Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower

by Brittney Cooper

This is a book for women who know shit is fucked up.

What I have is anger. Rage, actually. And that’s the place where more women should begin—with the things that make us angry.

sass is simply a more palatable form of rage.

To her, these stereotypical portrayals made Black folks seem understandable, even though to me, her descriptions felt like we were exotic others.

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

Owning anger is a dangerous thing if you’re a fat Black girl like me. Angry Black Women get dismissed all the time.

The truth is that Angry Black Women are looked upon as entities to be contained, as inconvenient citizens who keep on talking about their rights while refusing to do their duty and smile at everyone.

“Why are you so angry?” I hated the accusation from others, usually white people, because it was unfair, a way to discredit the legitimacy of the things Black women say by calling them emotional and irrational.

So in this book, I am doing what Black women do best. I’m calling America out on her bullshit about racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, and a bunch of other stuff.

young men had been socialized to desexualize outspoken women.

Listening to years of “talking crazy” among the crew had made me fall in love with ideas in a substantive way.

Still, it was cool as hell to run into thinkers on campus whose work I’d read on the regular.

But hooks’s feminist “crazy talk” was my first experience with the kinds of provocations that can be life-changing.

While I was not especially interested in being a feminist, I was even less interested in having a raggedy analysis, of being critically uninformed, and of getting caught out there, assed out and looking ignorant.

what lingers for me now, was the thoughtfulness and care of another Black girl’s friendship.

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.

🫰🏻🫰🏻

I worry about a world in which Black girls on their way to becoming women are taught to distrust women. I worry about a world in which Black women who are raising boys cultivate distrust for girls by looking upon every girl who shows interest in their sons with distrust. We wonder why young men hate women and, sometimes, the sad truth is that their mamas and aunts and sisters act as an arm of the patriarchy by parroting the refrain that “girls simply can’t be trusted.”

But there is wonder-working power in the homegirl hem-up, the particular way that Black women friends gather you and save your life by telling you lovingly to get your shit together.

We live in a world that tells women to distrust other women. And those of us who do dare to love other women hard are taught to distrust our impulses, to see that love as queer and wrong.

the trip to the plantation, one in which tour guides acted shy about admitting that enslaved people had lived and worked there, had brought us together.

having picked up from the ether, rather than from any particular conversation, that girls didn’t kiss girls.

it was clear to me that she existed on the outskirts of our small, tightly knit community because she was “different.”

The magazines worked to assure girls that they were most probably straight, subtly making it clear that queerness was not desirable.

in the soul-inspiring way that someone being thoughtful about loving you and showing up for you is romantic.

Our embrace of femininity was its own armor in a world where white women said that Black women should never be called ladies.

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.

Black feminism is and has always been a fundamentally queer project.

I am saying that far too many women leave behind the freedom feminism offers because they want to stay on patriarchy’s dick, which is to say they want to secure their straightness and their options for getting chosen.

fellating the patriarchy is no way to win.

And feminism helped me to recognize that there were other versions of a life to want.

“but the women keep the tempo.” I have thought long and hard about what it means for women’s bodies to keep the tempo of social movements.

might have different experiences, it’s not cool to act as though transwomen are in some entirely separate category from the more general category of woman.

Her feminism of deeply connected relationships is one that escapes notice in our rush to make sure our feminism names every ism and every intersectional category in its articulation.

It doesn’t matter if we get the rhetoric right, though, if we still keep treating other women wrong.

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

it read to me like grown Black women using the power of feminism to punch down (or up) at the mean girls who they resented in childhood.

the Black girls who we wanted to see us and befriend us instead either ignored or bullied us.

My feminism begins not with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton showing out at Seneca Falls, but with Maria Stewart, a Black lady abolitionist,

I see her challenging Black women to make that rage count.

Far too often they are straight-up enemies to the work of ending patriarchy and racism.

e.g. maga women

Black feminism is not a reactionary project. It is not about the damage that white girls do. Not solely or primarily. Black feminism is about the world Black women and girls can build, if all the haters would raise up and let us get to work.

not everyone is worth your time or your rage.

My Netflix queue is populated with shows that feature “Strong Female Leads”: Gilmore Girls, The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Girlboss, and Grace and Frankie.

All white

But until the Netflix-user algorithm clued me in, I had no idea that I had a predilection for watching white girls run the world. How can an avowed Black feminist be in love with imagined worlds in which white girls are at the center of everything?

Before my mother answered, her face winced in pain. I had never seen that look before, but I registered that she hated hearing and knowing that her daughter had been called such a thing.

As a hardworking single mom, my mother’s commitment to getting me to that meeting taught me that she was invested in my doing positive activities that would enable me to become a self-possessed and confident Black girl.

These new friendships also alienated me from any Black friends I might have had; I quickly became the object of ridicule among my black classmates, who accused me of “acting white.”

don’t know that I chose these books because the girls were white. There were so few books about Black girls to choose from.

A country girl in a small town, I associated access to books about my own experience with life in the big city. In the books to which I had regular access, the worlds of white girls were middle-class, nuclear, and uncomplicated,

I longed for that kind of close female comradeship. I craved it. As thankful as I was for sleepovers and friends to play with at school, none of my friendships ever felt like the Baby-Sitters Club.