Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower

by Brittney Cooper

That’s kind of how it feels to be a Black woman. Like our victories belong to everyone,

even though we do all the work.

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

Because Black women are viewed as preternaturally strong, our pain often goes unnoticed both in the broader world and in our own communities.

White male Christian conservatives used conservative biblical interpretation to pioneer a religious right wing to shore up

the machinations of white supremacy in government policy. Black religious conservatives adopted conservative biblical interpretation to inoculate themselves against the massive devastation of these same social policies.

“Women of Color in america have grown up within a symphony of anger, at being silenced, at being unchosen, at knowing that when we survive, it is in spite of a world that takes for granted our lack of humanness, and which hates our very existence outside of its service.

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.

white women’s voting practices tell us that they vote with the party that supports their racial issues, even though this means voting with a party that hates women as a matter of public policy.

Watching white women take it to the streets to protest an election outcome that was a result of white women’s powerful voting bloc felt like an exercise in white-lady tears if I ever saw one, and I knew I couldn’t be trusted to act right amidst a sea of pink pussy hats and white women struggling to understand what intersectionality means.

Black men’s disdain for Black women is so common that it didn’t even occur to me to stop watching his show.

After the Zimmerman trial, white feminists did not call out these jurors. During the trial they did not call on them to exercise integrity, check their white privilege, or act from a place of empathy. 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.

So much of the racial animus that is shaping this current moment in American politics is a relitigation of the 1950s and 1960s. Often, in the polling data that shaped the Trump campaign, white Americans cited the 1950s as America’s best decade. And perhaps the Leave It To Beaver years were really great—if you were white!

“There is a thin line between preference and pathology.” When Black men evince a preference for dating white women, solely or primarily, this crosses the line into the pathological.

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.

When white girls cry, every other girl’s tears cease to matter.

“The sad plight of grown white men, crouching beneath their (better) selves, to slaughter the innocent during traffic stops, to push black women’s faces into the dirt, to handcuff black children. Only the frightened would do that. Right?” she inquires of us. “So scary are the consequences of a collapse of white privilege that many Americans have flocked to a political platform that supports and translates violence against the defenseless as strength. These people are not so much angry as terrified, with

the kind of terror that makes knees tremble.”

But if you are Black and hope to live to adulthood, micromanaging your feelings is necessary for survival.

There are assuredly people who voted for Obama in

2008 and then voted for Trump in 2016. This is because their support for Obama was predicated on him emerging as some sort of Magical Black Jesus figure. When he couldn’t meet such ridiculous expectations, many white folks returned to their comfort zone.

Black survival means being endlessly obsessed with figuring out the depths to which white folks will fall to maintain a position of dominance.

To be black is to know you are being watched—at all times—anyway.

The logic of relying on people’s resilience goes something like, “Let’s see just how much we can take away from you before you break.” That shit is evil.