The Case for Rage
A review of Myisha Cherry's The Case for Rage: Why Anger is Essential to Anti-racist Struggle.
Cherry’s thesis statement in The Case for Rage is that society tends to paint anger in broad strokes; she argues the common person’s conception of anger—a homogenous and necessarily destructive emotion—misses the complexity of the emotion. Anger, like all other emotions, comes in many forms, some good some bad. She goes on to argue “anti-racist anger” and more specifically “Lordean Rage” is one of these positive forms of anger. It’s constructive as opposed to destructive, helpful as opposed to harmful and more likely than other variations to be appropriate and correct. She gives a series of arguments throughout the book as to why rage isn’t intrinsically immoral or bad and argues for Lordean Rage’s place in politics. I will be focusing on only one part of her argument in this essay and that is her claim that Lordean Rage is more likely to be appropriate and correct (I’ll unpack what these words mean later). I think Cherry makes a compelling case for this and I broadly agree with her.
At the beginning of the book, Cherry gives us the framework she will be using to assess rage throughout her book. She gives the example of Greek words for love to illustrate what she means. In English, we use the same word “love” to refer to many different things: I “love” ice cream but I also “love” my parents. Ancient Greek philosophy uses different words to describe these very different emotions (Storge as opposed to Phillia) (Liddell and Scott). Cherry argues rage operates in the same way; the thing we call “rage” is actually many different emotions all given the same name. She describes her view as an “image variation” perspective (Cherry 2021, 12) and also acknowledges she isn’t the first person to make this observation.
So if there are different “variations” of rage, how can we differentiate them? The different Greek kinds of love are differentiated by their intensity and who they’re directed at (Agape is weaker and directed at far more people than Eros). Similarly, Cherry says the different kinds of rage can be differentiated through: who the rage targets; what it aims to achieve; the perspective which forms the anger and the actions that kind of anger encourages. During this chapter, she gives many examples of negative rage variations such as Rogue and Wipe Rage; the common factor in all of them is that they have either disproportionate action tendencies, they target the wrong person, or at their worst, both. I will be focusing on the latter of these.
Rogue Rage, for example, is a generalised anger at perceived injustice. At first glance, one may think that this is a good thing – very similar to how I described Lordean Rage. The difference between Rogue and Lordean Rage is their target. Most examples of Rogue Rage – like the one Cherry gives in the book of Christian Picciolini – involve someone feeling “marginalised angry and broken” and “projecting that anger and pain onto innocent people who they thought responsible for their problems” (Cherry 2021, 16). The reason these kinds of anger are bad is not because “anger” is intrinsically bad. It’s because they direct their rage towards those who don’t deserve it – often violently.
It is with this context, that we can assess Cherry’s argument for why Lordean Rage is more likely to be “correct”. “More likely to be ‘correct’ “, in this context, means the person experiencing the anger is more likely to accurately identify what is causing their anger and to respond to it. To fully understand what it means for Lordean Rage to be “correct” we must distinguish it from it being “fitting” or “appropriate”.
An emotion is “fitting” if it is the expected response to a situation whereas an emotion is “appropriate” if it’s also morally good. For example, we might expect someone to be envious of their neighbour’s wealth if they’re flaunting it all the time. Obviously, we ought to try not to feel envious but it is to be expected. In Cherry’s terminology: the envy is fitting but not appropriate (I and Cherry also believe Lordean Rage is more often than not appropriate as well but that isn’t the topic of this essay) (Cherry 2021, 36).
These are both distinct from correctness. You may be having an entirely fitting and perhaps appropriate response to a given situation but not be responding correctly. For example, if someone were to tell you your brother had died overseas at war, we may expect you to be sad about that. Your depression is fitting to the situation and there’s nothing morally inappropriate about it. However, if it were the case that you’d been lied to – your brother is actually alive and well – then we would say your emotion isn’t correct. Your emotional state doesn’t correctly reflect the world.
To illustrate how this concept relates to Lordean Rage and anger generally, I think the example I gave earlier is perfect. Rogue Rage is a generalised “anger at injustice although the target of the anger isn’t necessarily the cause of the injustice”. Rogue Rage, in my opinion, is almost always fitting and appropriate. The cause of it being so destructive is that it is rarely correct. Nobody can blame Christian Picciolini for feeling “marginalised angry and broken”. I’m sure it was a fitting and appropriate response to the situation he found himself in. We may even want to encourage him to kindle this anger and metabolise it into something more useful. Fight the system that’s responsible for making you feel this way. Join a union, protest. Instead, he directed his anger at the innocent, believing them to be responsible.
I believe scapegoating is in fact at the heart of all hate movements. The job of the Right-Wing propagandist is to turn general dissatisfaction with life into Rogue Rage and then turn that Rogue Rage into Wipe Rage, using minority groups as their scapegoats. It’s not the fact that the majority of the world’s wealth is owned by 1% of the people, it’s all the Jews’ fault. That’s who you should direct your rage at. This is a well-explored idea that you can read more about in Socialism of Fools: Capitalism and Modern Anti-Semitism (Battini 2016) and Right-Wing Women (Dworkin 1983).
Rogue Rage being incorrect is what makes it bad which is why it’s so important to show why Lordean Rage doesn’t face this problem. Racism, as much as we would love to believe otherwise, still exists today. The instances of Lordean rage which Cherry presents – such as protests – are not responses to isolated incidents. We can get angry at individual events, true, but just as often our experiences can have a cumulative effect. When racism is so deeply embedded in the systems we live in, we’re more likely to correctly identify racism when it occurs.
Cherry uses the example of a computer being broken. If you see a flash on your screen, you can only have marginal certainty you weren’t just seeing things. But if your screen flashes again and again in the same way, it becomes more likely your computer is indeed broken (Cherry 2021, 40). The argument can also be applied to replicability in science. A single experiment is good but multiple peer-reviewed studies are much more credible.
Similarly, when you experience a single instance of racism, you might not experience rage in a Lordean way. But when these events stack up over your whole life, you can be more certain you are correctly identifying the source of the injustice you’re experiencing – racism – and your rage is more likely to be a correct response to it. Therefore, when activists target the systems and people responsible for their oppression, they are acting correctly and appropriately. They’re taking action to change their circumstances instead of “raging with an utterly inhuman lust for arms, blood and tortures” as Seneca would describe it.
Furthermore, Cherry herself acknowledges Lordean Rage can get out of control when it takes on the qualities of Rogue or Narcissistic rage; that is to say, when the rage is directed at the undeserving. She acknowledges Lordean Rage can go too far, and can target the wrong people. Anti-racist anger can be incorrect, she’s only making the point that Lordean Rage is more likely to be correct than other kinds of anger.
To recap, rage has many variations, some positive, and some negative. When rage is negative, it’s usually because that rage has not been directed at those responsible for the injustice but at the innocent. Lordean Rage is more likely than all of these other kinds of anger to be directed at the right people and more likely to be an appropriate response because it is responding to a cumulative set of racist incidents. The simple fact is: the bigots’ worldview, is wrong.
References
Battini, Michele. 2016. Socialism of Fools: Capitalism and Modern Anti-Semitism. Translated by Noor Mazhar and Isabella Vergnano. N.p.: Columbia University Press. https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Socialism_of_Fools/X8V1CwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0.
Cherry, Myisha. 2021. The Case for Rage: Why Anger is Essential to Anti-racist Struggle. N.p.: Oxford University Press.
“Christian Picciolini.” n.d. Wikipedia. Accessed May 8, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Picciolini.
Dworkin, Andrea. 1983. Right-wing Women. N.p.: Perigee Books.
Liddell, Henry G., and Robert Scott. n.d. “A Greek-English Lexicon.” Wikipedia. https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3Da%29ga%2Fph.