Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower

by Brittney Cooper

The thing I know today, after many cycles of homegirls, many more years of girl crushes, and a life of straight sexual activity, is that one can’t truly be a feminist if you don’t really love women. And loving women deeply and unapologetically is queer as fuck. It is erotic in the way that Audre Lorde talks about eroticism. It’s an opening up, a healing, a seeing and being seen.

I love a penis attached to a man who knows how to use it, but I’m uninterested in femme-style battle royales over dick. That’s just so basic. Who has time?

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

But for Black women, our relationships to white women and Black men are still the primary definers of our feminism.

While there are a fair number of Black women across history who have believed in revolutionary violence, the posture of burning shit down feels decidedly masculinist to me.

But militarism isn’t just racist. It’s also patriarchal, sexist, and masculinist.

My dad didn’t leave a will, but through this letter I inherited a slice of beauty, a slice of his joy, before being a Black boy in a world that hated Black boys hardened his heart and limited his capacity for kindness.

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

the collective, orchestrated fury of Black women can move the whole world. This is what the Black Lives Matter movement has reminded us. There is something clarifying about Black women’s rage, something essential about the way it drills down to the core truth. The truth is that Black women’s anger is not the problem. “For it is not the anger of Black women,” Lorde tells us, “which is dripping down over this globe like a diseased liquid. It is not [our] anger which launches rockets … missiles, and other agents of war and death.” “Anger,” she said, “is an appropriate response to racist attitudes.” #AudreLordeTaughtMe

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. American democracy is as much a project of suppressing Black rage as it is of legitimizing and elevating white rage.

The lie we are told is that white rage and white fear are honest emotions that preserve the integrity of American democracy. More often than not, we keep learning that white rage and white fear are dishonest impulses that lead us toward fascism. White rage and white fear are reactions to perceptions among white people that their power might be slipping away. Black rage and Black fear are fundamentally more honest, because they are reactions to the violence of white supremacy.

Feminism doesn’t belong to white women.

And white women frequently don’t recognize that though women are oppressed around the world, whiteness elevates the value of their femininity and allows them to get away with shit that women of color pay royally for.

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

Curiosity is often the first casualty of the politics of fear. Sometimes the things we fear most are our questions. More specifically, we fear the questions to which we don’t have answers. When we are afraid, we stop asking questions and start seeking short-term solutions.

When the Pew Research Center accounted for employment status using census data, they found that there are “51 employed Black men for every 100 young Black women.” Decades earlier, the numbers were far more equal: There were nearly 90 employed Black men for every 100 young Black women. Here’s the rub: “Among never-married white, Hispanic, and Asian American young adults, the ratio of employed men to women is roughly equal—100 men for every 100 women.”

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

And I let the conversation drop, because giving a patriarchy 101 lecture on date night would be tantamount to cock-blocking myself. And this good feminist still needs dick. To put it how Maya Angelou once defined feminism, “It’d be stupid not to be on my own side.”

“I want a partner, someone who shows up for me, offers emotional support, and someone to share my life with.” “Oh,” he said, with no hint of irony, “you want me to be gay!” This is why we can’t have nice things.

Acting right, which far too often means “acting white,” didn’t protect me from what Carol Anderson calls the “white rage” of my classmates when they realized that I actually would graduate at the top of the class, and atop all of them.

Thus, when I see other radicals with elite access valorizing their hoods, I recognize it as misapplied survivor’s guilt and a deep desire to retain one’s street cred and authenticity.

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.