If you, like me, ill-advisedly whiled away the past couple of weeks in a haze of doomscrolling, then you have seen the memes. Sophie Cunningham, a shooting guard for the Indiana Fevers, points at an enraged DeWanna Bonner, an opposing player for the Phoenix Mercury. Eminently memeable, Cunningham and Bonner’s confrontation circulated as a signifier for situations involving one-sided blame and the wrath the blamer often incurs from the blamee. “My husband when another Amazon package I didn’t tell him about arrives.” Or, “Jesus to Judas when he asks who’s going to betray him.”  In a more inspired iteration, one meme grafted Cunningham onto the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, like Eve ragebaiting the wrath of God. And, of course, the Trump Administration couldn’t resist a desperate bid for relevancy in an official X post juxtaposing the shooting guard with images of Trump also pointing. In one edit, Cunningham has been endowed with X-Men-like powers as her fingers discharge laser beams onto a hot-headed Bonner now engulfed in a literal fiery furor.

After their heated dust-up went viral, Cunningham’s index finger, and Bonner’s ensuing rage, enjoyed an unusual longevity on the internet, much to the boon of the WNBA. However, beneath this cascade of memes lurk entrenched attitudes about emotional expression that have done historical violence to racialized others. Full disclosure: I’m the furthest thing from a sports analyst. I don’t even watch the stuff. But, I do study American literature for how representations of anger reflect cultural attitudes around race, violence, and moral evaluations of human impulse. At the same time that my feed buffeted me with Cunningham memes, I was also struck by the disconcerting parallels between the recent controversies in the WNBA and late-nineteenth-century discourses about race and emotions.

For one thing, Cunningham is white and Bonner is Black. Online commentators tend to laud Cunningham’s cool demeanor while disapproving of Bonner’s unrestrained emotional state. This comparison between Cunningham and Bonner recapitulates racist assumptions about emotional self-control, or lack thereof, that can fuel panic about interracial violence. Case in point, recent Republican-led efforts, and far-right sycophants, have glommed onto WNBA stars as mascots for white victimhood. These efforts have conscripted white players like Cunningham and Caitlyn Clark into a battle against Black women waged by online race-baiters and the most vile from the ranks of the GOP. Clark’s own meteoric rise has incidentally made her something of a lodestar for controversy after eleven Republican members of congress cosigned a letter to the WNBA expressing their own outrage towards the Association’s alleged failure to protect Clark from targeted violence purported to be “racially motivated” [1]. Not only portraying Clark as the victim of violence perpetrated by Black players, the letter also boldly threatens to throw the full discretion of the Department of Justice at any “civil rights violations against Clark.”

Like any sport, basketball is a game where tempers are often lost, and rivalries overheated. However, race can often determine how notions about impulse versus self-control become attributed to individuals and their predilection for violence. When it comes to the incident involving Cunningham and Bonner, commentators typically describe the latter as impulsive and the former as the paragon of self-control. Cunningham herself described Bonner as “losing her shit,” while media outlets have noted Bonner’s seniority over Cunningham to imply that the maturity of the former should have prevented her from losing her temper at such a harmless gesture [2]. And it hasn’t taken long for Fox News to situate Cunningham into the larger discourse over targeted violence. As a Redditor user curtly put it, referring to Cunningham and Bonner, respectively: “emotional control vs. no emotional control.” Or, captured in another exchange between users discussing Bonner on the more unsavory of Reddit troll boards: “Zero impulse control.” “Nailed it. She wanted that violence instantly.” But don’t take it from the mouth of Redditors. As Representative Marlin Stutszman, a cosigner of the Republican letter, reiterated in a public statement, the league “should act swiftly to keep [women] protected from the thug-like violence Caitlyn Clark has fallen victim to.” With racist dogwhistles about “thug-like” violence and Republican efforts, not to mention Cunningham’s own endorsement, to curtail trans women’s rights to compete in sports, few sports events today are spared the Social Darwinist baggage of determining who is the fittest to compete.

As the WNBA monopolized my feed, I was also reading what I consider to be the angriest of American literature. Not just novels by Edith Wharton, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, and Jack London, but also the intellectual substrate that germinated many of these writers’ innovations in character psychology and their novelistic discourse on human nature. During the late-nineteenth century, American writers imbibed by the caskful the writings of Darwin and the works of Social Darwinists like Edward Spencer. In doing so, these writers not only wanted to depict people as they really behaved, but sought reasons and causes as to why people behaved the way they did in the first place.

Darwin’s theories, and their derivations in the social sciences, provided compelling material for thinking about the influence of environment and hereditary on human behavior, perhaps human emotions most of all. For instance, in Norriss’s 1899 novel McTeague: A Story of San Francisco, the titular protagonist, an enormous and dimwitted dentist whose degeneration into savagery coincided with an almost fated descent into poverty, finally surrenders to his impulse to kill in which his “rage was a kind of obsession, an evil mania, the drunkenness of passion, the exalted and perverted fury of the Berserker, blind and deaf, a thing insensate” [1].

On the other hand, a writer like Theodore Dreiser, an advocate for the urban working poor, consumed the bulk of Darwin and Spencer and found an explanation, albeit not an unproblematic one, for the human greed, selfishness, and immediate gratification that a corrupt capitalist system rewarded. In Sister Carrie, published in 1900, Dreiser’s narrator states “[a]mong the forces which sweep and play throughout the universe, untutored man is but a wisp in the wind. Our civilization is still in a middle stage, scarcely a beast, in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason” [2]. Here, the expression of human emotions, particularly that of anger, was paramount to how these authors thought about the nature of human impulse and the racialized question of “primitive” or “savage” emotional states.

The most fertile of that substrate had been Darwin’s 1872 book The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals. In his chapter “Anger and Hatred,” Darwin writes that “[r]age, anger, and indignation are exhibited in nearly the same manner throughout the world,” only to qualify this statement a little later by adding “[t]here is, however, an exception with respect to clenching the fists, which seems confined chiefly to the men who fight with their fists” [3]. For Darwin, those pugnacious pugilists are Europeans. Compared to the dignified indignation of these clenched-fisted Europeans, Darwin taxonomizes the gestural grammar of anger from an assortment of racial and ethnic others. When it comes to Australians, “Dakota Indians,” Chinese, “low-caste Bengalese,” and “degraded English women” prone to “quarrelling violently in the streets,” Darwin describes their rage in a manner that conveys an inability to regulate impulses: “native men […] throwing their arms wildly about,” “stamp[ing] on the ground,” or “pour[ing] forth a volley of abuse” [4]. The clenched fists of restraint versus the claws and clamor of impulsivity. Elaborating on this, Spencer formalized Darwin’s analysis into an axiom of eugenicist thought. In his 1875 essay “Emotions in the Primitive Man,” Spencer compares the “proprietary feeling in the savage” to that in “the civilized man” only to peremptorily conclude that “primitive man” not only experiences “a greater degree of sensations,” but also a greater degree of “irregularity which results when each desire as it arises discharges itself in action before counter-desires have been awakened.” In short, when compared to well-behaved Western man, the so-called savage lacks the virtue of anger management.

Reading these texts, it was difficult for me not to see such sentiments reproduced in the comments and debates swirling around the WNBA. The dichotomy of these two “types”—whiteness as civilized restraint on the one hand, and Blackness as uncontrollable rage on the other—suggested a tendency we have to view emotions as transhistorical reactions and sensations uncontaminated by social and cultural discourses that enlist race as an organizing logic. As discourses, then, these emotions can be rewritten. And when reading African American writers at the turn-of-the-century, there appears a radical reversal of these assumptions. In novels that capture the racial violence and turmoil after the failures of Reconstruction and the terrorism of white lynch mobs, writers like Charles Chesnutt and James Weldon Johnson turned these theories back onto the unchecked fury of thug violence carried out by whites.

In The Marrow of Tradition, Charles Chesnutt’s 1901 novel that fictionalizes the violent atrocities committed during the Wilmington race riot of 1898, the language of degenerated savagery frames not racialized others, but the Southern whites who form the lynch mob that enacts racial violence. The lynch mob’s impulse to commit murder in a storm of rage reveals “that our boasted civilization is but a thin veneer, which cracks and scales off at the first impact of primal passion” [5]. Or when, in James Weldon Johnson’s 1912 novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, the protagonist witnesses a lynching in the American South, the recounting of the narrative forces him to pause and address the reader: “Have you ever witnessed the transformation of human beings into savage beasts?” [6]. Writers like Chesnutt and Johnson challenged the putative theories that the dyed-in-the-wool eugenicists of their time took on faith: that a master race was one that had mastered their own emotions.

As I was reading Darwin and Spencer, and authors like Chesnutt and Johnson, I couldn’t help but be brought back to the frenzied attention that Cunningham’s gesture garnered. It seemed to me that if the internet is wrapped around Cunningham’s pointer finger, and the right-wing has claimed her as a bastion of white willpower, it is because racialized notions of self-control have been endemic to American culture. Like the online discourse around the WNBA’s recent controversies, sentiments about anger, violence, and race risk propagating often unexamined historical echoes that reach back to an era when eugenicists sought to measure the “civilizing” potential of racial others by the moral metric of emotional self-control. Consequently, an otherwise innocuous statement from Cunningham about the incident involving Bonner can unintentionally provide the tinder to rekindle these eugenicist sentiments. “I couldn’t help myself,” stated Cunningham, “I could not. She was losing her shit and all I was doing was literally pointing.”

Like the dignified clench fists of Darwin’s European, and the loss of self-control that Spencer attributes to primitive man, Cunningham’s calm and cool pointing becomes fodder for those who use the rhetoric of impulsivity and emotional immaturity to stoke fears about Black violence. With the recent Republican letter addressed to the WNBA decrying the league’s lack of protection for Caitlyn Clark, it’s easy to see how the political right has appropriated these white women as victims of uncontrolled Black violence and rage. And yet, literature can teach us to be better attuned to nuance. In fact, by her own admission, Cunningham recognizes the pettiness and impulsivity of her own actions: I couldn’t help myself. At the same time, Trump’s own impulsiveness, subjecting us all to the mercy of his wanton whim and unbridled brinkmanship, frequently gets reframed by rightwing media as a virtuous “telling it like it is,” unregulated speech that throws to the wind the scripted stage directions of establishment politicians. The irony seems lost on an administration whose calls for law and order are barked from combative cabinet members easily excited into outbursts of inarticulate rage, whether it’s the fascist vitriol of Trump’s bulldog Stephen Miller or, in the administration’s most recent crash out, RFK Jr. Interpersonal anger can be a vicious feedback loop. But when emotions of animosity enter into racial discourse they risk turning animosity into a dangerous and dehumanizing rhetoric of animalism, naturalizing ideas about racial violence.

The politics of impulse, and the racialization of instinct, have historically found particular salience around questions of anger. Within a larger discourse about “targeted violence” perpetrated by Black women against white women, it matters how we talk about the powerful emotions that others perceive as fueling that violence. And competitive sports, which have through the annals of human history commanded our attention, and at times devotion, not just by impressive feats of athleticism, but through the powerful emotions that contested struggles evoke from players and fans, often ignite charged and often explosive emotions. However, when sports media coverage turns outrage into public spectacle these emotions get filtered through toxic and even dangerous discourses.  The capacity for literature to move readers emotionally makes it an effective medium for challenging these discourses. To resist the eugenicist assumptions lurking in such sentiments, novels by African American writers like Chesnutt and Johnson provide urgent counter-examples of Black and white rage that expose the double-standards by which some indignation counts as righteous and other forms of anger are condemned as violence. As Chesnutt wrote in 1901, “[t]he qualities that in a white man would win the applause of the world would in a negro be taken as the marks of savagery. […] his love of liberty, a mere animal dislike of restraint. Every fine human instinct would be interpreted in terms of savagery” [7].

Notes

1. Norris, Frank. McTeague: A Story of California. Oxford University Press, 2009. p. 181
2. Dreiser, Theodore. Sister Carrie. W. W. Norton, 2006. p. 54
3. Darwin, Charles. The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Oxford University Press, 2009. p. 242
4. Ibid. p. 243
5. Chesnutt, Charles W. The Marrow of Tradition. Dover Publications, 2003. p. 200
6. Johnson, James Weldon. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. Penguin, 1990. p. 136
7. The Marrow of Tradition, p. 192

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