“FEEL GOOD. Feel better. Move forward. Let it go,” Claudia Rankine writes in her poem Citizen, in the internal monologue of a black woman trying to move past anger over racial wrongs.
Rankine depicts a familiar sensibility about anger: yes, we sometimes have good reason for getting angry—we feel wronged, after all—but there are all kinds of reasons for (eventually) letting it go. Even if our anger is righteous, perpetual anger is destructive— whether for its bearer or for society.
In our forum, philosopher Agnes Callard challenges this conventional view. Perhaps we shouldn’t let our anger go. Our reasons for being angry are eternal, aren’t they? No apology or redress ever erases the original injury that provoked the anger in the first place. “The affective response to injustice clings to the taste of blood,” she writes. “Once you have a reason to be angry, you have a reason to be angry forever.”