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When it comes to Black women, sometimes Americans don’t recognize that sass is simply a more palatable form of rage.
Black women turn to sass when rage is too risky—because we have jobs to keep, families to feed, and bills to pay.
women have the right to be mad as hell. We have been dreaming of freedom and carving out spaces for liberation since we arrived on these shores. There is no other group, save Indigenous women, that knows and understands more fully the soul of the American body politic than Black women, whose reproductive and social labor have made the world what it is.
Black-girl feminism is all the rage, and we need all the rage.
The boys wanted me to run their student government campaigns, or they wanted to verbally joust with me, but they didn’t want to date me. On high self-esteem days, I simply thought it was because they were dumb. On bad self-esteem days, I thought it was because I was fat.
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.
If you say fuck the patriarchy but you don’t ride for other women, then it might be more true that the patriarchy has fucked you, seducing you with the belief that men care more about your well-being than women do.
When you go for months or years without a dude (or any love interest) ever noticing you, you can begin to feel invisible. And feminist principles about how the patriarchy has made us beholden to beauty culture do nothing to assuage the desire we all have to be seen and affirmed.
One of feminism’s biggest failures is its failure to insist that feminism is, first and foremost, about truly, deeply, and unapologetically loving women.
I love being a woman and being a friend to other women should be feminism’s tagline.
When I talk about owning eloquent rage as your superpower, it comes with the clear caveat that not everyone is worth your time or your rage. Black feminism taught me that.
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. Often Black women are cast as cold and unfeeling for having these qualities.
