Myisha Cherry is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. She is also the Director of the Emotion and Society Lab. Her research is primarily concerned with the role of emotions and attitudes in public life. Cherry’s books include UnMuted: Conversations on Prejudice, Oppression, and Social Justice (Oxford University Press) and, co-edited with Owen Flanagan, The Moral Psychology of Anger (Rowman & Littlefield), and The Case for Rage: Why Anger is Essential to Anti-racist Struggle published by Oxford University Press. Her latest book, Failures of Forgiveness: What We Get Wrong and How to Do Better was released by Princeton University Press in 2023. Her work on emotions and race has appeared in The Atlantic, Boston Review, Los Angeles Times, Salon, Huffington Post, WomanKind, and New Philosopher Magazine. Cherry is also the host of the UnMute Podcast, where she interviews philosophers about the social and political issues of our day.

Presented by students from Morehouse and Bates colleges, this debate honors the Rev. Dr. Benjamin Mays, a 1920 Bates graduate, prominent debater, longtime Morehouse president, pioneer of the civil rights movement, and important mentor to Martin Luther King Jr..

This year’s topic is “Resolved: This house believes that social justice movements should practice a politics of anger.” 

Dr. King offered a complicated assessment of anger’s place in our struggle for social change. Dr. King once cautioned in his speech titled “The Other America” that “angered expressions” of despair could produce “bitterness in the violent rebellions” of civil rights activists. Yet, Dr. King also recognized anger’s positive potential in his 1968 commemoration of W.E.B. Du Bois, expressing that “the supreme task is to organize and unite people so that their anger becomes a transforming force.”