Episode 47 - Myisha Cherry on Rage

Transcript

David: 0:06

Hi, I'm David Pena Guzman,

Ellie: 0:08

And I'm Ellie Anderson. Welcome to Overthink,

David: 0:11

the podcast where two friends,

Ellie: 0:13

who are also professors,

David: 0:15

put philosophy in dialogue with the everyday.

Ellie: 0:18

Because big ideas are within everyone's reach. David, when's the last time you felt filled with rage?

David: 0:34

Exactly three days ago. Yes, I can even give you a timestamp for the experience, because it was when I was flying back from Paris to San Francisco and it was a male Karen on a plane sort of situation. So I boarded the plane and next to me sat this younger gentlemen, a very tall, like six foot four white man wearing lots of bling, weirdly, which you never really see on a French guy. And he starts looking at his Instagram next to me and I'm like, checking it out. And he's looking at a lot of like rappers and women in bikinis. And I'm like, okay, cool.

Ellie: 1:18

This is my kind of guy.

David: 1:19

Actually the exact opposite. And in front of us sits this older gentlemen and it, he must be like late seventies, maybe mid eighties. Yeah. So he's an elderly person who then leans his seat back and crushes, effectively, the knees of my neighbor, this younger guy who like I said is very tall. And so his legs barely fit there. And the guy reaches out to the older man in front of him and says, you cannot do this.

Ellie: 1:54

He can't put his seat back?

David: 1:56

Yeah. So he says, you may not do this. The problem is that the young guy is a Francophone who doesn't speak English. And the older man is an American guy who doesn't speak French.

Ellie: 2:06

Oh no. Well, okay. I also think part of the problem is the guys saying you may not do this because I get that it's inconvenient when the person in front of you puts your seat back, but the airline has adjustable seats for a reason. Like it's the man's rights to put his seat back.

David: 2:20

Yeah. So I think we can have a whole debate about what is appropriate or not on airplanes, but objectively speaking, he is so tall that his kneecaps were getting kind of crushed in by the seat being moved back, which doesn't happen to me as a five foot 11 guy. But I think he crossed that threshold of height to where it really was physically uncomfortable. So then the older man decides to put his seat back up straight to avoid the tension. Cause he doesn't know what's going on.

Ellie: 2:46

He's like I'm 80. I don't have enough life to live for.

David: 2:49

For this guy.

Ellie: 2:50

The hill I die on.

David: 2:52

Yeah. Not the hill or the seat that he wants to-

Ellie: 2:54

I've seen some shit, I'm done.

David: 2:56

So the older man is kind of smart and he waits until a flight attendant comes by waits for her to look at him and then just yanks his seat back, crushing the guy's legs again, thereby prompting a really angry response from this guy. So the younger man, and this was honestly horrifying, grabs the seat of the older man and just shakes it intensely, making the older man's head just like bounce back and forth from the seat. And so everybody around me starts like panicking and trying to intervene and I want to intervene, but I don't speak French well enough to talk about it on the spot. I'm like, oh, what's the word for shake in French? I don't remember. And I remember in that moment, I felt really angry that this guy used his physical force against this older man in a really unfettered way. I mean, it was genuinely a very violent act. And at the same moment that I'm feeling this anger, I'm realizing that I am projecting the same emotion as this guy who, in a fit of rage, lashes out against this poor man in front of him. And so it was a case of anger mirroring anger.

Ellie: 4:14

Okay. I have thoughts about the anger component of this, but also I, and probably our listeners are wondering, what ended up happening?

David: 4:22

So then the flight attendant noticed this and got the younger man to move seats, but nobody actually got reprimanded. And that left me just fuming for the rest of the 11 hour flight back to San Francisco.

Ellie: 4:39

Just stewing in your anger, but I think that's such an interesting example, David, because I think anger flares up a lot in context of injustices or perceived injustices. So I would argue that you felt angry at an injustice and the male Karen felt angry at a perceived injustice, right? I don't actually think it was unjust for the old man to put his seat back on the flight. It might not even have been on just for him to sort of passive aggressively do it when the flight attendant was there. I think that's like probably within his rights.

David: 5:13

Yeah, I agree. I was like, go man, crush this guy's kneecaps.

Ellie: 5:16

This guy sees it as an injustice, right. Which is why he responds with anger. And then you are actually seeing a real injustice. So there can be a response either to an injustice or a perceived injustice, but that seems to organize for me what the anger is.

David: 5:29

Well, now that you know what happened to me exactly three days ago, in connection to this moment of anger, what's your relationship to this difficult emotion?

Ellie: 5:40

Uh, I think it's been a pretty organizing emotion in my life. I felt like my family system had a lot of injustice. And so I felt a lot of anger growing up. I felt a lot of anger directed towards me, and I had a lot of anger in response. And in fact, this like rage that I had as a child, I think, is part of the reason I became a philosopher because I spent so much time stewing and trying to figure out like, well, is my anger justified? Is it not? Why do I feel this way? Like constantly journaling about it. And so I think it helped engage me as like a budding reflective thinker, especially around questions of justice and injustice.

David: 6:29

I like that you talk about anger as an emotion that initiated you in a way into philosophy because the German philosopher, Peter Sloterdijk wrote a book called Rage and Time which he argues that rage or anger, he's talking about the Greek word thymos, which is a combination of like courage, anger, rage, just an intensity moving forward. And he says that that emotion is in fact the affective state that inaugurated all Western literature and culture, because it is the first emotion that is recorded in writing. So it has this founding power and his evidence for this is the fact that the Iliad, which is one of the oldest works of Western literature, opens precisely with the rage of Achilles making this emotion the founding emotion of the west. So now I imagine you, Ellie, as like a microcosm of the west with anger at the center of your personality structure. It's the organizing principle of your life.

Ellie: 7:28

Don't tell my young self that. I would have just really run with that.

David: 7:39

Today, we are talking about rage.

Ellie: 7:43

This form of anger is often considered to be irrational or even immoral.

David: 7:47

Our guest Myisha cherry argues that it can be transformative for social justice.

Ellie: 7:53

How can rage help fight racism?

David: 7:55

And it might rage, at least in some cases, actually make us better people?

Ellie: 8:03

Contemporary philosopher Martha Nussbaum says that anger is irrational. And I think she has one of the most well-known articulations of anger that comes from our discipline. She says that we should never dwell in anger, but always try and transform it into something else. So anger on its own is not helpful or moral emotion. Social life instead demands that we work through our anger and that means stopping actually being angry.

David: 8:31

And I love that she uses ancient Greek tragedy to drive this particular point home, especially the Oresteia, which is a trilogy written by Aeschylus, which tells the story of the downfall of a very powerful family. The central character in the story is Orestes who commits an unimaginable crime. He kills his mother Clytemnestra because she killed his father, ie. her own husband Agamemnon. After the crime, orestes this on the run and the Furies are after him and the Furies are these hideous mythical creatures that represent effectively revenge. And when he's running away, Athena looks at the situation and decides that she needs to adjudicate this tension between the Furies and Orestes through judicial process. And there's a trial to see whether Orestes should be punished or not for killing his mother. Orestes wins the trial and the Furies are well furious, but then Athena, in the story, convinces the Furies to stay with her in Athens and actually join her endeavor to administer justice in the city by means of legal process. And in her book on anger, Nussbaum says that when they agreed to join a theme, the Furies undergo a radical transformation and you can see this in the description, in the tragedy. They changed their look, their behavior, and then they suddenly start donning what Nussbaum calls, benevolent, sentiments, which Nussbaum then interprets as evidence that law and order and peace require the abandonment of the Furies or of unbridled anger.

Ellie: 10:20

Yeah, because it's not the abandonment of the Furies it's the transformation of the Furies, the abandonment of-

David: 10:25

of what they represent.

Ellie: 10:27

Yeah. And so I think that kind of founding moment of ancient Greek tragedy, where we are seeing the transformation of anger provides a really nice symbol for subsequent approaches to anger as well. The anger of Martin Luther king Jr. at the racism in the United States was transformed into a non-violent approach to social justice, similar to that of Gandhi. And these are actually examples that Nussbaum uses of people who transformed their anger into love and compassion.

David: 10:59

Yeah. And I like that she's never saying that we should not feel anger, but simply that we need to learn to metabolize it into other more positive emotions, such as compassion or even grief. She says that when we feel angry at a situation, you know, like somebody crushes your knees in the plane, what you should do instead of dwelling in that emotion is just grieve fact-

Ellie: 11:23

Mm.

David: 11:24

happened in the first place. And so the feeling is understandable, but the dwelling in it, that brewing or stewing, that's the problem.

Ellie: 11:35

And I think that idea that dwelling in anger is immoral is something you find in a number of other traditions. It's something that comes up a lot in Buddhist philosophy, where there are debates about whether anger should be eliminated entirely or transformed, or metabolized to use the word that you mentioned from Neusbaum, into something else. So the idea that anger has to be eliminated because it doesn't serve a moral purpose at all, is associated with the eighth century philosopher Shantideva. He says that when we feel angry, we should be like a block of wood trying to shut down the feeling of anger. So this is more or less the view that we just shouldn't give into anger. This tradition of elimination. And a lot of people have assumed that this is really the main, if not only, Buddhist view on anger, but the tantric Buddhist tradition of Tibet actually suggests something very different, which is that anger can be virtuous. And the contemporary philosopher, Emily McRae shows this using two Tibetan texts that have absolutely incredible titles. They're from the 10th century, but their names are The Wheel Weapon That Strikes at the Enemy's Vital Spots.

David: 12:45

Oh, my God.

Ellie: 12:47

and The Poison Destroying Peacock Mind Training. Like those are some metal names for 10th century monastic texts.

David: 12:55

Yes. Poison destroying and wheel weapon. Come on.

Ellie: 13:01

And there's also a lot of Tibetan Buddhist iconography that shows like scary deities with flaming eyeballs and weapons. There's a lot of anger there, or at least what appears to be anger because part of McRae's point is that sure, Buddhist philosophy, doesn't license just the compulsive acting upon angry emotion. However, the tantric tradition of Tibetan Buddhism suggests a specific kind of anger, which she calls tantric anger, and that's anger that's been metabolized through meditative and contemplative practices. So it actually sounds pretty similar to Nussbaum's view. Although McRae still says it's anger whereas Nussbaum says it's transformed from anger into something. But unlike regular anger, tantric anger is not compulsive. So one can drop it as soon as it's not needed. It has this effective quality for moral transformation, according to McRae, but the moral agent is not attached to it the way that most of us are when we just have a knee jerk reaction of anger.

David: 14:00

So with this notion of tantric anger, let me ask you a question. Is it that the anger subsides and loses intensity, or is it simply that we have more control over it on account of these meditative and contemplative practices so that I can then use that if I want to or not use it if I don't want to?

Ellie: 14:18

It's more the latter. It's this idea that we have, as McRae calls it, an upper hand on our anger and ultimately that actually does mean though that we can choose the intensity with which we feel anger. Through cultivating spiritual practices of meditation and contemplation, we not only have the upper hand on feeling anger at all, but we also have the upper hand on how strongly we can feel it.

David: 14:47

Okay. And so that is really different than Nussbaum's claim, which is that the metabolizing process has to yield a final product that doesn't look anything like the original ingredients, right. To like the compassion, or she uses a term of love, a lot, the love that we feel, or the grief, even that we feel as a result of an anger inducing situation, will never have any of the qualities of anger or rage. So it disappears completely, ideally.

Ellie: 15:15

Yeah. And that actually is also a very mainstream view in Buddhist ethics. It's just that McRae's point is that that's not the whole story. People often assume that the only way to treat anger in Buddhist thought is by transforming it into compassion or equanimity, but she's like, no, these tantric deities with their flaming eyeballs, the peacock minds training, we can metabolize it and it will still be anger, just a bit different.

David: 15:40

Yeah. So anger becomes a weapon that you use to strike at the enemy's vital spot.

Ellie: 15:45

Exactly. A wheel weapon to be specific.

David: 15:49

Well, and the thing about Nussbaum is that at heart, she is an Aristotelian and that means that she follows Aristotle in thinking that anger is, at its core, a desire for revenge. And so if the goal of social life, as we saw in the Oresteia, is to get rid of anger and transform it into another emotion, it means that at the individual and at the collective level, we need to figure out ways to move away from expressions of anger.

Ellie: 16:19

And the reason for that is that we need to move away from ways of seeking revenge?

David: 16:23

Correct. And so individually you can easily see how that can be the case. You know, you don't want to go around your life, seeking revenge from those who have hurt you, because ultimately that just hurts you.

Ellie: 16:33

Um, okay. I think Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride would disagree, but that's another story.

David: 16:41

That's why, uh, Nussbaum says that anger is ultimately futile, cause you will just lose yourself in this wild goose chase. But at the collective level, Nussbaum says, this means changing the way we approach justice and especially criminal justice. And she cites the research of the psychologist Richard H. Taylor, who won the Nobel prize in economics in 2017 for showing that positive reinforcement is much better at getting people to change their ways and to grow than negative reinforcement or punishment, essentially.

Ellie: 17:17

So the criminal justice system, as it currently is structured is, rooted in anger or at least the desire for revenge, but that's, wrong-headed in the same way that my anger directed towards another person is wrong?

David: 17:29

Yes. And this is why it's called a retributive justice, because we are trying to get the criminal to pay back for the offense that they carried out against the victim, by ourselves inflicting a kind of punishment to them. And in connection to this question of criminal justice, she points to a series of experiments in what is known as restorative justice that indicate that the best way to combat recidivism is not through punishment, through taking away people's freedom, through isolation, but rather through things like education, training, therapy, community building, and so on. If you want to change criminals, really, you should not act in anger as a community.

Ellie: 18:17

Okay. Our guests is definitely going to disagree with that, which I'm excited about. Before we get to that, I want to think about one other aspect, maybe, of rage, which Myisha Cherry, our guest uses as a synonym for anger. So you probably noticed that we've been using rage and anger both. Rage is typically seen as a particularly intense or even violent form of anger, but it's a form of anger, but I think our discussion so far has revolved around anger as ethically oriented, as either moral or immoral, or even if it's not moral or immoral itself as leading to moral or immoral action. And I think this is true of most philosophical discussions of anger and it will certainly be the way that our interview with Myisha goes as well. But I also want to just briefly mention a psychological approach to anger that we get through the affect theory of Silvan Tomkins. And just as a way of setting that up, like I often feel super angry when I'm stuck at a light and there's a red left turn arrow, but the light is green and nobody is coming the other way. And I'm just like, dude, let me turn left, please. Don't make me sit out this entire light because there's this arbitrary red left turn arrow. And that's not anger directed towards a person, but it's just like kind of a general frustration. I don't know, David, do you have this too?

David: 19:45

Well, yeah. When I told the story about this incident on the flight, you know, I said I was angry at the guy who was angry at the older man, but I also was angry at my own inability in the moment to speak French. And that was not really directed at anybody. Not even at myself. It was just anger inducing fact of my reality in that moment. But I think this speaks to the limits of one claim that Aristotle makes about anger, which is that anger is always directed at another person. And you just mentioned the American psychologist, Silvan Tomkins, who talks a lot about anger that is not directed at other subjects. And he came to his theory of anger by observing pre-verbal infants. And he says that when infants, we're talking about very young infants first year of life, when they feel overstimulated, maybe because there is a loud noise somewhere in their environment, they don't know what to do. And they experienced what he called distress. But if the stimulus does not abate, at some point, the infant will cross a threshold and pass from distress to full-blown anger, which for Tomkins is-

Ellie: 20:53

Mm.

David: 20:54

innate primal affect that doesn't need to be conscious. It doesn't even need to be cognitive. And therefore is not even directed at a particular entity that, let alone a person that- the infant is just pissed, um, because there is this overstimulation of the senses.

Ellie: 21:13

Yeah. Well, and I think that speaks to a kind of way that anger can be a response to just a feeling of overwhelm, at least that is my experience of it in some cases, and definitely resonates with the experiences, I think, in my family system where anger was just licensed as like a way you respond, if you're feeling anxious or overwhelmed. Well, let's turn to our interview. We'll hear from my shaft. Myisha.

David: 22:00

Well, we're very excited to have with us Myisha Cherry, who is an assistant professor of philosophy at UC Riverside. She specializes in moral psychology, as well as social and political theory. And she's the author of an amazing book entitled The Case for Rage: Why Anger is Essential to Anti-Racist Struggle. She's also the host of the Unmute podcast, which Ellie and I cannot recommend highly enough.

Ellie: 22:28

We are so delighted to introduce our guests for today. Dr. Myisha Cherry. So welcome Myisha.

David: 22:35

Welcome.

Myisha: 22:36

Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited. Okay. My voice doesn't sound like an excited voice. So let me, I really am excited. I really am excited.

Ellie: 22:47

Okay, thank you. We're very excited too, which I think my voice is probably like sharing too much, but in any case, onto like a more sober professorial vibe. So you, contrary to popular opinion, have articulated the view that we need to give range credit for its ability to catalyze social justice movements. And you draw inspiration from black feminist author and poet, Audre Lorde, who wrote the seminal essay, "The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism." And you use her writings to show that even though most expressions of anger are politically futile, there's one kind of rage that can transform our attitudes for the sake of a better world. And you call this Lordean rage. What is it about Lordean rage that has this transformative power for you?

Myisha: 23:32

Yeah, I'm glad you kind of mentioned "The Uses of Anger" essay because when I was deciding to get into the topic as an intellectual endeavor, I was reading a lot of feminist philosophy and I noticed that the philosophy was quoting this woman that I hadn't heard of, um, and it seemed to be the source that they all had in common. And so it was the first time that I had heard Audre Lorde. So basically I got put on to Audre Lorde by white feminist philosophers, who would've thought. So I basically go to the archive, AKA JSTOR. And I, I find, I find the, the essay and I'm just amazed about the essay. I mean, she is indeed responding to racism that she's encountering, that she shares between political allies, political allies, and feminist movement. Um, and she starts to essay kind of given a definition of racism as suggesting that her anger is in response to it. She's given an account of a kind of anger that is appropriate. That is, that is fitting, uh, how it can be a catalyst for change, how it can be an inclusive. And it was just something about that essay that just really. It moved me in a very, in a very unique way. I mean, I'm not typically moved, um, when I'm doing intellectual readings. Um, but that, that essay moved me, you know, I'm very much in the emotions. And so I listened to my emotions and I listened to the things that move me in. And since that moment I've been kind of, when I say intellectually in love with, with Audre Lorde. And so when I was thinking about the topic, I had to give respect to where respect was due. And I think, I think as much as there's a lot of things that I talk about in the book, it does not necessarily derive from "The Uses of Anger" essay. It is mostly inspired by it. And so when I, when I consider Lordean rage, I had to name it, Lordean rage, which is an anti-racist anger. That essay changed my thinking about what anger can be in a context of racial injustice, not necessarily from the mouth of a man, a masculine man, militant man, and the nationalist movement, but from a feminist woman, um, who was very inclusive. And wasn't just concerned about herself as a privileged Black woman. When I think about anger that can arise in the context of political injustice, one of the things that I began to realize over the years is that critics paint anger in broad strokes. I think they, they looked at anger as if it was one thing. And that one thing was always destructive, always counterproductive, that when we experienced it we was under it's control and all hell can break loose, but that's not what I found in the essay of Audre Lorde. And so what I began to do is, is try to philosophically approach that essay and try to figure out, you know, w, what is, what is it about this anger that differs from the criticism that I'm hearing in these streets? What is it, what is it about this thing? And I, and I realized that it has several features. So, so Lordean rage, this anti-racist anger it's targeted towards racism, racist, racist, attitudes, et cetera. So it's target is, is a specific target. It's directed at something very. It's, it's motivational. And so it motivates one to engage in, engage in productive action, is directed at, at change. And Audre Lorde is very specific with suggesting that it's a radical transformation of our world, that when one is angry at a particular racial injustice, one is not only thinking about oneself and one's social economic position. One is concerned about everyone. So it's inclusive as what I call inclusive perspective. So I'm not just angry that my people got pulled over by the police, but I'm also angry that Asian Americans are getting attacked in the street, right? That's Lordean rage, has an inclusive perspective because I realize that I'm not free until everyone is free. And you contrast that with destructive anger, like January 6th, what happened on Capitol? I mean, they're not really aiming to really bring about a radical transformation of our world there. They're aiming to undo the democratic process, it's not inclusive, right? It's only thinking about, uh, white folks and particularly them thinking that they have been excluded in the American system. And so when you, when you consider those features that Audre Lorde has helped me to illuminate, you realize that there is kind of a productive and an appropriate rage that can be useful in the context of political injustice that doesn't always necessarily lead to January 6th or Charlottesville. And so I think, I think moral critics, anger critics are right to be suspect about anger, but be suspect about that kind of anger and not Lordean rage. It's different from anger that I call narcissistic. It's different from anger that I call white rage or rogue rage. Just differ from that. So let's, let's, let's attack that and challenge people to perhaps transition out of those unproductive rage in come into Lordean rage, but let's, let's keep Lordean rage. It has, it has uses.

David: 27:47

Well, one thing that I really like about your book Myisha is the way in which you draw these distinctions between destructive forms and expressions of anger, like the narcissistic anger or the anger that only seeks gratification from taking others down and destroying the social fabric and then this constructive, productive Lordean rage that seeks to build communities. And that seeks to empower individuals rather than disempower them. But speaking about being moved by writing, um, I w- I was moved by one particular point that you made.

Myisha: 28:18

Just one.

David: 28:23

Yeah, let me rephrase that. I was particularly moved by, by an argument that you make in chapter two of your book, which is that even Lordean rage, in spite of its transformative power, can sometimes go wrong. And that's a move that I wasn't expecting because by then you had it set up this distinction, right, between constructive and destructive rage. And you point out that well-meaning people who end up being so consumed in, let's say fighting what they're angry about, in particular racism. So they are embodying Lordean rage, but they might end up actually neglecting their relationships with, with other people, with their loved ones, with their family members, ignoring their, their duties in their everyday lives. And I want to know whether you can tell us more about how maybe incessantly fighting against what makes us justifiably angry can still end up making us sometimes act in unethical ways.

Myisha: 29:27

Right. Right. So this, this gets to kind of the heart of the matter when I think about kind of my philosophy of, philosophy of emotions. And so I kind of pointed out about action and agency, and I think, I think as much as emotions can move us, uh, we're still, we're still in the driver's seat here. You know, we're not possessed, you know, we're still in the driver's seat. So I want to, I want to give an account that no matter what emotion you may experience, that there's still room for agency. Then in a non-ideal context with my agency, I can be working so hard with something that is conceptually very productive to the point that I'm overworking myself. And so the anger can be fitting in that sense. Um, but it can turn what we call kind of prudentially inappropriate, right. And in which I'm neglecting my own wellbeing, right. I'm driving myself insane. And as sociologists and psychologists have recently talked about this, what we call kind of racial fatigue, um, people get tired of fighting the good fight. And so, you know, there's also a recent literature about self care. And so I want to suggest that just because I find power in anger, I'm not suggesting that we ought to be angry at every turn, angry to the top degree, always working, always in the space of being motivated to do something about injustice, because we've got to take care of ourselves. And when we don't take care of ourselves, even in the name of the struggle, our anger can be going wrong in that particular way. And that's why I end the book with a chapter talking about anger management, right? Suggesting that, Hey, if you want to keep this anger productive, if you want to continue to resist racism, racial rules, here's some things that you constantly, you need to constantly do in order to make sure that that anger stays in its most potent form, right. That's agency, right? Suggesting that there's things that we can do. So yes, we are equipped with a tool, but we are the ones that are maneuvering it and we can overdo it and do it in very ways that can be counterproductive to our particular aims. And I think once we recognize that, um, we can be hold ourselves a little bit more accountable, hold each other a little bit more, more accountable and allow us to kind of take care of each other. Take care of ourselves, make sure that when someone is doing something out of control, we check them in solidarity. And we also make sure that we constantly check ourselves. It also allows us to be home. And even though we're experiencing this kind of productive and fitting anger doesn't necessarily mean that we're always going to be perfect, that we're always going to wield it and ways that are in line with our explicit goals. And that's why before I get to anger management I talk about rage renegades, right? I talk about how white allies can even misuse this, this rage. So I want to allow for agency. And just because you got it doesn't mean that you can't go wrong with it. And I think we need to be aware of that.

Ellie: 31:59

Yeah. And I think what you're saying speaks a lot to the rise of attention to self care and, um, sort of having those inward turns where we're seeking refuge from, uh, the kind of, as you said, battle fatigue or racial battle fatigue of, uh, fighting for justice. And I guess I'm wondering how you see that in relation to the idea of metabolizing anger, because you say in your book that Lordean rage is a metabolized anger, and that's something that comes up in some other accounts of anger as well. Where on the one hand you have the account of somebody like Martha Nussbaum or Shantideva, whom you also mention in your book, who both think that we have to move beyond anger. So anger could be a starting point, but it ultimately has to be extinguished or overcome in order for us to have a moral contribution to justice. And then something like maybe Lordean rage where the metabolized anger is still actually an anger. And that's something that you see also in the tantric Buddhist tradition, where you're kind of holding on to your anger, but you have control over it. So I guess in thinking about what, what it might look like to have that anger management, do you see metabolizing anger as ultimately a form of overcoming it or as preserving it, but just in a different way?

Myisha: 33:21

Yeah. it's the latter for me, it's the latter for me. And I was very convinced to, did an anthology prior to the book in 2018, called The Moral Psychology of Anger and got some, brilliant folk to connect.

Ellie: 33:32

Highly-

Myisha: 33:33

Um, some on anger. And so I basically suggest, I don't believe in transitional anger, I believe in transformative anger. I think you know, the kind of anger that I'm giving an account of, it's all good all by itself, right. So, so why do we need to leave it in order to enter into kind of a new emotional space? If it aims to, to challenge and to change and bring about a radical transformation of our world, if it scrapped value to marginalized people's lives, if it motivates us and gives us the fuel that we need to engage in productive action. If we're able to have it and be a resistant figure, why would I want to transition out of that, right. But I would say, I would say something about other emotions and another reason why I don't think that we need to leave anger to enter into other kinds of emotional spaces is because I believe that anger is already compatible with those emotions. So why would I want to leave it? And not only is it compatible is also, it can expression of it. If I'm going to be angry that someone is being oppressed, and out of that anger, you know, I basically bring about an awareness that an injustice has happened. And I basically also make a claim about the value of their lives. I can only do that when I love them. And I'm talking about the kind of Agape love, kind of attitudinal love that King talks about, right? I mean, it basically means I love black folk. It means I love oppressed marginalized folk, right? It means that I love Latin X folk. That's compatible. That means that love is compatible. And it also means that that anger is an expression of that particular love so much so that if you ever got, got abused and your friends did not get angry, you would doubt the feelings that they have here. I mean, at least I would right because that's what, that's the power. So I don't think we need to transition out of anger to experience that love. And this is very different from Nussbaum's argument because she believes that we, that we should, and, and she, she uses King as an example, particularly "I Have a Dream" speech as an example of a transition out of anger. But when I look at King's life, King's life is a model of the fact that he did not transition out of his anger, right. He found it to be transformative. And so, you know, you can think about the "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," which a lot of us are teaching in our, our philosophy classes. And, you know, w, we basically held it as a good piece of philosophical writing, but we don't get the full count of how that even came about. So he's in jail. His lawyer basically sends him a letter that white clergymen, um, moderate white clergymen have wrote, it's an open letter telling them to wait, be patient, they're starting trouble, et cetera, et cetera. And his lawyer basically gives an account and described King as being angry. I mean, like really mad as hell. And so what King does in jails, there's a lot of reading that, that letter out of anger, he writes letter from a Birmingham jail from scraps in the jail. So we had this wonderful piece of philosophical writing that was birthed out of anger. Why would I want King to transition out of that? What we got as a result, right? And, and when we see, when we see King even mention anger, there's a, this is found in a collection that Cornell West on the radical King, The Radical King. There's an essay on Dubois that, that King writes about and imagine he's writing the story and the rise of the Black Panther movement and there's riots happening. Think that he would tell young folk don't be angry, right? He doesn't, he basically says that your anger is immature, right. he basically says, why don't you cut- basically? You said it's just like that. Oh, for those who nineties, baby, come on and join death row. He's basically telling them if you join, come on over here, join our team and use that anger in productive ways. Cause we got a plan. And he suggested WEB Dubois was a model of that kind of transformative anger, right. So I'm just not convinced that we need transition out of it, right. And when we think about King, we think about all of these positive emotions, he didn't find a disconnect between the two. He was able to see that, that you can have having them all. And that's my view. You don't need to transition out of it. It's already transformative all by itself. And it's compatible with these other positive emotions.

Ellie: 37:18

Yeah. And that sort of sanitized version of King, I was like, oh, just about love. I think, I think that's like, that's like the white version of King. That's the version of King that's friendly to middle and upper middle class white folks who want to have their cake and eat it.

Myisha: 37:31

And 2021, cause it still wasn't friendly with, it's 2022. Jesus

Ellie: 37:34

Totally.

Myisha: 37:35

Can y'all believe it? Anyway, because during that time people weren't trying to hear it.

Ellie: 37:39

Yeah. Yeah, totally. Now in retrospect, it's like, oh, he was such a nice figure, I think because there's still a lot of, you know, white resistance to black anger as having transformative power.

David: 37:50

Yeah, I, and I, I'm thinking about this definition that you're giving us of anger and not as something that is opposed to positive emotions, but as something that can grow out of, and in fact, manifest positive emotions, like love, hope yearning for another future. And this raises actually a question for me about the argument that you make in connection to a rage in your book. Because here, it seems like we ought to be angry at things that produce injustice, at things that produce suffering in the world. But at one point in your book, you make the argument that you actually cannot tell somebody that they should or should not be angry. It's not as if emotions are just hats that we decide to put on arbitrarily, like, you know, in the spot. But yet we often hear activists say things like we should be angrier about X, Y, or Z. And that appeal doesn't strike me as necessarily misguided since it, it really has some normative weight behind it, right? So when somebody says, David, you should be angrier, I don't know, the disenfranchisement of a particular community. I take that to be a productive critique of my values, of my action, of my priorities. And so I want to hear your thoughts about this, about the claim you ought to be angry, or you ought not to be angry.

Myisha: 39:21

Yeah. Um, you know, it's interesting kind of thinking about these things because on one level I really did have to think about kind of common language use. And what we mean by them and of those circumstances daily. And then think about like a larger kind of view about what I take emotions to be in general that can apply across all cases. In all contexts, you hit it spot on about what I think about emotions. And I just think that like, I can't will myself into, into an emotion. I can create a context or kind of thing to kind of lead me into it. So if I wanted to be sad, trust me, I can just go to the news and just watch a whole bunch of stuff. And there may be a probability that as a result, I will become sad. So I can put myself into a situation that will lead me into sadness, but it still doesn't guarantee that I will be, right, which goes to show this limits to this, right. For a whole bunch of reasons. It goes back to kind of agency and just how the emotions work in general. Also I would say that I have always been turned off by, I mean, think about the kind of position that I'm in about when I'm hearing people say don't be angry. And in some ways I'm re- I'm resistant to that and I have to be consistent. So if I'm consistent with there's something appalling about someone telling me not to be angry, I have to also be consistent and say, well, there's also something off. It really is something about someone telling me that I should be angry. Now, what is that about? I think both of those things are about what take emotions to be. We just can't will ourselves into these emotional states. Now we can hold ourselves accountable about attitude, um, and certain kinds of beliefs, right? So let's just say that I'm never angry about injustice. This is something that Amia Srinivasan kind of, kind of note. She talks about how people say, well, the Dalai Lama doesn't get angry about injustice, but it will be kind of off for us to say that he does, he's not concerned about injustice. Like that's kind of like a counter argument and should I kind- kinds of agree? And she's like, well, the typical person who doesn't, we would still say that there's something missing, although what's missing, we can't really give an account of right. And I'm kind of sensitive to that. I don't know what's missing in that particular case. Can't really give an account of it. But I would say that even if the emotion is not there, I will expect at least minimally to hold them responsible for any kind of lack of judgment. So could make the case that like you're not angry at this particular injustice. Well, what is anger? Anger, it involves kind of a judgment that something has gone awry and suggesting that something needs to be changed. And as much as I liked for that person to have kind of this, you know kind of an additional and emotional thing, I'm still resistant with saying that they should feel the emotion that I have, right. I'm more concerned as long as they have the, the values and the beliefs, because I think they can still have the values of beliefs. Emotions is just a way of valuing, but it's not the only way of valuing, right? I also want to be very careful about predispositions. And so there's just some people who are just dispositionally have very different emotional tendencies than others. So I know people who just don't get angry, it takes a lot to get them angry. Me, anything.

David: 42:14

I know. I noticed when I told you only one thing and moved me in your book.

Myisha: 42:17

Listen. listen. Anyway, I don't care about fulfill the stereotype of the angry black woman and here's the thing. People probably wouldn't even know that I'm but there's a lot to get me indignant, right. But that's just it. I just take it to be kind of me and my history and my experiences and my kind of dispositions, et cetera, et cetera. I know a lot of people who just have a disposition to be sad, I'm really sad, right. Which is different. And then not to even give an account of people who, whether that's through, uh, the way that their brain is structured, they just not predisposed to certain kinds of emotions. I want to be kind of sensitive to that kind of thing, whether it's through a hormonal imbalances or whether it's just who people are, people just respond very differently emotionally. So the should or should not, when it comes to the domain of emotions, I want to be resistant to that. I'm content with people, you know, having certain kinds of values and beliefs, absence of those particular emotions. But I am concerned about people who are in fact angry. And if you are already angry, this book is for you. Listen to me, right? I'm concerned about people who are angry and people are being made to, you know, make them feel embarrassed or shameful that they are angry. This book is not to convert people into angry people, right? I am concerned about people who have been having anger at racism and have been made to feel that they're doing something wrong. In some ways I want to remind them because I think there's some things there. I don't think they need a philosophy to tell them how valuable their anger is, but I want to remind them about how valuable their anger is and they shouldn't get rid of it. And I also want to talk to people who are not interested in feeling any emotion, right? They are just mad that other people are mad. Well I want to talk to those critics and let them know, Hey, you need to relax because the kind of anger that they are experiencing is productive, hence why I don't believe in the should and should not kind of thing. If you already are, that's where I want to start the argument.

David: 44:00

Well in this makes me think of another argument that you have in the book, which is that there is a pretty significant asymmetry when it comes to let's say white people and people of color in relation to these claims of whether you ought to or ought not to be angry. So, you know, it's not the same thing to look at a white person, looking at a racialized situation and say, you should be angrier. And to look at a black person who doesn't display that anger and then telling them, according to me, you should be responding to racism as a black person in a way that it's legible to me. And in this case, that means being angrier. And you point out that not expressing anger, especially for people of color, can be a survival mechanism after having to deal with the realities of racism. And so the violence, sometimes maybe even of that injunction to be angry, uh, has to take into consideration this asymmetry of the who it's being addressed to, who the addressee is.

Myisha: 45:02

As much as, as a concise book, there's a lot going on there that I'm trying to make into kind of succinct things. And one of the things that I- I'm, I'm aware of and, and, and why I'm so interested in kind of solving some of these problems, these real world problems, is because I think there's a lot of policing going on. No doubt, tone police and anger police in that's happening in that era. Like never before, particularly because we have so many mediums to do that and the policing, it can take a variety of forms. And that's why once again, I'm resistant to the should and should not, I mean, in some ways that could be a form of policing. I don't think anybody should police the emotions of others. Now, of course, it's going to be some exceptions to that. If we're going to do some should or should not. I want to say that people should not be policing the emotionals, the emotions of others. I mean, one of the things that I talk about in a book is for you to say that I should be angry. I say in the second chapter of the book, I believe that I think proportionality to me is just irrelevant. Um, and so even that kind of policing that says, Hey, you should be angrier. You know, particularly for a black person. It's like, listen, man, if I'm one more ounce of angry, I will lose my mind. the reason why I think policing goes awry because we try to make these general pronouncements and not really attuned to kind of the individual and the needs of the individual. And that's why I just don't think that it works in either way. So we have to be very careful about that. You know, I don't believe that everybody should be angry, but I want people to be angry. I do want white people to be angry about injustice. Now, all white people, when I saw the protest in 2020, and I saw, you know, Portland and even internationally people walking in solidarity with black lives. I can't really describe how I felt. There's no doubt that I felt affirmed. I felt seen. And so there is some value. I mean, we want to go to the shoulds. Should some white people be angry? Yup. I want some white people to be angry but I still want to be resistant to the all claim and still want us to be very sensitive on an individual level. And then, you know, I want some white people to be angry because I want to take a break. I mean, we mentioned this before. I want to be able to take a break. I want to be able to tone it down just a little bit for the sake of survival. Also there's some contexts in which white people can be angry in ways in which I can not be. Particularly with the stereotypes, because some certain contexts, I may be afraid that I'm going to confirm the stereotype, which I probably have already had in this interview, um, that black women are angry all the time, right. And so this is not the day I want to confirm the- interview early. Can you be angry? Can you like, turn it up a little bit in this meeting today? Not today. I want to be quiet today, right? So there's some value. There's some value in that.

Ellie: 47:30

And I think, you know, in terms of white rage, I want to return to the white nationalist. Well, I don't- okay. I don't want to return to the white nationalists, but I am, I'm inclined to think a little bit more about what you said earlier about the fundamental difference between Lordean rage and the rage of the white nationalists. Because, you know, as you're talking about wanting white people to be angry about racism, I'm also thinking about how I want white people not to be angry about what they perceive as like racism against white people. And so following your point that we can't say to the white nationalist, you shouldn't be angry because that's going to be ineffective and perhaps misguided. I wonder what we should say to them, because I think you've given us some really interesting tools for thinking about that. One of them being the white nationalist is not actually invested in the wellbeing of all people, but they're only invested in the wellbeing of white people, but I sometimes worry that they don't properly recognize that. And I'm thinking about an interview that the British journalist Gary Young did with Richard Spencer, where Richard Spencer was just like, oh no, no, no. I literally want the wellbeing of all. I just think that white supremacy is the best way to achieve that.

Myisha: 48:42

It's a contradiction. That's-

Ellie: 48:43

Yeah.

Myisha: 48:44

But go ahead.

Ellie: 48:45

Is that's, that's what, that's what I want your thoughts on, like how do we alert them to that contradiction?

Myisha: 48:51

So let me just say this. When it comes to the white nationals, we got to ask some questions here. Like, what is your anger directed at? Right. I really don't know. Um, and maybe we can think through this together, because I think that's going to answer a lot of questions, right. For one it's going to let us know, is that really injustice, really a thing, or is that an imagining? And if it's not the case that it's a thing than perhaps we can persuade them that it's not a thing and there's no need to be angry. Right. Because it will be unfitting at that point. Right. If it is a thing, is it a symptom of a thing? Is there really a larger cause here? All right. So, so listen, we know it's not the case that other racial groups are taken over this country. Even, even if you're concerned about numbers, we know the numbers do not make the majority, power doesn't work in that particular way. We know that we still live in a white supremacist society. We know that there's still a such thing as white power. I mean, have you looked at the Senate lately, white people are still in political power, even when there's a majority of, of people of color. I mean, it's just not the case that other racial groups have taken over. So what are you going to do with that particular fact? Right? If you say, Hey, no need to go through all the other features. What you say that you're angry about is just not fitting. You have no reason to be angry. And in some ways we perhaps stopped the conversation and we moved on to something else because the issue is no longer analyzing your anger, but it's analyzing which you mistakenly have assumed the world to be. Of course a philosopher is going to answer your question, Ellie, by suggesting that there need to be kind of a Socratic kind of engagement. And that's basically where it's going to start. I even think the whole term white nationalist within itself, I mean the term itself lets us know what the values are, right? And unless that person is able to transition out of those values, we can never really get to a productive kind of rage would benefit everybody that lived in a liberal democracy. Right. So we already know that there's already, I don't know if we want to say that there's some self deception involved there or this other kind of cognitive things going on not allowing them to see, I think white nationalists is a clear case that there are some explicit values, some explicit beliefs that doesn't hold up on a scrutiny when we look at it empirically. I think the more, the more kind of difficult cases is people who was at the Capitol, who doesn't really consider themselves a white nationalist per se or not part of any nationalist organizations, but they were there anyway. And so I will be interested in kind of interviewing them and trying to figure out, okay, what were you angry at, right. I think that's a, that's a very interesting case. Um, that will be very different from the Richard Spencer case. And once again, I think, I think my account helped to kind of make sense of, of for them and also for ourselves is that when we begin to ask them, what are the features of their rage, right. Really get at the content, right? Those features. Who are you thinking about? What is it directed at? What do you aim to do? Then we're able to figure out what kind of rage a person actually have. Um, and we can expose them to say, Hey, this is the epistemic errors you're making. Here's some moral errors that you're making. Do you want to stay here? Do you wanna change your values? Uh, do you wanna change your beliefs? You know, I got some ways with the happen, but unless you're willing to do that, then we're not really going to get to the productive stuff.

Ellie: 51:49

Yeah. And I think that's a really powerful way of thinking about it because one of the things I really liked about your account is that it doesn't actually depend on changing their anger, right? So a lot of psychological studies show it's really hard to change your emotions in the face of evidence that shows that you're wrong about what you think is a fitting anger, but your point is instead that, well, maybe they can change their values and beliefs. Seeing that their anger is not the kind of Lordeaan rage that you're discussing and therefore not productive.

Myisha: 52:15

Right, right. And it's not an instant, I'm not saying, as we know with Socrates, when he encountered these individuals, sometimes they left the conversation. I mean, his, his success rate is pretty low, you know what I mean? So I'm not saying in that Socratic interaction, that immediately, that person is going to transition.

Ellie: 52:31

He does not use evidence-based teaching methods.

Myisha: 52:35

So I'm not going to say it's going to happen in that instance, but we also didn't come into an anti-racist lifestyle in the instant either, right. So as much as we have been generous and I, and our wokeness have been a process, I think we need to be a little bit more generous in that regard, but it doesn't mean that we don't hold them accountable. It doesn't mean that we don't, engage in conversation in that particular way or ask them to engage us any kind of self-reflection, et cetera, et cetera. Just know that there's just like we require work. They too require work too.

David: 52:59

Yeah. And we all require work, um, around this question of how to process our emotions, especially as you said earlier in the unideal world that we inhabit with that in mind. Myisha, thank you so much for joining us today. This has been an extremely productive and let's hope transformative conversation.

Ellie: 53:21

Thank you. Thank you.

Myisha: 53:22

You too. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it. Thanks.

Track 5: 53:33

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Ellie: 53:51

Wow, David. So much to think about. I always love talking to Myisha and it's been so great to have her on. So what did you think?

David: 53:58

I thought it was amazing. You know, I obviously read her book, but listening to her talk about it gives me a sense of what she means when she says that she wants to build the case for rage, especially for those who are already angry.

Ellie: 54:12

Totally. Well, and also just speaking of her book, I mean, her book is written in such an accessible style for non-academics and there was actually, this is so rare in academia, there was a bidding war.

David: 54:24

Oh, I know. Hashtag goals.

Ellie: 54:28

I know, I know such goals. Like everybody wanted to publish her book and yeah, I think it just speaks so compellingly to the moment that we find ourselves in and offers like really interesting solutions to on the one hand, the fact that a lot of people have really strong emotions and having strong emotions isn't necessarily a bad thing, right. I liked what she said about not tone policing or policing people's emotions. And then on the other hand, wanting to do something with those emotions. And I remember when I was in grad school, the famous philosopher of race, Robert Bernasconi recommended to me, has his piece of advice to me, was write angry. And I've always thought about that, but I feel like Myisha also encourages us to act angry, but angry in a very particular way.

David: 55:16

Well, you know, one thing that really stood out for me about her comments about anger here, had to do with her use of the term predisposition or disposition, because it made me think about the way in which I experienced emotions. And it is true that there are some emotions that I definitely experienced, but that I don't manifest outwardly. And that might lead people to wrongly infer that I don't feel them because I don't act in ways that might be legible as David is experiencing this emotion at this particular moment.

Ellie: 55:48

Definitely. And I also think that people's emotions are read differently depending on certain elements of implicit bias, for instance. So a lot of times men's sadness might actually be read as anger rather than sadness, because we have this predisposition as a society to assume that the predominant emotion that men feel are angry and conversely, as a white woman, which has its whole set of stereotypes associated with it, my anger might be less likely to be read as anger and perhaps more likely to be read as like hysteria or I don't know what else like.

David: 56:27

Stop nagging.

Ellie: 56:28

Yeah.

David: 56:29

I'm telling you stop nagging at me.

Ellie: 56:34

Or even just as like, there might be more of a predisposition to see it as like polite or like, oh, she must be responding to something, you know that went out of the bounds of polite discourse, I don't know. I'm just like making shit up.

David: 56:47

Well, you know, it's funny because when I think about my own expressions of anger as a queer person of color, I think sometimes people have difficulty figuring out which category that should be filed under because on the one hand, as a queer person, people are like, oh, we can kind of file this under a male form of hysteria. You know, like the queeny gay guy who is just like, yeah. Like bitchy. But then also, because I'm a Mexican man, they also want to file it sometimes under the macho category. And those two things just don't work well together. So it's like, what is this queeny machista anger that I don't know how to reconcile in my head. And like, of course I don't experience my own anger as the combination of those two categories necessarily, but I've seen people struggle and I just see the kind of clash in their eyes, especially along those two identity lines for them.

Ellie: 57:39

Yeah. And I love how Myisha was just kind of like, look, I don't give a shit about trying to actively contest an angry black woman stereotype from a philosophical perspective. She doesn't spend a lot of time really caring too much about that, right. Because it's like, I'm going to give you a robust philosophical argument for when and why anger is merited and how it often is merited against situations of injustice, especially racism. And so then, Hey, you can follow that out to its conclusions, which is that black women's anger is often justified.

David: 58:11

I also was struck by her claim that sometimes she feels a need not to express anger only so as to not let people have that validation of the stereotype, you know, it's like, I'm really pissed, but I won't let you see it.

Ellie: 58:26

Totally. Yeah. And so my point is not to say that she's like, oh, I just want to express my anger at all times, because she said, not only does she not want to do that sometimes, but also at other times it would be unsafe to do so or threatening in some way to her person. Um, but I think also just kind of like bypassing that narrative and in her philosophical writing, um, is a really powerful move.

David: 58:48

And this makes me think, Ellie, that if we return to Peter Sloterdijk's argument in a Rage and Time that rage is this founding emotion that gets the Western project going, maybe anger, according to Myisha might be a way to combat many of the side effects that this Western project has produced like injustice, disenfranchisement, and so on and so forth. So that anger might be the cause of the problem, but it could also be part of the solution. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcast.

Ellie: 59:32

You can find us at overthinkpodcast.com, where you can email us with questions, feedback, or even request for life advice.

David: 59:39

You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter @overthink_pod. We want to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan, as well as our production assistant Sam Hernandez.

Ellie: 59:49

Samuel PK Smith for the original music and Trevor Ames for our logo, and to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.