Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower

by Brittney Cooper

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

I love being a woman and being a friend to other women should be feminism’s tagline.

Black women care about feminism because sexism and patriarchy affect our lives, too.

First, I’m not merely a feminist who happens to be Black. I’m a Black Feminist, capital B, capital F. That means I learned my feminism from Black women, and my feminist theory and praxis is situated in the particular ways Black women have understood, thought about, and written about the problems of racism and sexism across space and time.

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.

My Black feminism insists that we center them, that we talk about them, that we build a world for and with them, that we fight alongside them.

I tried to make sense of this whole new world through the very vehicle that had brought me into contact with so much whiteness in the first place—a love of books.

I realize now that I was mostly interested in understanding the very different lives of these older, Northern, sophisticated white girls who, because they were fictional, were different enough from the Southern white girls I knew and safe enough for me to admire and love without hurt or shame.

My Baby-Sitters Club years were populated with racial slights from the white girls I called friends. Never overt, these incidents communicated that I was mostly liked, often tolerated, but invariably different.

The politics of Black women’s hair matters. It matters in a world where, as I learned at Mandy’s party, the comb never slips through our hair quite so easily as it slips through theirs.

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 them.

That tucking away of my Black-girlness, even as I simultaneously tucked away my awareness of my friends’ whiteness, was a survival skill that I honed, in part, by reading and immersing myself in the stories of white girls’ lives.

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 stories we watch and read ask us to put aside their whiteness and relate to their very “universal” human struggles around conflict with the world, the self, and others....

My relationship with white girls is and remains complicated. And in the public parts of my life, for good or ill, white women’s racism has never kept me from admiring them, befriending them, or supporting them. This has been true for multiple generations of Black women, especially in the South.

It was a painful opportunity to see myself through the mirror of others and find my reflection wanting.

The things that made others distrust Hillary Clinton were the things that made me like her. Something about her social awkwardness, her detail-oriented policy-wonk tendencies, and her devotion to the long game of racking up qualifications through intentional résumé building feels familiar, because it is the very same strategy of every high-achieving Black woman I know.

Hillary appealed to the parts of me that care far less about impressing people than about figuring out the nuts and bolts of the kind of thinking that will actually help people. She appealed to the parts of me that despise the insincerity and superficiality of small talk. She appealed to the parts of me that come alive in intimate settings when I have the chance to connect with real people.

My ability to empathize with a woman whose life and political commitments diverge significantly from my own is rooted in the ways I learned in early childhood to understand and negotiate the complex humanity of white women even before I learned to negotiate my own. I learned to like and value certain white women, despite their racism, long before I learned how to prioritize and value my own Black-girl magic.

I wasn’t a feminist yet, but my unquestioned commitment to a race-only politic was like sand slowly slipping through the fingers of my tightly clenched Black-power fist.

White women taught me about racism; Black institutions, like Howard and the Black Church, gave me a primer on sexism.

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.

So many Black men escaped the racist wars of segregation and criminalization being waged in their own backyards by agreeing to fight America’s many racist wars of aggression abroad.

Intersectionality makes clear the ways that systems of power interact in Black women’s lives to restrict social mobility and to hinder us from moving unencumbered through the social sphere.

I believe that each of us is responsible for doing our own emotional work. We can’t hope to have healthy relationships of any type if we are unwilling to own our shit.

Weems suggests that so much of Black people’s experience of citizenship has been

tied to consumerism; so when Black women became a mainstream target demographic in the 1990s, they experienced new levels of cultural visibility that expanded to other arenas like books and movies.

On the other hand, individual transformation is neither a substitute for nor a harbinger of structural transformation. Holding oneself in perpetually low esteem is a structurally induced condition.

But I believe that decades of discourse about poor Black women and unwed Black mothers being “welfare queens” who unfairly take more from the system than they put in has shamed many Black women into not bearing children that they otherwise might consider having. The idea that only middle-class, straight, married women deserve to start families is both racist and patriarchal.

Many Black women like me are so obsessed with the idea of not having babies too early that frequently it ends up being too late.

Black women deserve more options than these extremes—that the same choices we make to not ruin our lives as young people become the choices that make us miserable twenty years later.

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. Those who feel “empowered” talk about their personal power to change their individual condition. Those with actual power make decisions that are of social and material consequence to themselves and others.

Empowerment looks like cultivating the wisdom to make the best choices we can out of what are customarily a piss-poor set of options. Power looks like the ability to create better options.

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.

Held up as an exceptional Black student, I was conditioned to believe in the myth of my own exceptionalism, to see other Black students’ struggles to succeed as a result of their own terrible choices.

My grandmother did for me what Naomi did for Ruth. She tried to empower me to fight for my happiness by helping me to not be limited by script and convention. She modeled the ways that Black women can build a life for themselves. And sometimes that comes with a willingness to cast aside fear and say no to what others think is best for you, so you can find the courage to say yes to yourself.

We also have an absurd theology of discrimination against LGBTQ people. And far too many churches still believe that women can’t be preachers or pastors. The thing we would all do well to remember is that conservative Christian theology was used to enslave Black people. We can use our theology to oppress people or to liberate them. That’s our choice.

He fully embodies both the divine and the human. If we spent as much time thinking about how he lived as we do worshipping how he died, our faith would demand that we prioritize a better integration of flesh and spirit, of humanity and divinity, than we do.

This is not about right and wrong, though. This is about what freedom means. This is about not standing by idly or, even worse, participating as white evangelicals and their enthusiastic Black counterparts hand to us a theology that does the dirty work of racism, patriarchy, and homophobia.

Respectability politics, the belief that Black people can overcome many of the everyday, acute impacts of racism by dressing properly and having education and social comportment is, first and foremost, performed as a kind of sartorial prerogative.

Rage is a fundamentally more reasonable response to America’s cultural investment in the disrespect of Black women than being respectable. That’s why it’s damn near impossible for rage and respectability to reside in the same place.

Since the definition of respectability politics is that you absolutely give a fuck (because you have to) about what white folks and everybody else thinks, respectability politics and fuck-deficiency pretty much cannot coexist in the same body.

Women and men like Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington reasoned that if Black folks learned to work hard, educate themselves, and stay out of trouble, white people would see that we were good, respectable people, human beings, worthy of both citizenship and protection.

The problem with all provisional strategies, particularly when they begin to work for the exceptional few, is that they rise to the level of ideology.

Because respectability is a rage-management project, those invested in Black respectability are often deeply uncomfortable with Black rage.

Suppressed rage will cause us to accept gratuitous violence as a necessary evil. Expressed rage offers us an opportunity to do better.

Individualized acts of eloquent rage have limited reach. But the collective, orchestrated fury of Black women can move the whole world.

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. American democracy uses calls for civility, equality, liberty, and justice as smoke screens to obscure all the ways in which Black folks are treated uncivilly, unequally, illiberally, and unjustly as a matter of course.