sits down and tries to explain the historical evidence which refutes that. Wouldn’t one who observes this exchange be justifiably angry, the emotional indifference to the violence of such a claim and the notion that it should be entertained at all? How could one who becomes angry in response to angerlessness escape responsibility for the public expression of that anger? So there’s a lot in there, but what do you think? Like it would that be a situation where that’s too little anger, as Ray was saying a moment ago.

Myisha Cherry
So I think all of us have a part to play in the moral landscape in which we live, some people’s role would be the calm person who sits down to educate others. And then someone else’s role is the one that kind of insight things just a little bit to remind people where we should be and where we need to be. And that will be the angry person. I mean, when we think about the Civil Rights Movement, for example, Martin Luther King played the role as a loving person. I remind you in the book, I suggest that he did get angry, but as far as the public display of anger, and the ways that a lot of radical people wish that he did was quite different than the Black Power movement. But I would say that both of them had a role to play, in getting civil rights and getting equality for Blacks. And I think that that’s not just the case for the 60s, but it’s also the case for the present, all of us each have a role to play. And if we all play our roles, then we can all be morally and politically educated and challenged to do the right thing. And to build a better world.

Ray Briggs
This position is really interesting to me, because it sounds kind of similar to something else I’ve heard that I think is wrong, but different. No no, I don’t think that you’re actually saying the thing I think is wrong.

Myisha Cherry
I kind of bypassed the question just a little bit. I don’t think I fully fully fully laid out my full view. But go right ahead.

Ray Briggs
So I mean, one view that I’ve sometimes heard people express is that emotions are just kind of morally irrelevant. Like what matters is that you say true things and that you do good actions. And it seemed like you were you’re saying like anger is morally good in many situations, but it’s not the only morally good emotion. So emotions are morally relevant, but they’re differently morally relevant from each other.

Myisha Cherry
Exactly. Exactly. Yes. And one of the things that I want to challenge people is to build their moral toolkit and in relationship to to emotion so, you know, one of the things I suggest is that anger is compatible with love. I think you all kind of talked about this earlier in the show. And so if you protect the kind of righteous anger that I’m defending, when that’s on the scene, you also have love. But you also have compassion, you also have pity. And there are certain kinds of ways or particular social contexts in which one emotion will do a better job than the other emotion, right. But one of the things that I’m proclaiming that we have a tendency to beat up on that very valuable, more emotions, such as anger, and I’m trying to remind us, let’s not get rid of this too quickly, because it has a very specific role to play that’s quite different from meekness. That’s quite different from solely pity or compassion. I mean, Bishop Butler, a famous British moralist, he basically suggests, hey, if we got rid of anger, he’s concerned that justice would never get done, right. He believes that we are always compassionate towards the wrong door, that we will never exercise true justice in the world. So he finds that anger allows us to achieve justice in ways that compassion alone is not able to do. So I think emotions are, you know, they all have a role to play. And they can be very present and do very different things in the same similar social moment.

Ray Briggs
So one of the things that’s cool to me about this view is that it’s compatible with moral criticism of emotions, which you do in your book. So it seems like, you know, anger bad, meekness good. It’s just like a really blunt toolkit. Like, I’d like more suggestions on how to develop a more sophisticated toolkit for assessing emotions.

Myisha Cherry
So reductive right? So there’s one emotion that we don’t really criticize. So particularly when it comes to love, the Greeks has helped us note that there’s very different varieties of love, right. So the kind of love that I have for my partner is very different from the love that I have for my mother, we are able to distinguish different kinds of love and see the ways in which they play out in different relationships. We don’t tend to do that with what we call negative emotions. And I’m trying to challenge us to see that even one singular emotion has very different expressions, can go right can go wrong, because even love can go wrong, right? The stalkish kind, the obsessive kind, can go wrong. So love in general, is just not always perfect. So I think there’s several varieties of evil of one particular emotion, and we need to- I think we need to add some nuance to our conversations about emotions in general.

Josh Landy
So Myisha, I love that. And that was certainly one of the things I appreciated the most about your book was this incredibly helpful way of distinguishing between kinds of anger, and singling out this particularly healthy and helpful and constructive and socially meaningful kind. But I couldn’t help thinking about my own anger at injustice, and how that’s gone. And it hasn’t always gone great. Yeah, I don’t want this to sound like, you know, like, if can you help me kind of show. But, you know, these past few years have been hard for many of us. And it certainly, obviously, I’m better off in many ways than many people. But you know, I’ve had some anger at social media companies for fomenting discord. And it certainly, you know, news outlets for, you know, normalizing fascism, and even pretty prominent news outlets, and even my own university for, you know, sometimes letting itself be used as a node of COVID misinformation. You know, my experience of pushing back, I don’t think I’ve achieved anything at all. I’ve, you know, antagonized people, I’ve received threatening phone calls. So, does this fall under the category of unchanneled anger, of anger that isn’t actually productive and that I’d be better off without? Or is it potentially still the good kind? Because at some point, it could yield results? How can we know which kinds are going to be productive?

Myisha Cherry
Well, I think we need to change our perspective about what kind of productivity is, right. If we think that anger is only valuable if it brings about this massive amount of change, I think that’-s I think we shouldn’t use it in that particular sense. Like I said, before, you know, anger can be valuable when you don’t have an audience, right, it’s still able to do something in the world, whether that’s proclaim value in the world, particularly value on lives, that have been noted as not being valuable at all. So I wouldn’t judge the inadequacy of your anger based on it achieving some grand goal, right? If that’s the case, then we will suggest that Frederick Douglass’ anger was never productive. You know what I mean? Because, I mean, so we should be kind and gracious with ourselves, and also kind of get over ourselves a little bit. So the fact that you were channeling and expressing your anger is productive.

Ray Briggs
So we have a related question from Bernie in San Francisco, who writes, Charles Duhigg wrote a good article on anger for The Atlantic a few years back, basically arguing that anger has three goals, which are to give voice that a wrong has been done, to pressure the actor who has committed the wrong to make amends and if the first two fail, to exact revenge. Like what do you think of that?

Myisha Cherry
I agree with one and two and disagree with three, particularly, because we get angry at our children. And if you are the kind of parent who’s sitting right now plotting revenge for your children out of your anger, I don’t know, child protective services is somebody that we should call very quickly right. But that’s not that’s not the case. I don’t think that’s our, that’s our experience, um, it’s not the case that I don’t want to say that it never happens. And if it does happen, right if there is a desire for revenge, and we know that we have, perhaps have a kind of destructive anger that I talked about, such as ripe rage or narcissistic rage, right. So I totally disagree with the notion that anger always conceptually has kind of like this desire for revenge, Aristotle would say that it has, but I disagree with Aristotle. Smart man, but I disagree with him. And I disagree with him based on just experience of our everyday lives. I’ve been angry a lot of times, as I’ve already indicated, and revenge is really a part of of the picture, trust me, never been arrested. Because I have not sought revenge, is really part of the picture for me. So I want I want to disentangle that. That idea that revenge is always connected to anger.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about righteous rage with Myisha Cherry, author of “The Case for Rage.”

Ray Briggs
How can we channel our anger to make the world better? Should allies get mad on behalf of others? Or should they put their own feelings aside? What can the movement for Black lives teach other political movements about channeling our emotions?

Josh Landy
Getting mad, getting even, or just getting to a better world? Plus commentary from Ian Shoales, the Sixty-Second Philopher, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Could rage and anger lead to the guillotine? I’m Josh Landy. And this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything

Ray Briggs
except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Our guest is Myisha Cherry from UC Riverside. And we’re thinking about righteous rage.

Josh Landy
So Myisha, if you could suggest one concrete way for activists to use their anger, what would it be?

Myisha Cherry
Express it. I think a lot of us have a lot of suppressed and repressed anger. And particularly if you are a person of color, or a minority, there are certain kinds of stereotypes around one’s emotions. And one feels that if they express anger, then they will fulfill a particular narrative negative stereotype about their group. I mean, we talked about violence earlier, one of the most noted reasons for why people resort to violence is because they don’t have expressive resources, that they hold it in, they don’t have ways to express their rage. And so I find it very, very important that if one is angry, that one should express it, whether that is expressing it and admitting it to oneself to one’s loved ones, whether one expresses to people that they are in solidarity with whether they express it through art, express it.

Ray Briggs
So I have a question about witnessing others’ anger, which I think like most of us could get better at just listening and accepting that somebody else is angry. I think this is sometimes really hard to do, especially if you have a history with people getting angry at you. And then maybe violent. Do you have advice for people who want to get better at it?

Myisha Cherry
Yeah, I mean, if we had time, I talk about how Adam Smith thought about this stuff. And you know, one of the things that he kind of lays out in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, he talks about how how it feels to witness someone angry. And usually when we do that, it’s a very, I mean, we have witnessed someone angry, it’s it’s uncomfortable at times. And particularly if we see somebody angry at someone else, we immediately begin to empathize for the person who was a target of the anger, it can be very uncomfortable. But one of the things that I want us to get comfortable with is the uncomfortable, particularly when we know that the anger is in response to injustice, the best thing that we can do is to hear them out, allow them to express themselves. Because being an audience member in this particular regard, for lots of people, a lot of people don’t care about the reasons why they’re angry and so being able to listen to them, despite our discomfort, which is a social discomfort and can be a stereotypical discomfort. Just listening to someone who is angry and listening to their claims, can make them feel valuable, can make them feel heard in a world that doesn’t listen to them, or doesn’t value them.

Josh Landy
Let me take that same scenario from the other side. I’m going to be confessional again, I’m afraid. But I sometimes have conversations with family members. And what I’ve noticed is that if you know if I talk about some case of injustice, calmly, then they don’t really react to me. They don’t in other words that they don’t learn, they don’t really pay much attention. Whereas if I then you know, move to hey, I’m actually a little indignant about this injustice and you should be too. The response is often, oh, you’re angry, you must be out of arguments, or sort of worse, you know, now we don’t want to talk to you and we’re done with you. You know, I could say to them, you shouldn’t be reacting that way. But that’s not much help. Right? I, I mean, that’s so that that’s a worry that people often raise about, about anger from a pragmatic standpoint that sometimes this expression of anger that’s totally justified, has this unfortunate effect sometimes of causing people to start paying attention. What on earth do we do about that?

Myisha Cherry
I think there’s a variety of ways to express one’s anger, we have a tendency to think that anger looks like one thing, why it’s being expressive. It’s loud, that it’s overbearing. You know, what my mother taught me at a very young age, that she could be angry, she doesn’t have to raise her voice, she didn’t even have to speak, she used to give me this eye, right. So there’s a variety of ways to express one’s anger. And, you know, I kind of address insincere ways in which people try to police or to calm down the angry person. And, you know, I want to challenge those people. And one of the things that I do, I mean, as much as I’m trying to defend anger, and try to, you know, come to the aid of people who are angry, I’m very much concerned with, with audience members, people who are likely to respond to your anger in that particular way, and to remind them about what’s happening, about some of the biases, and the kind of policing or gaslighting that may be occurring when we tell someone to calm down and they cannot be listened to until they calm down. So the challenge is not just for the angry, but those who are listening to their anger, to give anger space to do its job.

Ray Briggs
Yes. So this actually makes me have like a bunch of questions about what to do in a hostile setting where your anger is not welcomed, but maybe other things that you do are equally not welcomed. So I think like, there are some situations where people do not want to hear that the world around them is unjust. And so whatever way you present it, they will come up with a way, like a reason why that was the wrong way to present and they won’t listen to you until you say it right. And my approach to this is usually well, that’s a no win situation. Once you see that you’re in it, you’re not really subject to criticism anymore for stating your case badly, because there was no good way of stating your case, right?

Myisha Cherry
I mean, this just goes back to Audre Lorde here, right? So she writes the uses of anger, she starts off in the talking about how she gave a speech to white feminists. And she she’s finished giving a speech, and she basically talks to a white feminist afterwards. And the white feminists says, tell me how you feel. But don’t say it too loudly, or I cannot hear you. And as you look at responses, she says, is it the manner in which I speak? Or is it because of what I have to say, may challenge you to change your ways? So Audre Lorde was kind of keen on this and knew that kind of move, that it’s not really the anger itself, that it’s not really the manner she speaks. But people know that, hey, will you say to this injustice that has just occurred is a wrongdoing has just occurred, then it’s a challenge for them, not only to open up their eyes, but it’s also a challenge for them to change as well. And it’s always I mean, she doesn’t use this language, but she wants to say that’s a no win situation, right? Until they are willing to change, to transform their ways, and open their eyes, and they’re not yet ready for the anger. But to put the onus as if the problem is her, she challenges and suggests that it’s not, it’s you.

Josh Landy
Can I ask about other things that you mentioned, the book has it because like, we’ve talked about a lot of sort of upsides of Lordian anger, the righteous kind, both for the individual and for society. But you do mention a couple of risks, right? I mean, so one is, of course, burnout, which we heard more about in the, in the Roving Philosophical Report earlier. Another is error, like, you know, it’s, you know, we’re all human. And we might sometimes make mistakes as to where we put our anger. But I wanted to ask particularly about something I think of as Sarandon rage. So, so yeah, back in 2015 2016, there were, as you know, there was some folks, you know, Susan Sarandon and rather, people sort of who seemed to be so angry at centrist Democrats like Hillary Clinton, that they were going around telling people, you know, not to vote for her. And that, to my mind was counterproductive, ultimately, to the cause of progress to justice. And so that’s, I wonder if that’s the kind of rage that, you know, one can understand, psychologically, where it comes from, but it’s, it’s the kind that all those ancients worried about, and maybe some of the Buddhists worried about where it’s sort of kind of running amok. And it’s, you know, it’s not well targeted, and it’s disproportionate and all those things.

Myisha Cherry
I also wonder if what we’re really thinking about, which we’re really concerned about is the issue of strategy. I mean, people are angry about the Democratic Party right now. You know, and, you know, directed towards the right group, right. I mean, that’s us. That’s the democratic project, right. We have thought about things and it failed. It wasn’t successful. I mean, I think that’s just a democratic project. I don’t want to say the best and necessary are sufficient or conceptually a part of the picture of what it is to be angry is to have bad strategy, I think you can be angry and have a good strategy, you can be angry and have a bad strategy. And I think the challenge is, is that we got to be a little bit more strategic, and a little bit more prudent about the kinds of strategies that we that we put out there. But I’m curious, because even before you mentioned, this particular anger, you got burnout, you talked about burnout mean, I like that, because I love sports, and particularly team sports. And one of the things that I learned playing sports as a kid, you know, particularly basketball is that you, even as a starter, you play a minute, and then you sit down, rest on the bench, and another person come off the bench, and they play and your particular position, everybody get a rest, everybody take their turn. And when I think about being agents of change, who perhaps is angry, hey, you’re going to get tired on the battlefield. And it’s good to get in solidarity with people and say, hey, I’ve been fighting in this fight, I am burnt out my emotions just all over the place, I’m going to take a break. And it’s good to know that you have someone else that can pick up a piece. And so one of the suggestions that I offer up in the book as far as anger management techniques, is to make sure that one is in solidarity with other folk, and that you’re constantly, you know, taken a rest. And as you take a rest, perhaps you encouraging those who are not taking a rest. But I believe in taking rests. I don’t believe that one can be angry all the time. I think that’s just impossible. But I think that one can be angry in ways in which can be detrimental to one’s mental health. And when that begins to occur, that one should engage in self care. And I believe that the community and those who are in solidarity with is there to help you engage in that. And they are able to work in your place until you’re able to get back on the field.

Ray Briggs
So I have a little question about anger on behalf of others, which I worry about as a type of anger. So on the one hand, like anger for yourself, or a group you’re part of makes a lot of senses as self respect. And as like, I don’t know, building a more just world. On the other hand, I’m just thinking about like white feminists who are like burqas burgers are the the biggest feminist problem facing Middle Eastern women. Which is like sort of misplaced, I think anger about it is sort of misplaced. And I’m trying to put my finger on exactly what’s wrong with it, but something’s wrong with it.

Myisha Cherry
Yeah, so a philosopher for Brooklyn College, has a wonderful book about transnational feminism. And she talks about that particular position, which she calls the missionary position. But I will say this, that I also don’t believe in a particular concept of being angry on someone else’s behalf. Right? Particularly, because when we think that somebody else is experiencing a problem, and only they are victims to that particular problem, or affected by that particular problem, then we have a kind of messed up conception about what it means to be in community and be co citizens with people, right, so when I think about, for example, white allies in the anti racist struggle, I don’t want a white ally, to feel anger on behalf of Black people or anger on behalf of brown people. Right? Because racism affects us all, although differently, although differently, right? Racism still affects us all. King talked about this, James Baldwin talked about this, that when you have injustice in the world, a threat to justice anyways, threat to justice everywhere, right? When you’re part of the democratic project, and certain kinds of individuals are not getting certain kinds of rights, then you don’t live in a just world, right? You’re not living in a society that is living up to its his particular ideas, and therefore you should do something about it. Right? We are all part of this particular political project, this democratic project. And so we should be angry that our society as a whole has racism, has sexism. And so we can be in solidarity and be angry with other people. But if you find yourself being eager on behalf of someone else, then you have a skewed vision about what it is to be a community with people.

Josh Landy
That’s beautifully said. Thank you so much for joining us today, Myisha.

Myisha Cherry
Thank you for having me.

Josh Landy
Our guest has been Myisha Cherry, Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside, and author of “The Case for Rage: Why Anger is Essential to Anti Racist Struggle.” So Ray, what are you thinking now?

Ray Briggs
So Myisha has told us a lot about anger and activism. And I’ve been thinking also about anti racist struggle, and particularly about some philosophy books that our listeners might be interested in about anti racist struggle that have come out pretty recently. So first, we’ve got a book by a former guest, Christopher Lebron, who was on Philosophy Talk some time ago. And he’s just had a book recently called “The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of An Idea.” There’s a collection of essays by Angela Davis called “Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson Palestine, the Foundations of a Movement.” And there’s an edited collection by Tommy Shelby and Brandon Terry, “To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr.” and so I encourage our readers to check all those books out.

Josh Landy
That is a great list and we’ll put links to everything we mentioned today in our website, philosophytalk.org where you can also become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes.

Ray Briggs
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, we’d love to hear from you. Send it to us at comments@philosophytalk.org and we may feature it on the blog.

Josh Landy
Now, fast AND furious — it’s Ian Shoales, the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales – large emotions are forever thrown at us in the form of entertainment, 12 Angry Men rage against machine, rage dressy as a sheep rancher and rampage, rage Nicolas Cage is a mob guy and rampage, fury, Brad Pitt and a Sherman tank on a rampage. Near as I can tell large emotions exist mainly in movies and books. Rage often shows up in hand to hand combat. The Irish hero Coquelin would get so enraged for a badly pop up into a raging monster. Just point him in the right direction and get out of the way. The werewolves, that’s uncontrolled rage right there in a metaphorical forum. I have felt rage myself, mostly in junior high school. This is before children were allowed to take guns to school, but it did lead to fistfights. Big emotions lead to big trouble. They are linked with the seven deadly sins but also with morality, as an righteous anger as an angry God. And if rage is a sin, we are complicit. Don’t annoy Bruce Banner if you wake up Hulk it’s on you. In video games, we see lots of amok berserkers but they were created to entertain we almost never write in anger you wind up stabbing the page with a ballpoint pen the point is lost, your notebook in shreds. This is why people turn to computers, typing something in a laptop is soothing, the finger clicks like the ticking of a grandfather clock, dialing down anger and suddenly I can bear the weight of the barrage of cliches it comes with posting things online. Thanks to the Internet, all writing is magically transformed into content where your strong opinions join an army of faceless Twitterati in a performative display of anger that vanishes as soon as you exit the app. Right or wrong, rage does not generate translate into coherent action. Sometimes when people get angry they get so darn man they throw their phone across the room. I have seen this dozens of times in movies. In the real world as nearly as close as you get to a murderous rage, even though pops up a lot in Twitter comments. Conservatives actually do feel rage I think but they repress it they can trigger libs to act up so they can call the cops, bunch of Karens, they make me so mad. January 6th was supposedly fueled by rage but the crowd didn’t seem that mad once they got inside the building. Some seem downright gleeful like they snuck into the movie and didn’t get caught. Also displayed was whatever that emotion is when you get away of shoplifting. They were wandering around like tourists without a tour guide, Ferber seemed to be missing. Godzilla, there’s another rage exemplar. Most of the time, he just hangs out a Monster Island, stirring up radiation and playing volleyball with his kid but getting mad, woo. Next thing you know, skyscrapers are being blasted to flinders by the force of his breath. We don’t know what rage is anymore, which is why we need monsters to display it. Politicians in the public eye often talk about being angry about something but we never actually see angry politicians except Bernie Sanders. But he always seems angry. So rage is nothing special when you see a senator frowning on a Sunday morning chat show but he’s just irritated because he has to pretend to be angry about a thing that might not even exist like critical race theory or colonizing Mars or global warming. Even for Americans well practiced in self delusion, it’s hard to get worked up, even about treason or a possible Civil War. Everybody’s mad about something but all we see are frowns, head shakes, forced grins and eye rolls. Alex Jones and The Hulk are perhaps the foremost avatars of rage we have. Mr. Jones seems to be slowly fading from public eye. And the Hulk is only occasionally a problem. Most of the time he’s mild mannered Bruce Banner looking about in dismay at the ruins of another suit of clothes. As so many things rage seems to be a product of another time back when we would fight mano a mano on a field of battle. One side would be naked giants, painted blood red, rebels yelling, mutilating, making the ground shake with their feet to the thunder in the battle. Throwing great iron Spears one handed as they advanced screaming, that scares me. But you know, today we just call it an inner strike and go take a nap. No sense getting mad about these things. God gave us drones for a reason. I gotta go.

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW San Francisco Bay area and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2022.

Ray Briggs
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Josh Landy
Thanks also to Merle Kessler and Angela Johnston.

Ray Briggs
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Josh Landy
The views expressed or mis expressed on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our funders,

Ray Briggs
not even when they’re true and reasonable.

Josh Landy
The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org where you can become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes. I’m Josh Landy,

Ray Briggs
and I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening

Josh Landy
and thank you for thinking.

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I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore!