Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower

by Brittney Cooper

picket signs that scream truths I’d rather not hear, all while demanding that I renegotiate terms. But

No one had time for my intense Black-girl emotions.

Skyrocketing childcare costs continue to disadvantage Black families, particularly in households like mine, headed by a single breadwinner mother. According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, 60.9 percent of all Black families are headed by a single mother who is the breadwinner for the family. Another 20 percent of Black households rely

Either her money could go to childcare, or it could go toward an investment in our future.

What might it mean to start from the perspective of a Black girl’s fears and build a world that is safe for her?

White fear is not subject to any such cultural or religious scrutiny. In fact, white fears are routinely treated as fact rather than fantasy.

white fears rest on the presumption that they are rooted in fact; everyone who is nonwhite is treated as though their fears are the stuff of fantasy.

If I’m being generous (and I’m not required to be generous), I can understand why shifting power relations in a world where white folks have always been unequivocally dominant could have them all in their feelings.

The problem is that, with the exception of former president Barack Obama and a few well-placed Black millionaires and billionaires, Black people don’t have any appreciable levels of institutional power.

In 2013, the median net wealth for white families was over $141,000. For Black families, it was $11,000.

White people fear a fantastical rise of racial power that they have made damn-near structurally impossible for Black people to achieve.

When we are afraid, we stop asking questions and start seeking short-term solutions.

The work of my hands is the work of teaching students how to ask more and better questions. It is the work of rescuing curiosity from the clutches of fear. What kind of world can (white) fear really create? What is the end game of white supremacy? And what would it mean to start from the fears of the marginalized and build a world that is safe for them?

I already told y’all that I’m a micromanager of emotions, and sometimes our questions show up in the form of feelings. Part of learning to manage our feelings is learning to confront our questions.

Black survival means being endlessly obsessed with figuring out the depths to which white folks will fall to maintain a position of dominance. Sometimes Black survival requires that we be the wet nurses and handmaidens for an endless project of white navel-gazing. In order to save our own lives, we have to be brutally honest about what the worst of white folks, as Kiese Laymon calls them, are capable of, even if no one else will.

But what they don’t know is that I’ve been slaying boogie men since age seven. White folks are not entitled to my fear.

The sacrifices that Black women and girls make create more opportunities and possibilities for our communities. Getting into formation with other like-minded folks is one way we can help our fears not to win. In those formations, we can find joy, support, and strategies to help us overcome. When Black girls get in formation, the nation should follow.

When they were left without anything of substance to say, they both did what men learn to do when they can’t

dominate a woman intellectually—they berate her physically. But I wasn’t a feminist yet. I didn’t know then that this is one way patriarchy shows up.

When the Pew Research Center accounted for employment status using census data, they found that there are “51 employed Black men for every 100 young Black women.”

In 2010, the Insight Center for Community Economic Development found that single Black women in the prime working ages of thirty-six to forty-nine have a median net wealth of $5.

Given the WTF nature of these statistics, it is absolutely high time that we stop blaming Black women for what is clearly a structural problem.

It’s not that white folks are less screwed up than we are. It’s that they

have far more chances to get it right.

Statistics and analyses about how the patriarchy is beating down your door ain’t got nothing on the fervent, insistent desire to get chose.

It had become exceedingly clear that my feminist analysis wasn’t gonna keep me warm at night or get me laid at all.

It doesn’t matter what feminism has to teach us about the structural realities of unemployment and underemployment for Black men. We live in a society that says real men provide.

Fear can distort your view of the facts.

They have to own that they have always gauged their nearness to patriarchal dominance by measuring both how far beneath white men they fall and how far above Black women they rise.

Is there a way to say, without sounding like somebody’s grandma, that three decades of turning the disrespect of Black women into a global art form via Hip Hop might have some intimate and emotional costs for Black folks?

Far too many brothers conceptualize freedom as the sharing of power with white men. And every time a bid for power fails, it is sisters who get shit upon and who are asked to pick up the broken pieces. This has to change. More to the point, if you feel like your manhood is rooted in failure, how can you possibly love yourself?

We have to figure out how to commit to the fierce pursuit of joy with one another.

want to be clear that God has a place in how I think about justice and feminism, but I hate God-explanations for structural problems.

How do we balance the impulse to think that having degrees equips us to speak for people in their absence with the fact that the degrees in most cases actually do mean we have something of value to contribute that we might not otherwise have had?

An accusation that one is elitist is like the sounding of the death knell to any activist or scholar committed to the struggle. It’s akin to somebody rolling up and dissing your mama. But there is a gender dynamic to it. When I have experienced these kinds of accusations from other Black feminist women, typically, it’s mean-girl shit and jealousy masquerading as a radical critique. When Black men do it to Black women, it is a way to deny Black

women the authority of being legitimate theorists or decision makers within Black communities.

In this way the church, as I mentioned in my discussion of grown-woman theology, has become complicit in the broader project of neoliberalism, which is marked by a social abdication of responsibility to create systems that help the vast majority of citizens

achieve some notion of the good life.

Part of the work of justice for those of us who made it out of terribly fucked-up conditions is rejecting the myth of our own exceptionalism.

Black people at every level spend less money than white

folks in similar economic circumstances.

White people have more money because their ancestors made money from owning our ancestors.

When white people die, other white people gain wealth. When black folks die, they often leave debt behind.

Disproportionate numbers of our people are locked in the structural hopelessness that attends concentrated poverty.

In fact, in this moment, when a broad-scale conservative backlash threatens to absolutely gut the social safety net, “resilience” is a dangerous word. 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.

Just like there are many, many white men who make viable candidates for the presidency, the same is true for Black communities. The only difference is structural levels of access, not levels of talent or intellect. I would not have known that if I had not left my community.

Structural violence is rooted in the need to maintain hierarchies, but far too often its most gut-wrenching acts are enacted horizontally, by our peers, not by those positioned above us.

Real radicalism implores us to tell the whole ugly truth, even when it’s inconvenient. To own the hurt and the pain. To own our shit, too. To think about it systemically and collectively, but never to diminish the import of the trauma.

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. We have to smash the patriarchy, for sure. And we have to dismantle white supremacy, and homophobia, and a whole bunch of other terrible shit that makes life difficult for people. Rage is great at helping us to destroy things.