Navigating Anger and Agency: Understanding the Uses and Consequences of Emotional Responses

2. Fleeing Discomfort:Reasons, ViceS, and Epistemic Injustice Alessandra Tanesini May 2019

3. The Plan • Anger • Anger, Reasons, and Agency • Muting and suppressing anger as epistemic injustice • White and cis-fragility and discomfort • Discomfort, insensitivity and vicious sensibilities • Fleeing discomfort: guilt, complicity, complacency and rationalisations • Hope whilst staying with the discomfort

4. Anger • Anger is a “desire, accompanied by [mental and physical] distress, for apparent retaliation because of an apparent slight that was directed, without justification, against oneself or those near to one” (Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1378a 30-33). • Anger is a negative emotion in response to a perceived wrong • It includes a desire to redress the wrong • Aristotle conceives of this as seeking to get even, but it need not be so.

5. Two faces of Anger • Anger is a characteristic emotion of some vices of superiority. • It can be a reaction to a perceived threats to arrogated entitlements (privileges). • Anger is a characteristic response of the subordinated to the wrongs of their subordination. • It can be a reactive attitude of moral indignation holding others responsible for their behaviour and demanding that they stop and/or make amends

6. The uses of Anger • Feminists of colour have long argued for the usefulness of anger (e.g., Lorde, 1981; Lugones, 2003). • Anger as efficacious in the fight against oppression • It supplies energy and motivation and thus is a burdened virtue (Tessman, 2005) • It scares and pushes away individuals who are dangerous for one (Malatino, 2019)

7. Anger, Knowledge, Communication • Anger is instrumental in the acquisition of moral knowledge. • Anger, like other moral emotions, directs attention to relevant evidence of a wrong. • Anger if unwarranted can mislead and make us misconstrue the moral status of some action. • Anger is also a reactive attitude. • Anger is a way to hold people responsible for their actions by communicating to them that what they are doing is wrong • It demands that they stop and/or make amends and thereby it supplies them with a reason to do so.

8. Anger, Reasons, agency • Anger, when trained to be accurate, is essential for the exercise of epistemic and moral agency • Anger alerts one to the existence of wrongs even when one lacks the conceptual resources to fully understand them. • Anger thus is instrumental to understanding • The ability to understand one’s situation is an essential component of epistemic agency • Anger is also a way of holding others responsible. • This ability is an essential part to the exercise of moral agency

9. Muted and suppressed Anger • Anger is muted when it is silenced and thus treated as mere venting or over-reaction rather than as a communicative reactive attitude. • Anger is suppressed when it is self-smothered so that it is not manifest but also inhibited overtime.

10. Muting Anger as Claimant Injustice • When anger is muted it fails to communicate moral indignation and becomes mere venting. • One is thus deprived of the ability to address some moral claims to others • Claimant injustice when one is, because of prejudice, systematically and wrongly deprived of the ability to hold others responsible (Carbonell, 2019).

11. Suppressing anger as Hermeneutic Injustice • Repeated self-suppression of anger might lead to the dampening down of anger because of • Rationalisation to reduce cognitive dissonance • Sheer depression • Dampening of anger damages one’s capacities to fully understand one’s situation • Rationalisation lowers self-confidence and atrophies some intellectual capacities • Denies one of a vital cue to develop understanding when conceptual resources are not already in place • This is an hermeneutic injustice since it harms one’s capacities to develop appropriate conceptual resources

12. White and CIS-Fragility in the Face of Anger • Feminists of colour and more recently trans-women complain that their anger is often met by white feminists or cis-women with fragility. • “I speak out of direct and particular anger at an academic conference, and a white woman says, “Tell me how you feel but don’t say it too harshly or I cannot hear you.” But is it my manner that keeps her from hearing, or the threat of a message that her life may change?” (Lorde, 1981) • White Fragility is manifested in tears, fears, expressions of discomfort and guilt and a disposition to flee (DiAngelo, 2011).

13. White and Cis- Fragility as strategy • White fragility seeks to be comforted thus promoting the suppression of anger • White fragility promotes fleeing discomfort thus fostering the muting of anger

14. White Fragility, active ignorance and racial insensitivity • White fragility is a way of keeping oneself ignorant of one’s complacency and complicity in other people’s subordination. • This is active ignorance because it is ignorance motivated by the desire not to know. • It is the product of racial insensitivity understood as a vicious or corrupt sensibility (Medina 2013, 2016)

15. Hope and Staying with the discomfort • Staying with the discomfort is essential to hear the angry message and to avoid being complacent about and complicit with widespread injustice. • How to resist white fragility and the concomitant fleeing of discomfort • Promote resilience and persistence (Di Angelo, 2011) • Foster hope (Applebaum, 2017) • Foster the epistemically virtuous sensibility of virtuous sensitivity