Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower

by Brittney Cooper

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

America needs a homegirl intervention in the worst way. So

The process, of both becoming a feminist and becoming okay with rage as a potential feminist superpower, has been messy as hell.

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

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

Loving Black girls is complicated, but loving oneself in a world where there is always someone ready to do you harm is even harder.

Maria Stewart, a Black lady abolitionist, who was schooling audiences of men and women, Black and white, in Boston in the 1830s.

oft-repeated Black proverb: You have to work twice as hard to get half as far. Black

It’s not just Black and white women who I think keep replaying middle-school angst.

I didn’t understand how people, knowing how patriarchy works, expected the first woman president in a deeply masculinist and patriarchal democracy to break the mold.

I’m asking what it will take to have a politics that puts Black women and girls (cis, trans, and everything in between) at the center and keeps them safe.

Self-help gurus, pastors, and poets love to point to Black women’s “low self-esteem” as the cause for all Black-girl problems. Just

learn to love yourself, we are told. But patriarchy is nothing if not the structurally induced hatred of women.

If every woman and girl learned to love herself fiercely, the patriarchy would still be intact; it would demand that she be killed for having the audacity to think she was somebody. I...

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 B...

We owe it to ourselves to imagine what a post-patriarchal Black masculinity might look like.

Patriarchy numbs men’s collective pain sensors, and it causes Black men to not see Black women as worthy of care and concern.

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.

On the other hand, individual transformation is neither a substitute for nor a harbinger of structural transformation.

But now that I’m grown, I no longer believe that Black women should imbibe shame and blame for all the creative ways that we build families and lives, arrange fulfilling partnerships, and work to maintain safe homes and

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.

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.

White privilege works by making the advantages white people have invisible while making the supposedly “poor” choices of people of color hypervisible.

Healthy consensual touch is nothing short of holy.

She tried to empower me to fight for my happiness by helping me to not be limited by script and convention.

We can use our theology to oppress people or to liberate them. That’s our choice.

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.

Black feminism has been a liberatory theology for me in its own right.

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

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

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. On her last day,

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.

But it also is perhaps the most symbolic evidence of the failure of the project of African American respectability.

The rub is that these mansplaining men think they are helping. Moynihan thought his report would help.

In the absence of actual structural resources to ameliorate social problems, sermonic shaming and policy blaming is the opposite of help. It constitutes harm.

But the more access I have to halls of power, to places where decisions get made, the more rage I feel. I know how to

“count the costs” of my rage, but I wonder if we’ve learned how to count the costs of our respectability. It makes us emotionally dishonest. It makes us unable to see each other. It causes us to sympathize with the dignity vampires, come to take everything from us while claiming we brought it on ourselves.

“For it is not the anger of Black women,” Lorde tells us, “which is dripping down over this globe like a diseased liquid. It is not [our] anger which launches rockets … missiles, and other agents of war and death.” “Anger,” she said, “is an appropriate response to racist attitudes.” #AudreLordeTaughtMe

American democracy is as much a project of suppressing Black rage as it is of legitimizing and elevating white rage.

White rage and white fear are reactions to perceptions among white people that their power might be slipping away.

Black rage and Black fear are fundamentally more honest, because they are reactions to the violence of white supremacy.

The ability to take on and peel off the parts of Black culture that you like at will is exactly what is meant by the term “white privilege.”

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.

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.

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.

Too many white women thought they could vote for Trump while sticking everyone else with the consequences. In the battle over power, when white men run the world, white-lady tears have diminishing returns. This fact alone should inspire an army of white feminists to arm themselves with boxes of Kleenex, march into the world of white women, and start doing the painful work of trying to change their sisters’ minds.

My fluffy friends, those who have had many more years of therapy than I have had, are quick to tell me that feelings and emotions are not to be judged and that there are no right and wrong feelings. Feelings just are. But I am as judgmental as I can possibly be of white fear. It is an illegitimate political emotion that has done no good that I can think of, and more harm than it is humanly possible to tally. To say it in terms that the “all lives matter” crowd might understand, all fears matter, but some fears are treated as though they matter more.

My feelings, for their part, go on strike against me all the time, showing up with