The Uses of Anger

All of the readings & Zoom link can be found on our website and attached to this email: https://sites.google.com/view/historyhumanitieshealth/fall-2022

Our foundational text for discussion will be Audre Lorde’s “The Uses of Anger,” first delivered as a keynote at the 1981 National Women’s Studies Association meeting. Lorde reflects on anger as a motivating and clarifying force, as well as the difference between Black women’s anger against racism and forms of anger that destroy and dehumanize.

We will pair Lorde’s work with the prologue to Carol Anderson’s recent book, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide. Anderson’s work takes an long view of white supremacist policymaking since the Civil War, rooting the denial of Black citizenship in a long-entrenched white rage. While both authors point to the dangers of leaving anger “unspoken,” the forms of anger they describe have radically different motivations and consequences.