The Case for Rage: Why Anger Is Essential to Anti-Racist Struggle

"This is very consciously written as public philosophy. All the books I’ve chosen for this list are written for a general audience, but Cherry is explicit that that’s what she’s doing. She’s a very clear writer. She draws on her own experiences of being a victim of racism a various points in her life. But she also confronts the wider issues in protesting against racism and draws on recent history to make her case. The general argument is opposing something that has its origins in a form of Stoicism . Seneca put forward the idea that anger is a form of temporary madness, and that, wherever possible, we should extirpate it. Get rid of it. It’s a bad thing because it makes people rash, makes them do stupid things. It clouds judgment and makes us do terrible things. We should instead be cool-headed and not bring that kind of passion into human relations, particularly political relations. Fairly obviously, anger has a close link with violence, so there’s the sense that once you get angry, you release the inhibitions that stop us harming other people. So, Stoics concluded it’s always a bad thing, and they even came up with exercises to help us eliminate it from life. Well, perhaps in some situations. Myisha Cherry makes the case for a certain kind of rage, rage being a subset of anger. Rage for justice in the face of injustice is her main focus. She calls this ‘Lordean rage’, after the black feminist, activist and writer Audre Lorde . Cherry’s argument is that the energy and the possibility of collective channelled action, inspired by rage, justifies this approach, and makes it superior to a more neutral response to something as outrageous as the cold-faced racism in Charlottesville, for instance. It’s been a theme in America, particularly, for hundreds of years: this refusal to treat people of different races equally, and enshrining that in law or institutionally, and also within the police where racism has repeatedly reared its ugly head, for example, as it has done to some extent in the UK. This book is an expansion of that idea, that rage can be a good thing and not something to be avoided. It’s clearly written, and easy to read. And it looks at specific cases in which anger has been used in positive ways. This is a case for seeing some instances of anger as positive, and important, and not as a psychological problem or something to fear. Exactly. That’s it in a nutshell. It’s not a complicated argument. But it’s certainly stands in opposition to some other philosophical writers in this area who have argued that we need is to reach the state of understanding and forgiveness, and that’s how we get political progress. Martha Nussbaum has, for example, taken this line . But Myisha Cherry thinks that righteous anger, which has a long and noble tradition, is something that should be celebrated and recognised within the struggle for greater racial equality and fairness of treatment. She’s not saying, ‘get angry when someone steps on your toe,’ it’s not a wholesale justification for rage. It’s this specific kind of Lordean rage that she’s celebrating. It’s very nicely done. Again, it’s very short—a small format book of under 200 pages. It’s excellent. It’s definitely of relevance to them, because it contains practical advice and justifications for it. But this is not just a book for activists. It also provides an understanding of how protests unfold, and how and why not to denigrate rage when it’s justified. She’s not advocating violence, but she is clear that there’s a place for this kind of motivational rage that works in the antiracist struggle very effectively—it inspires people and brings them together, collectively, to stand up against injustice."