Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower

by Brittney Cooper

White supremacist gaslighting insists that what the statement really means is “only Black lives matter.” But that is willful ignorance on the part of folks who refuse to see that the conditions that prompted the proclamation in the first place were conditions that tried to assert that Black lives didn’t matter, that they were disposable, and that Black communities didn’t deserve justice.

Far too frequently, white women’s notions of antiracist solidarity is defined solely by their willingness to date Black men.

White feminism has worked hard to make the world safer for white women, but it has stridently refused to call out the ways that white women’s sexuality and femininity is used not just as a tool of patriarchy but also as a tool for the maintenance of white supremacy.

White women and Black men share a kind of narcissism that comes from being viewed as the most vulnerable entities within their respective races. Black people hesitate to call out Black men for male privilege because they have experienced such devastation at the hands of a white supremacist system. 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.

There is racialized sexism at play in Bill Cosby’s apparent choice of victims. The desire to violate predominantly white female victims at the height of the 1960s, when Cosby was one of the most powerful and visible Black male stars, suggests that, if these charges are true, his desire for power was tied uniquely to the ability to subjugate white women.

The desire to dominate and humiliate white women is a logical extension of a racialized toxic masculinity, predicated on the idea that freedom is synonymous with white patriarchy. And white patriarchy inheres in both the dominating and the possessing of white women.

Black and white people have never had the luxury of apolitical romance.

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. There’s a problem when visibility becomes a zero-sum game, where making one group’s demands visible renders every other group’s political concerns obscure. Only white supremacy demands such exacting and fatalistic math.

I once read that the root of all anger is fear, particularly a fear of those things we cannot control.

White fear of Black people is not limited to white Americans. It is rooted in the ideology of white supremacy, a virus that infects us all.

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.

But I was so obsessed with getting the right answer that often my natural skepticism took a back seat to my overachiever impulses.

If we cannot or will not ask questions, then we are far, far from the path to freedom.

Part of learning to manage our feelings is learning to confront our questions.

Moving through the world as though under the constant gaze of white folks is something Black people with middle-class aspirations are taught from a young age to perfect.

Favor isn’t fair. So we should have what womanist theologians call a “hermeneutic of suspicion”—a healthy skepticism—of the institutions and opportunities that would make of us exceptions.

You can’t judge the effectiveness of a system by the success of its exceptional actors, from the president on down.

The trap and the burden of being exceptional is that your entire identity is wrapped up in being the only one. The stories of infighting and competitiveness among Blacks that we tell when we get together have everything to do with building an identity based on being the exception.

It’s fine to quote Audre Lorde to people and tell them, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” The harder work is helping people find better tools to work with.

Joy arises from an internal clarity about our purpose.