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.

That’s kind of how it feels to be a Black woman. Like our victories belong to everyone, even though we do all the work.

love being a woman and being a friend to other women should be feminism’s tagline. If this isn’t true for you, you aren’t a feminist.

Loving Black girls is complicated, but loving oneself in a world where there is always someone ready to do you harm is even harder.

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.

That’s all I’m saying—that so many of the emotional impulses that shape our engagements with powerful public figures have to do with the shit we went through in middle school. I really wish people would just go to therapy.

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.

One of my all-time favorite quotes, one that has largely been attributed to civil rights preaching luminary Rev. Vernon Johns is, “If you see a good fight, get in it.”

Sexism, like every other “ism,” is a willful refusal to not see what is right in front of you.

How are Black girls supposed to grow up to be Black women in love with themselves in a country built on the structural negation of Black women’s humanity and personhood?