On Righteous Anger

I’m thinking about anger this week. I often find myself both affirming anger and feeling deeply uncomfortable with its expression. That tension is worth exploring I think, because in the interest of liberatory change, anger is both invaluable and precarious.

I came to value anger as a driver of change long ago, largely informed as I often was then (and still am now) by the poet and activist Audre Lorde. “Focused with precision,” Lorde said in a 1981 speech, “anger can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change.” (See resources).

I understand the necessity of anger in the work of increasing equity. As paradoxical as it may seem, I recognize the role of rage in the work of decreasing violence. Anger insists on my attention. It requires me to see. Without the sharp light of anger, I might not summon the courage to act. Lorde writes, "When we turn from anger we turn from insight, saying we will accept only the designs already known, deadly and safely familiar.”

So why am I troubled by anger at all? Why do I call it precarious? I circle back to Lorde. There’s a call for transforming anger in her words. In the service of change, she writes, anger doesn’t generate power on its own; it requires translation, focus, and “precision.”

Precision has come to be associated with accuracy, but the word in English comes from the Latin, praecidere, to cut off. What must be cut off from anger to make it precise? Several writers this week have affirmed my belief that what needs trimming is self-righteousness.

There is a fundamental difference, I think, between righteous and self-righteous anger. I appreciate writer and musician Sara Haile-Mariam’s definition of righteous anger, which she describes as, “ an anger that lets you know when your boundaries have been crossed. Anger in response to mistreatment, to being asked to shrink. Anger born from injustice. This anger always comes to reveal when your circumstances are misaligned with your worth. . . . It says these circumstances do not reflect my wholeness and the truth of who we are.” (See resources).

Mariam’s illustration of injustice is helpful to me: “circumstances misaligned with [essential human] worth.” Righteous anger is fueled by a sense of injustice. Self-righteous anger is fueled by a sense of moral superiority.

That difference matters, at least in the context of efforts for liberatory change. Moral superiority can very easily excuse or lead to actions that deny others’ essential humanity. In Mariam’s illustration, that’s injustice.

I’ll circle back to Audre Lorde. In the next sentence after she spoke of the power of anger focused with precision, Lorde said, “And when I speak of change, I do not mean a simple switch of positions or a temporary lessening of tensions, nor the ability to smile or feel good. I am speaking of a basic and radical alteration in those assumptions underlining our lives.”

I can’t see how anger fueled by moral superiority, which arguably works against justice, will benefit any effort toward changing the assumptions underlying injustice.

This is not a theoretical discussion. I’m frustrated with calls for liberation that affect the opposite for those with whom the callers disagree, or which only serve to increase resistance. Unleashing self-righteous anger often looks like name calling, denigration and marginalization. It’s easy to post an angry meme calling those who deny climate change idiots, but I have to ask, to what end?

One more circle back to Audre Lorde (for now). Such imprecise anger, she argued, will only result in guilt at best and defensiveness, even sharp resistance, at worst. “Guilt and defensiveness,” Lorde wrote, “are bricks in a wall against which we all flounder; they serve none of our futures.”

I don’t see the purpose of angry responses that serve none of our futures, and this explains my discomfort with some expressions of anger, to an extent. Buddhist teacher and activist Lama Rod Owens seems to share my impatience when he writes in Love and Rage (2020), “In activist communities, our relationship to anger is immature, ill informed, and overly romanticized.” (p.22).

But Owens’ answer to that concern reveals another source of my discomfort. Owens’ agrees with the value of anger in the service of change, arguing compellingly for the necessary energy anger provides. But that won’t be available, Owens writes, without tending to emotions that underlie anger, “When I am taking care of my hurt,” he writes, “the energy of anger becomes an energy that helps me cut through distractions and focus on the work that needs to get done.” Likewise, Owens continues, “If we refuse to acknowledge our hurt . . . we will never be fully empowered in our agency to channel the energy into clarity and directness while reducing harm.”

If anger is not reducing harm, and especially if it is causing harm, then anger is no friend to liberation. Righteous anger though, and anger strengthened by tending to other emotions, provides essential energy for doing the work that needs to get done.

It has not escaped me, writing this week, that Audre Lorde spoke in 1981 of the need for precise and focused anger, and that almost forty years later Lama Rod Owens writes of the need to “cut through distractions” and “focus the work.” Clearly these lessons are hard to learn. So I turn back to practice, knowing that practice necessarily includes failure, committing to honing my own anger to serve the work of liberatory change.