On Anger, Silence, and Epistemic Injustice

Abstract

If anger is the emotion of injustice, and if most injustices have prominent epistemic dimensions, then where is the anger in epistemic injustice? Despite the question my task is not to account for the lack of attention to anger in epistemic injustice discussions. Instead, I argue that a particular texture of transformative anger – a knowing resistant anger – offers marginalized knowers a powerful resource for countering epistemic injustice. I begin by making visible the anger that saturates the silences that epistemic injustices repeatedly manufacture and explain the obvious: silencing practices produce angry experiences. I focus on tone policing and tone vigilance to illustrate the relationship between silencing and angry knowledge management. Next, I use María Lugones's pluralist account of anger to bring out the epistemic dimensions of knowing resistant anger in a way that also calls attention to their histories and felt textures. The final section draws on feminist scholarship about the transformative power of angry knowledge to suggest how it might serve as a resource for resisting epistemic injustice.

Political anger

“…Recent research has explored the ethics of anger evaluations, questions that lie at the intersection of moral psychology and social epistemology. Acknowledging that there are silencing practices, Alison Bailey (2018) recommends we respond with knowing resistant anger. She defines it as “a rebellious anger attentive to the epistemic terrains where it is and is not intelligible.…”

Misogynoir

“…Tone Policing: Tone Policing is a mechanism for preserving the status-quo through suppressing expressions of anger in response to injustice [10]. For Black women, Tone Policing is exacerbated by stereotypes of the "angry Black woman" that are ubiquitous in the media and film [5].…”

“…Aerica Shimizu Banks: Aerica Shimizu Banks is an excoworker of Ifeoma Ozoma at Pinterest, who was also working in the Public Policy and Social Impact team. She had served on the Patent Policy team at Google before Pinterest 10 . Aerica Shimizu Banks went public about her tenure at Pinterest, and shared her encounter with her former colleague Ifoema Ozoma's Twitter thread.…”

Passionate Speech: On the Uses and Abuses of Anger in Public Debate

“…Yet, even though it is sometimes appropriate to criticise others for their anger, one must remain alert to the possibility that one’s attitude is one of tone policing that silences some who might have been wronged (Berenstain, 2019; Jamieson, Volinsky, Weitz and Kenski, 2018). Thus, long before DiAngelo (2011) labelled the phenomenon ‘white fragility’, Lorde (1996) notes, in response to a white woman who asks her to mute her anger so that her addressee can hear the message, that she appears to think that her tone is a bigger problem than the injustice she highlights in her message (Bailey, 2018). Tone policing, and the calls for civility that accompany it, have little to recommend for themselves.…”