Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower

by Brittney Cooper

Even though I was only in my mid-twenties at the time, I had already experienced many years of white people doing that thing they do to articulate Black women—always asking us “Why are you so angry?” I hated the accusation from others, usually white people, because it was unfair, a way to discredit the legitimacy of the things Black women say by calling them emotional and irrational.

Black women know what it means to love ourselves in a world that hates

Feminism can give us a common language for thinking about how sexism, and racism, and classism work together to fuck shit up for everybody.

I became a Ph.D. because I wanted that kind of life, one where “talking crazy”—playing with ideas that skirted the line between the radical and the absurd, the sacred and the profane—was the order of the day.

On more than one occasion, I’ve had a male lover say to me, upon finding out I’m a feminist, “Are you a lesbian? Are you sure?” Rather than being reactionary and defensive, perhaps straight women need to become less invested in the project of straightness altogether.

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

You can be deeply invested in loving other Black women, but still need to proclaim sometimes that bitches need to bow down. One, I don’t take bitches to be gender-specific. Call that a feminist disruption of the sexism inherent in the English language.

This is my Black feminism—the kind that is gonna channel all this rage to either get free or die trying.

Stewart didn’t say we shouldn’t give white folks the business. She said the opposite. But she also reminds us that Black women and girls should be at the center. My Black feminism keeps my eyes on the prize, the prize being Black women and girls.

Black feminist rage can change this world, but it can also destroy us if we are not careful. It’s just that powerful. It’s powerful because the power of a good political analysis is that it can be a masterful cloak for the emotional work we haven’t done.

But so much of what it meant to be a Black girl among white girls, was to be a spectator and coconspirator in their construction of me as the other, as not quite like

Before we fully learn to love ourselves, all people of color in the United States learn that we are supporting characters and spectators in the collective story of white people’s lives.

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.

I didn’t understand how people, knowing how patriarchy works, expected the first woman president in a deeply masculinist and patriarchal democracy to break the mold. People demanded nothing short of political purity from a woman fighting for a position in a system that has been stained bright red with the blood of countless marginalized groups from the beginning.

The feelings of disinterest and the faulty belief that Black girls aren’t engaged in an urgent struggle for their lives infuriates but does not surprise me. Sexism, like every other “ism,” is a willful refusal to not see what is right in front of you.

Black women did not agree to or apply for the job of baggage handlers for the nation. With histories as forced laborers and forced breeders, so much of our employment history in this country has simply not been up to us. Our lives are strewn about with structurally deposited baggage. If we assume the radical position that it isn’t ours to carry, we are called lazy. Degenerate. Angry. Irresponsible.

The fact that our society honestly believes that poor women don’t have the right to start families because they may require public assistance obscures the variety of ways that middle-class families do receive public assistance.

But “empowerment” is a tricky word. It’s also a decidedly neoliberal word that places the responsibility for combating systems on individuals.

Power is not attained from books and seminars. Not alone, anyway. Power is conferred by social systems. Empowerment and power are not the same thing. We must quit mistaking the two. Better yet, we must quit settling for one when what we really need is the other.

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

For years, I let Christian preachers convince me that the story of Ruth and Boaz pivoted upon a weird cultural ritual in which men get drunk and then women lie down next to them all night, only to wake up with a marriage proposal the next morning. That shit is just absurd.

The primarily white male theologians who created the systematic theology of evangelical Christianity were trying to make sense of a theology that fit their own lives and their own worldview.

One of the perks of being a lady is not being subject to people’s lewd, thinly veiled sexual commentaries. Michelle Obama enjoyed no such perks. It also bears noting that white people’s regulation of Black women’s bodies in the public sphere is one reason that Black people have been obsessed with outward appearance.

Too often, Black leaders think rooting for Black folks means shaming them into respectability.

In the absence of actual structural resources to ameliorate social problems, sermonic shaming and policy blaming is the opposite of help.

We live in a nation that does everything to induce our rage while simultaneously doing everything to deny that we have a right to feel it.

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 obsession with curtailing reproductive freedom in this country is about forcing white women to be hyperproductive in service of reproducing a white Republic.

When Ida B. Wells gave the written side eye to the white-girl tears of her day, she was hoping that maybe by doing so, those folks listening could attune their ear to the fervent cries of Black women being raped by white men all over the country. But Wells learned something that every Black girl learns at some point. When white girls cry, every other girl’s tears cease to matter.

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.

All voters should have access to candidates that make them feel recognized, but there’s a problem when your notion of recognition is predicated on someone else’s exclusion.

To be Black is to grow up in a world where white feelings can become dangerous weapons. If you’re Black, white fear is frequently lethal.

But if you are Black and hope to live to adulthood, micromanaging your feelings is necessary for survival. Your feelings can’t go on strike in the workplace. You can’t karate chop every white retail service person who follows you around a store, is rude to you on the phone, or takes their good sweet time bringing your food to the table. You also can’t karate chop the well-meaning white friend who moves to reassure you that “it wasn’t racial. Clearly they’re just jerks.”

Black children learn early that our fears are not, and cannot be, the first order of business in a family trying to survive.

In other words, white fears rest on the presumption that they are rooted in fact; everyone who is nonwhite is treated as though their fears are the stuff of fantasy.

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.

The work of my hands is the work of teaching students how to ask more and better questions. It is the work of rescuing curiosity from the clutches of fear.

Every time I write about the emotional lives of white people, some white person sends me an email or a tweet and tells me, “How dare you act like you know what white folks are thinking?!” Haven’t white folks learned that Black folks know them far better than they know themselves? Our survival is predicated on our willingness to study you, your impulses, your hard expressions, your laughter (and whether it reaches your eyes), your gifts, and your lies.

When Beyoncé tells all the fly chicks to get in formation, she is asking us to get our shit together so we can do the work that needs to be done. And the stakes are high as hell, because Black people are being killed. So, she reminds us, “Slay, trick. Or you get eliminated.” Now that might be a reference to some kind of dance competition. But it’s also a revision of “Never let them catch you slippin’.”

There was an art to “letting a man be a man” and not making him feel intimidated, my mother told me, as she recounted strategies for how to date a man who made less money while not offending his ego. Who has time? Or, better yet, interest? At what point is it fair to ask men to act like grown human beings?

Today, Black school-age boys are expelled three times as often as white school-age boys. And black boys in the late nineties were part of the first major wave of the school-to-prison pipeline in which schools pursued zero-tolerance policies for fighting. This meant that Black youth were frequently suspended or expelled and sometimes arrested either for fighting or for truancy. Black male teenagers, boys who were not yet men, became bona fide enemies of the state, the primary targets in law enforcement’s war on drugs and crime.

It’s not that white folks are less screwed up than we are. It’s that they have far more chances to get it right. White people have more access to marriage and partnership because they have more access to absolutely everything else: jobs, housing, safety, and wealth.

Recognition is a human need, and there is something fundamentally violent about a world that denies Black women recognition on a regular basis.

Kanye made millions blaming Black women for desiring men to have some level of economic stability.

Is there a way to say, without sounding like somebody’s grandma, that three decades of turning the disrespect of Black women into a global art form via Hip Hop might have some intimate and emotional costs for Black folks? Is there a way to do that without letting white supremacy off the hook for creating the very social conditions that caused these problems in the first place?

Lots of men have feminist rhetoric down, but many of them haven’t done the emotional work of showing up for a woman with dreams and visions of her own. I learned in that moment that marrying a feminist dude wasn’t the goal. Instead, I learned to look for men who genuinely like and value women as people.

Part of the work of justice for those of us who made it out of terribly fucked-up conditions is rejecting the myth of our own exceptionalism.

Going to college, raising children in a two-parent home, working full-time, and spending less do not make it possible for Black people to close the wealth gap that they have with white people. White people have more money because their ancestors made money from owning our ancestors.

Being asked to do more with less is inhumane.

American democracy is not interested in acknowledging that a Barack Obama can be found in every Black community.