Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower

by Brittney Cooper

Black women turn to sass when rage is too risky—because we have jobs to keep, families to feed, and bills to pay.

Like many other feminists, I used to carry around Audre Lorde’s book Sister Outsider like it was the feminist bible. Her essay “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism” taught me that rage is a legitimate political emotion. She writes, “Focused with precision, it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change.”

The process, of both becoming a feminist and becoming okay with rage as a potential feminist superpower, has been messy as hell. We need to embrace our messiness more. We need to embrace the ways we are in process more. Very often Black girls don’t get the opportunity to be in process. So just know that you don’t have to have everything figured out to read and enjoy this book.

young men had been socialized to desexualize outspoken women.

This is what I like to call doing the most, but achieving the least.

For instance, the Crew put me on to Ta-Nehisi Coates back in the early 2000s when he wrote for the Washington City Paper.

I worry about a world in which Black girls on their way to becoming women are taught to distrust women. I worry about a world in which Black women who are raising boys cultivate distrust for girls by looking upon every girl who shows interest in their sons with distrust.

We wonder why young men hate women and, sometimes, the sad truth is that their mamas and aunts and sisters act as an arm of the patriarchy by parroting the refrain that “girls simply can’t be trusted.”

We live in a world that tells women to distrust other women. And those of us who do dare to love other women hard are taught to distrust our impulses, to see that love as queer and wrong.

The old adage is that all feminists are lesbians. So what if that’s true? Here’s the thing, and there’s really no straight way to say this. Black feminism is and has always been a fundamentally queer project. Straight chicks gotta make their peace with that, and hopefully without too much struggle.

If Black women don’t figure out how to love other Black women (cis and trans, queer and straight, and everything in between), it will be the death of us.

“Sometimes, Miss Bertney, (Alicia’s nickname for me), it’s not that people don’t love you, it’s that they don’t have the same capacity to love as you do. Most people are doing the best they can.”

One of feminism’s biggest failures is its failure to insist that feminism is, first and foremost, about truly, deeply, and unapologetically loving women.

I’m asking us to sit with the mean-girl tendencies we all have, with the ways that we hurt each other and don’t show up for each other. I’m asking us to sit with the Beyoncé conundrum that exists for all of us. At least she had the courage to own the messiness of it.

There is never just cause to beat a Black woman like she stole something when she is very clearly taking the pieces of her life and trying to build something magnificent.

Black feminism is not a reactionary project. It is not about the damage that white girls do. Not solely or primarily. Black feminism is about the world Black women and girls can build, if all the haters would raise up and let us get to work. When I talk about owning eloquent rage as your superpower, it comes with the clear caveat that not everyone is worth your time or your rage. Black feminism taught me that. My job as a Black feminist is to love Black women and girls. Period.

if people can’t trust you, you can’t lead them.

Perhaps it’s sexist of me to reduce legitimate political analyses down to mean-girl infighting, but the political distrust and disdain for Hillary Clinton is as outsized as the vitriol that some Black feminists reserve for Beyoncé.

Look. It’s not just Black and white women who I think keep replaying middle-school angst. Working-class white men’s overidentification with Donald Trump, a man who clearly despises them, is the stuff of middle-school fantasy, too.

Many of these Black folks, some of them new and first-time voters and some of them old-school contrarians, saw Hillary Clinton as a shill for the neoliberal, establishment Democrats, a racist doing her husband’s bidding, a woman unworthy of being a poster child for feminist anything. It seemed reasonable to them to protest every imperial fault of the American Republic on Hillary Clinton’s back. Meanwhile, these same folks lined up behind Bernie Sanders, a socialist who had radical things to say about money, but not much else.

Moreover, I found it especially terrible that when it came to racial politics, many young progressives, across racial lines, were far more willing to train their hatred on Hillary Clinton, a white woman, than on Bernie Sanders, a white man. White women have absolutely been accomplices to the American project of white supremacy, but their husbands, brothers, fathers, and sons have always been the masterminds. Let us never forget that.

look. But the world of girls and women outside my home was white. In graduate school I read the Combahee River Collective, a group of Black feminist activists from the 1970s who gave me a new understanding of “identity politics,” a term they invented. I had learned early how to disidentify with whiteness but never fully how to inhabit, embrace, and identify with my particular Black-girl magic.

Our nation’s story is one of men using violence—against Native folks, against Black folks, and against women—to build and fund a grand “experiment in democracy.”

The men in my family lived down South, the place from which other Black people fled during the Great Migration. There were no good factory jobs in these rural small towns near the Mississippi Delta to create economic opportunity for those who didn’t go North.

I have learned to defend myself because I’ve never been able to rely on a man to do it for me. That doesn’t mean I’ve never wanted a man to do it for me.

“We can neither heal nor fix that which we will not confront.”

There seems to be no empathic register for understanding the sheer magnitude of the physical and emotional pain that systems of racism, capitalism, and patriarchy inflict on Black women every day. Black men grow up believing and moving through the world politically as though they have it the toughest, as though their pain matters most, as though Black women cannot possibly be feeling anything similar to the dehumanization and disrespect they have felt. That it might, in many cases, be worse for us seems to many men a preposterous supposition.

Intersectionality, or the idea that we are all integrally formed and multiply impacted by the different ways that systems of white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy affect our lives, was a mostly foreign notion to these young scientists.

Intersectionality is not only not objective, it sneers at claims to objectivity, arguing that none of us is purely objective. We all come with a perspective and an agenda.

Because traffic stops are frequently a life-or-death matter for Black people, stopping traffic has become one of the primary modes of protest for the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM).

“When people disrupt highways and streets, it is about disrupting business as usual. It’s also about giving a visual that folks are willing to put their bodies on the line to create the kind of world we want to live in.”

The 1980s was hell on the social image of Black women, who were vilified and demonized as money-grubbing welfare queens and drug-abusing crack fiends birthing crack babies that the system couldn’t handle.

The idea that only middle-class, straight, married women deserve to start families is both racist and patriarchal.

Many Black women like me are so obsessed with the idea of not having babies too early that frequently it ends up being too late.

Black women deserve more options than these extremes—that the same choices we make to not ruin our lives as young people become the choices that make us miserable twenty years later.

This is why songs like “Bag Lady,” which point out this baggage to us and act like we are holding all of it of our own accord, are summarily unhelpful. The unfair part is that folks are far more concerned with policing how Black women carry the baggage than with reducing the load hoisted upon us in the first place.

Neoliberalism is endlessly concerned with “personal responsibility” and individual self-regulation. It tells us that in a free market, devoid of any regulation or accountability at the top, what happens to those on the bottom is entirely our fault.

Have you ever noticed that people who have real “power”—wealth, job security, influence—don’t attend “empowerment” seminars? Power is not attained from books and seminars. Not alone, anyway. Power is conferred by social systems.

Empowerment looks like cultivating the wisdom to make the best choices we can out of what are customarily a piss-poor set of options. Power looks like the ability to create better options.

The regulation of sexuality by white Christians in the United States has always been about the propagation of a socially acceptable and pristine nuclear family worthy of having the American dream, a family that was heterosexual, middle class, and white.

White privilege works by making the advantages white people have invisible while making the supposedly “poor” choices of people of color hypervisible.

Black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins refers to this sticky web as a matrix of domination, a sociological term for the way social systems of power converge to impede Black women’s agency and structural well-being.

The thing we would all do well to remember is that conservative Christian theology was used to enslave Black people.

Eloquent rage isn’t always loud, but it is always effective.

That very same night, Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi got together on social media and began proclaiming “#BlackLivesMatter.”

The problem with the 2016 presidential election is simple: White feminists did not come get their people.

For white women, their race comes before their gender.

White girls usually cry white-lady tears after they have done something hella racist and then been called out by the offended party for doing so. To shift blame and claim victimhood, they start to cry. The world falls apart as people rush to their defense. All knowledge of the fact that they are the ones who caused the problem escapes the notice of everyone except the person or people they disrespected. It’s a phenomenon that Black folks know well.

Conveniently enough, white men didn’t begin to propagate the myth of Black male rapists until after the Civil War. During the war, when they left their wives and daughters on plantations with these same Black men, there were few to no accusations of sexual assault. But after the war, suddenly (we are to believe), white men’s outsized outrage and paranoia over the safety of white women was about actual crimes Black men were committing rather than about white men’s deep and unbridled rage over losing power.

Far too frequently, white women’s notions of antiracist solidarity is defined solely by their willingness to date Black men.