By Myisha Cherry, The Atlantic, October 17, 2021
When we think of love, we recognize its varieties. Philia, brotherly love. Eros, romantic love. Agape, universal love. Conditional and unconditional love, requited and unrequited love, love for virtue and love for vice. Our awareness of these different kinds of love not only allows us to perceive its varied forms; it also gives us adequate information to approve or disapprove of a particular type. When we talk about anger, by contrast, we tend to paint it in broad strokes, generalizing it as though it were one destructive thing.
But there are many kinds of anger. As a philosopher and an anti-racist scholar, I study anger through the lens of political injustice, and I have sorted political rage into five categories. The first four are at best unproductive and at worst dangerous, but the fifth variety can be useful and lead to positive change.
- “Rogue rage” is anger at injustice, although the target of the injustice is not necessarily the person or institution that caused it. A person with rogue rage blames almost everyone for his unjust experiences. The former neo-Nazi Christian Picciolini, who now works to fight extremism, was a rogue rager before he changed his ways.
- “Wipe rage” is felt by people who perceive injustice at the hands of a specific group or groups and aim to eliminate those people. Wipe ragers may experience economic hardship or they may feel ignored by a government that is supposed to represent and serve them. The alt-right protesters who descended on Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 with their anti-Semitic and anti-Black chants of “You will not replace us!”—voicing a belief that white people are on the verge of extinction—were expressing wipe rage.
- “Ressentiment rage” may sound strange at first, perhaps even redundant. (The French ressentiment can be translated as resentment, although its meaning in French more closely reflects my intent here.) Ressentiment rage is aimed at a racial group in power and is expressed by those without power. It is likely to be directed at all members of the powerful group—for example, an Indigenous person who is angry at all white people in America. People with ressentiment rage are reactive: They see themselves as subjects who are acted upon.
- “Narcissistic rage” is not my term; bell hooks coined the phrasein her 1995 book, Killing Rage. She cites Black elites as a group that sometimes has narcissistic rage, which arises from a sense of individual exceptionalism, not outrage at systemic injustice. Narcissistic ragers are angry because although they have worked hard and risen through the ranks—gaining much social capital and even acceptance by some white people—the oppressive powers refuse to make a distinction between them and other members of the oppressed group.
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