Feelings of Injustice
Who gets to act on their anger?
Hi there,
If you don’t already know me, welcome. I’m a journalist who covers the social sciences—i.e. research that tries to make sense of baffling and wonderful and unsavory aspects of human behavior. I’ve named this newsletter Related because I’m fascinated by how people relate to one another and because I plan to bring ideas from various fields in conversation. Here, I’m inspired by Brain Pickings author Maria Popova and her notion of combinatorial creativity:
“The idea that in order for us to truly create and contribute to the world, we have to be able to connect countless dots, to cross-pollinate ideas from a wealth of disciplines, to combine and recombine these pieces and build new castles.”
I hope the dot-connecting in this newsletter will build something new and insightful. In this newsletter, you’ll find my thoughts on social science research, links to my recent work, reading/listening suggestions, and a random factoid.
Amid the nearly two months of protests and widespread conversation about racism and police violence, two papers have been on my mind. Both speak to the way marginalized people are forced to make difficult, even infuriating, trade-offs as they seek to address injustice. They have to choose between the apt way to respond and the response that’s more likely to bring the outcomes they want. I was prompted to again think about these papers around the Fourth of July, a holiday that commemorates the results of righteous anger (of white men) against an unjust government.
The first paper,“Agenda Seeding,” which recently came out in a top political science journal, looks at a different moment in history. Princeton political scientist Omar Wasow focuses on how 1960s Black protest movements influenced public opinion and voting. He finds that non-violent protests drove up support for civil rights and increased the share of votes for the Democratic presidential candidate. In this interview about the paper, Wasow describes how Black civil rights leaders realized which situations best captured public attention: those that involved nonviolent protesters as the targets of state violence. In incidents like Bloody Sunday, white Americans could see on their TVs how the police attacked, and in some cases killed, nonviolent black protesters. The brutality of Jim Crow was irrefutable.
But not all violence worked in Black activists’ favor. When protesters instigated violence, the media framed news stories in the language of riots and crime rather than civil rights—even when police escalated the situation with violence of their own. Wasow found that violent protests helped Nixon—who campaigned on a law and order platform—get enough votes in some swing states to capture the presidency in 1968. Wasow argues that the effect was enduring. “In the absence of white antipathy to black uprisings,” he writes, “the ‘law and order’ coalition would not have carried the day and, possibly, not developed a durable campaigning and governing strategy for the next half-century.” The last line of the paper is sobering synopsis of the dilemma for Black protesters:
“An ‘eye for an eye’ in response to violent repression may be moral, but this research suggests it may not be strategic.”
The Oxford philosopher Amia Srinivasan would say that even asking marginalized people to moderate their anger is a special kind of injustice. In “The Aptness of Anger” she turns away from the standard question that people in politics and philosophy ask about anger: is it productive? She says that even if we were to take for granted that it’s counterproductive for marginalized people to act on their anger—that they’ll just inflame and alienate the people who they want to change—we still need to answer the question, is anger an appropriate response to an unjust world? She says the answer is often yes. The fact that anger backfires when it’s expressed by people of color, women, and other groups (see The Angry Black Woman stereotype; research that finds that white women are perceived as less competent when they’re angry in a workplace setting whereas angry white men are perceived as more competent) is a problem that we need to notice rather than a reason to suppress these people’s well-earned anger. Srinivasan gives us a name for situations in which “victims of oppression must choose between getting aptly angry and acting prudentially”: affective injustice. The grim irony is, the very people who are most justified in getting angry have the most to lose by expressing it.
Srinivasan is writing about anger; she takes care to separate her discussion from one about violent tactics. But the idea of affective injustice feels useful when people ask, what forms of protest are effective? Isn’t violence counterproductive? Black activists must make the tricky calculations that Wasow and Srinivasan lay before us. (White protesters do not have to make these in the same way, which is perhaps this is why some white protesters acted violently despite the pleas of Black leaders). The choice: suppress your emotions and reduce the risk of further harm, or act on apt emotions and face the consequences.
Now you know
How did the word “clue” get its meaning? A clew is a ball of yarn that people would leave trailing behind them to find their way out of a maze. Clew, later changed to the current spelling, came to take on the metaphorical meaning of a potential solution to a mystery. There’s another reason “clue” caught on. Many crimes against women were violent; women’s bodies were often found with torn clothing. Fabric threads—literally clews—were evidence that could help solve crimes. [Source: The Last Archive’s “The Clue of the Blue Bottle”]
I’m still thinking about
Words: Imagining Manhattan without cars. I knew that cars contribute to pollution, but I hadn’t thought about the sheer amount of space they demand—and how a city with precious little real estate to spare, like New York City, could better use that space.
Sounds: It’s about a month old, but this profile of Breonna Taylor will go down, in my mind, as a gorgeous, rending piece of audio.
Video: I was frozen in my seat as I watched five of Frederick Douglass' descendants, who are all in their teens and twenties, deliver his 'Fourth Of July' Speech.
I made
For The Lily, I wrote a tribute to voice memos in pandemic times.
I was one of the editors for this Hidden Brain episode about how the faulty use of science has contributed to injustices within the criminal justice system.
Let me know what you think of this first newsletter. And please do send me research and other things that you think should be on my radar.
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