Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower

by Brittney Cooper

To be clear, I’m not really into self-help books, so I don’t have one of those catchy three-step plans for changing the world. What I have is anger. Rage, actually. And that’s the place where more women should begin—with the things that make us angry.

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

Don’t you just hate when folks yell at you to “Smile!”? I told the last man who said that shit to me, “You smile!”

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.

Audre Lorde’s book Sister Outsider

rage is a legitimate political emotion.

I hadn’t considered that sexism had anything to do with it, that young men had been socialized to desexualize outspoken women.

I didn’t realize that living life in a patriarchy, even in a beautiful Black one, meant that I had to at least appear conquerable if I wanted to get chose.

While I was not especially interested in being a feminist, I was even less interested in having a raggedy analysis, of being critically uninformed, and of getting caught out there, assed out and looking ignorant. So I sat down that same night, turned to the essay Tracey had suggested, and tried to get clearer on what exactly feminism was and how it might apply to me.

We live in a world that tells women to distrust other women.

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. Good sex is all these things, too.

My friendships with women have never been overtly sexual, but a good many of them have been what bell hooks in her book Communion: The Female Search for Love called romantic, in the soul-inspiring way that someone being thoughtful about loving you and showing up for you is romantic. Often those connections have what hooks called “an erotic dimension … that acts as an energetic force, enhancing and deepening ties.” There is no room in my life for shallow or basic connections.

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.

The problem is that only the experiences of white people are treated as universal. Meanwhile, Black movies, shows, and books are typically seen as limited and particular.

I also learned that if wives have the nerve to have ambitions beyond wifehood, the public chastening and disciplining is even more severe.

being an ambitious and untamed woman. Though I believe she and Bill enjoy a great friendship and a political partnership, his multiple infidelities and his flaunting of them in public have certainly had the effect, if not the intent, of disciplining his wife into the role of supportive, loyal spouse. And for playing that role with aplomb, Hillary Clinton garnered the respect of many women across race and class lines.

I have always lingered over stories of women who lead, women who know what they want out of this world, and women who demand that others respect them and recognize their magic.

It was dramatic and devastating in the way that first failures for overachievers tend to be.

I learned first and foremost, though, that if people can’t trust you, you can’t lead them.

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.

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

It has been said before, but it is worth saying again: Toxic masculinity kills.

Are Black girls ever worth fighting for? I wonder this sometimes as a feminist who still secretly hopes for a man who will fight for her honor.

patriarchy is nothing if not the structurally induced hatred of women.

Individual blame isn’t enough to solve the problem.

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? Too much of the conversation about patriarchy in Black communities pivots on Black women’s low self-esteem.

In every part of their lives, young men need access to conversations about what it means to be a man in ways that are not rooted in power, dominance, and violence.

I believe wholeheartedly in the internal spiritual work that Black women must do to save our own lives. But I also wonder whether our spiritual work is a match for the structural systems that would crush us alive.

individual transformation is neither a substitute for nor a harbinger of structural transformation.

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.

When I read fluffy self-help literature or attend church services where usually male preachers tell usually female parishioners that our social conditions are largely a result of our personal failings and individual bad choices, I often want to throw the book or walk out of the service.

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

Individual solutions to collective problems cannot work, no matter how personally empowering they may feel.

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.

This is no way to teach sex education to teens, and it is a completely absurd way for grown-ass women to think about sex. Most Christian theology infantilizes women in just this manner.

Healthy consensual touch is nothing short of holy.

dissent from a set of biblical truths and social mores that shamed women, cast female sexuality as bad, dirty, and evil, and suggested that marriage was the only proper context through which women could express their sexual selves.

Black women had the right to a say about their finances, their bodies, the number of children they bore, and the kind of sex they wanted to have. What she offered to me that day was permission to choose for myself.

We do a kind of violence to ourselves when we shut down our sexuality.

A liberatory theology for us cannot set us at war with our very bodies. A liberatory theology for women cannot set us at war with the desires for touch, companionship, and connection that well up like deep springs in our spirits. When we hear about how “the heart is deceitful above all things,” which is an actual verse, it teaches us to suppress our deepest longings, to not trust our own thoughts and our own counsel. For people who have been enslaved and oppressed because of their race, or gender, or sexuality, such interpretations are dangerous.

Respectability politics are at their core a rage-management project. Learning to manage one’s rage by daily tamping down that rage is a response to routine assaults on one’s dignity in a world where rage might get you killed or cause you to lose your job.

Rage is a fundamentally more reasonable response to America’s cultural investment in the disrespect of Black women than being respectable.

Rage is a kind of refusal. To be made a fool of, to be silenced, to be shamed, or to stand for anybody’s bullshit.

To be a Black woman is to be always confronted with these kinds of profane distinctions, to be asked to choose between your race and your gender. Black social life in the nineteenth century was marked for Black women by a lack of access to the protections of ladyhood, and by a steadfast refusal among white people to even make gender distinctions among Black people.

One of the most unique things about Black women’s experiences in this country is that we are the only group of people whose bodies have ever been legally mandated as the place that reproduced noncitizens.

misogynoir (a term that specifically refers to hatred of Black women)

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

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

The logic of otherwise disparately placed men—in public policy, in Hip Hop, and in the church—converges on the truth that if Black women would just be better mothers, the state wouldn’t be so taxed, our communities would not be in such a shambles, and brothers wouldn’t be so short in the pockets. That’s a huge minefield of structurally induced hatred to navigate.