Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower

by Brittney Cooper

White feminism has worked hard to make the world safer for white women, but it has stridently refused to call out the ways that white women’s sexuality and femininity is used not just as a tool of patriarchy but also as a tool for the maintenance of white supremacy.

White feminists often struggle to even conceptualize Black female vulnerability, let alone to call out white men for harming Black women. When the various forms of structural challenges that Black women experience come to light, the response from white feminists is, more often than not, anemic.

Black people hesitate to call out Black men for male privilege because they have experienced such devastation at the hands of a white supremacist system.

“We’re done watching and waiting while this invention called ‘whiteness’ uses and abuses us, burying black people out of sight and out of mind while extracting our culture, our dollars, our entertainment like oil—black gold, ghettoizing and demeaning our creations then stealing them, gentrifying our genius and then trying us on like costumes before discarding our bodies like rinds of strange fruit.”

I’m tired of meeting white women with no race analysis who marry Black men and make these men feel like their race—their Blackness—is not a primary thing that defines them. For many Black men, the best-case scenario is that they can create a part of their lives where they are not solely defined by Black manhood. The worst-case scenario is that they think white womanhood is some kind of come-up from the abjection of Black womanhood.

In Kate Weigand’s book Red Feminism, she tells a fascinating story about Black women who participated in the Communist Party (CP) in the 1930s. In 1934, Black women organizers asked the Party leadership to outlaw interracial marriages among members.

The movement to defund Planned Parenthood, an organization that provides critical health care to many poor women of color, has nothing to do with the desire of white men on the right for Black and Latina women to have more babies. Rather, these men seek to control reproduction itself because they want to control the life possibilities of all women. So much of right-leaning social policy in the 1980s and 1990s was predicated on white men controlling white women’s bodies by uplifting the purity and sanctity of white femininity and simultaneously maligning Black womanhood and Black femininity.

The anti-Blackness at the heart of white fear is predicated on a misrecognition of the humanity of Black people. Whether that misrecognition is willful or unwitting matters less than its harmful outcomes. Impact matters more than intent.

“So scary are the consequences of a collapse of white privilege that many Americans have flocked to a political platform that supports and translates violence against the defenseless as strength. These people are not so much angry as terrified, with the kind of terror that makes knees tremble.”

I once read that the root of all anger is fear, particularly a fear of those things we cannot control. White rage is deeply connected to a fear of losing privilege and status in a browning American empire.

One online interlocutor characterized the political program of BLM as a desire for “Black supremacy.” Black supremacy is not a thing, if you were wondering. But the same folks who believe in the possibility of Black supremacy also have a problem with Black Entertainment Television, Black History Month, and T-shirts that proclaim that Black Girls Rock.

White fear is the cultural refuse of white supremacy.

with the exception of former president Barack Obama and a few well-placed Black millionaires and billionaires, Black people don’t have any appreciable levels of institutional power.

In 2013, the median net wealth for white families was over $141,000. For Black families, it was $11,000. According to a joint study by the Institute for Policy Studies and the Corporation for Enterprise Development, it would take Black people 228 years to catch up to the amount of net wealth that white people currently possess. White people fear a fantastical rise of racial power that they have made damn-near structurally impossible for Black people to achieve.

Recently I found out that I had been placed on a “professor watchlist” for a national nonprofit organization whose mission is to remove “liberal bias” from the college classroom. What they mean by “liberal bias” is that they don’t want a Black woman standing in a classroom, teaching college students that racism is real, sexism is a problem, homophobia is repugnant, and capitalism and the elitism it begets are worthy of our deepest skepticism. This is not knowledge, they say. It’s my “racial agenda” governing how I run my classroom. By letting me know that they are watching me, they are hoping to scare me. But this is why I’m “never scared,” as we say in the crunk South. This doesn’t mean I’m never afraid. Being never scared has a cultural inflection to it that is about defiance, and about a refusal to be cowed into submission. To be black is to know you are being watched—at all times—anyway.

The crime bill also funded massive increases in police officers across the country. Most striking were laws that allowed juveniles to be tried as adults for violent crimes, and laws that allowed juvenile offenders to receive automatic life sentences for certain crimes.

To put it how Maya Angelou once defined feminism, “It’d be stupid not to be on my own side.”

If there is at all a healthy or just version of ride-or-die Black relationships, it is rooted in the concept of being allies and coconspirators. It is rooted in a notion of partnership and solidarity. The way we love each other, or fail to, is a life-and-death situation.

But Black women’s revolutions are always about safety, food, and education for women, children, and the elderly. No matter where the sisters are, we are always making meals, raising children, and keeping things together.

The idea that the pathway to freedom is found in better choices is bullshit.

least one brother demands the mic so that he can tell us that “What Black people need to do is support Black businesses. If we would just pool all our resources and stop spending money on Jordans and hair weaves, we could have real wealth to invest in our communities.” The research says differently. Black people at every level spend less money than white folks in similar economic circumstances. It turns out that the entire respectability formula for raising Black socioeconomic status is a fail.

Being asked to do more with less is inhumane. Frequently, social scientists point to the resilience of children from difficult backgrounds. One time, in a meeting on my campus, in a discussion about the hardships children of color face, a white woman remarked dismissively, “Oh, but children are resilient!” Celebrating the resilience of poor folks is a perverse way of acknowledging the unreasonable demands placed upon people who already are struggling to make it.

Knowing more than the folks with less education than you, doesn’t mean you know everything. In some cases, it doesn’t even mean you know the best things or the right things. But education is powerful.

May you have joy. Joy, as I have heard countless Black preachers say, is different from happiness, because happiness is predicated on “happenings,” on what’s occurring, on whether your life is going right, and whether all is well. Joy arises from an internal clarity about our purpose. My purpose is justice. And the fight for justice brings me joy.

In your president’s favorite book of the Bible, Two Corinthians, these words appear: “We are hard-pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.” In shorter form, the Black Church would say, “Joy—the world didn’t give it to me, and the world can’t take it away.” Maintaining the capacity for joy is critical to the struggle for justice. Things are still as fucked up at the end of this book as they were at the beginning. But we can’t let the messed-up state of the world steal our joy. It is critical in reinvigorating our capacity for new visions. When we lack joy, we have a diminished capacity for self-love and self-valuing and for empathy. If political struggle is exercise for the soul, joy is the endorphin rush such struggles bring.

May you ask more and better questions. Homegirl interventions leave me with more questions than answers. But usually they leave me with far better questions than I began with. May your curiosity be unceasing.

May your rage be a force for good. What you build is infinitely more important than what you tear down. When the struggle feels unwinnable, may you never forget this one thing: * * * You got this. We got this.