Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower

by Brittney Cooper

My Baby-Sitters Club years were populated with racial slights from the white girls I called friends. Never overt, these incidents communicated that I was mostly liked, often tolerated, but invariably different.

but my daddy doesn’t like Black people.”

Candy raised her hand first when the teacher asked for volunteers to play Martin Luther King. Her mother brought her to school with a bottle of brown makeup, which Candy smeared all over her own face.

A few months later, when we were all treated to the video of Rodney King being brutally beaten by four LAPD officers, no one at school mentioned it. I was left to discuss it in the blackness of my own home.

Despite my lack of Black girl friends, listening to Black music, Hip Hop and R&B, made me know that I was a real Black girl even if none of the other Black girls around me saw it.

Before we fully learn to love ourselves, all people of color in the United States learn that we are supporting characters and spectators in the collective story of white people’s lives. The stories we watch and read ask us to put aside their whiteness and relate to their very “universal” human struggles around conflict with the world, the self, and others. The problem is that only the experiences of white people are treated as universal. Meanwhile, Black movies, shows, and books are typically seen as limited and particular.

I learned that men don’t lose presidencies over cheating on their wives.

Naïve and idealistic, I had yet to learn at age twenty that elections are as much about popularity as about policy.

I could not understand people who thought I knew the issues better than anyone, but planned to vote for someone else.

It was dramatic and devastating in the way that first failures for overachievers tend to be.

Like most Americans, and most of the polling numbers, I assumed that we had arrived at a place where America was ready for a female president, especially one as hypercompetent as Clinton.

Every time I heard or read one of those pieces, I winced, remembering acutely how it felt to be deemed overqualified but simultaneously disliked and distrusted.

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.

What might feel like a singular and stunning defeat for her is one that Black women learn to live with every day—the sense that you are a woman before your time, that your brilliance and talents are limited by the historical moment and the retrograde politics within that moment in which you find yourself living. Black women, from slavery to freedom, know that struggle so much more than any white person ever will.

Everything about the ways that white women endlessly analyzed and picked Hillary apart felt like it came from the mean-girl playbook that we all learn in middle school.

Working-class white men’s overidentification with Donald Trump, a man who clearly despises them, is the stuff of middle-school fantasy, too.

Donald Trump sure ain’t pretty, but he is rich and well-connected, and that means that lots of white men who will never be either of these things secretly identify with him.

Moreover, I found it especially terrible that when it came to racial politics, many young progressives, across racial lines, were far more willing to train their hatred on Hillary Clinton, a white woman, than on Bernie Sanders, a white man. White women have absolutely been accomplices to the American project of white supremacy, but their husbands, brothers, fathers, and sons have always been the masterminds.

Having grown up in a world where white women were frequently a mixed bag, I couldn’t technically disagree with assessments of Clinton as a racist and a neoliberal big-money politician. My problem was that every politician on the left since Bill Clinton has been exactly this kind of politician. 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.

Even before I embraced feminism, the Howard campus election taught me that patriarchy is always on its job. Other things like race, class, and sexual orientation, might be central. But gender always matters.

But in addition to her clear talent for politics and her doing an admittedly really great job as student body president, she also met respectable standards of femininity

Never before had I encountered a world where the merit of my ideas didn’t rule the day.

Opinionated, outspoken, and far too serious, I didn’t temper my mouth with cute hairstyles or clothes. I didn’t know I needed to.

I had learned early how to disidentify with whiteness but never fully how to inhabit, embrace, and identify with my particular Black-girl magic.

the posture of burning shit down feels decidedly masculinist to me. Our nation’s story is one of men using violence—against Native folks, against Black folks, and against women—to build and fund a grand “experiment in democracy.”

According to several years of reports by the Violence Policy Center, in this, the second decade of the twenty-first century, eight Black women per week, more than one per day, are murdered, usually with guns, and usually by a Black male they know. More than one thousand women of all races are murdered each year, in similar incidents, usually by men of their own race. It has been said before, but it is worth saying again: Toxic masculinity kills.

This had been the script of both my grandfathers, Henry and Claudie. It was the script my mother had to work with when she chose whom to love. It was the script of both of the men she loved as a young woman.

Men aren’t born destroyers. Many men imbibe scripts of toxic masculinity almost from birth. And on their way to becoming men, they enact those toxic scripts in the lives of the women around them.

For the second time, my daddy had become the victim of another man’s vendetta against the special woman in his life.

How could I love him? I’d seen him inflict pain with my own two eyes. Small and powerless, I’d heard him slamming my mother into doors, even while I screamed and cried from the other room for him to stop.

I am always struck by the ways other people’s stories about my father tend to highlight his empathy and kindness for others. I wonder about a world in which you can be kind to everyone but the people who belong to you.

And as the argument went among some Black men on the left, even two hundred-plus kidnapped, raped, and forcefully impregnated Black teen girls did not warrant U.S. military intervention.

But far too many brothers have walked away from the fight for Black women’s lives, citing lack of interest, lack of urgency, or dogma.

Though patriarchy is clearly a structural problem, often there is a refusal to confront it, because to do so makes it seem like Black women are “picking on” Black men.

I’m advocating for people-centered politics that hold the safety and protection of the least of these—among them Black women and girls—as a value worth fighting for.

They are demands for recognition of citizenship and humanity.

Far too often, in these days of endless war and in wars past, it sends or has sent back to us men with war raging in their hearts and ringing in their ears. Those men, who cannot cut through the madness of the violence they’ve seen and in which they’ve been forced to engage, see Black girls and women as targets—as objects for violent sexual release, as punching bags, as emotional chopping blocks.

What does it mean to build a world in which Black women and Black girls are safe? Jail clearly didn’t keep Bob away from my mother and me, and the restraining order didn’t keep him away forever, either.

I’m a Black woman who wants to live in a nation that believes it has a responsibility to Black women, as citizens and as people, to make the world safe for them.

All of these men, my father, my stepfather, and Bob, had to contend with the models handed down to them. But only Rev seemed to come to the right conclusion.

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.

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 Black women’s humanity and personhood?

But my mother left Bob when he didn’t treat her right. She almost lost her life for it. The deadliest time for a woman in an abusive relationship is when she decides to leave. Still, despite almost being killed, when things got to be too terrible with my father, she left him, too. From where I sit, my mama made the right choice to leave every time it became clear that her man wasn’t going to treat her right. The abuse had nothing to do with her choices and everything to do with the ways we don’t demand that men stop being violent.

We have to spend our time teaching young men how not to be violent men and partners.

War narrows the frame of masculine possibility and tethers it irreparably to violence. In every part of their lives, young men need access to conversations about what it means to be a man in ways that are not rooted in power, dominance, and violence.

Black men grow up believing and moving through the world politically as though they have it the toughest, as though their pain matters most, as though Black women cannot possibly be feeling anything similar to the dehumanization and disrespect they have felt.

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

It wages war in Black communities at home, controlling Black folks through surveillance and violence, demanding their submission and compliance. When submission and compliance is not freely offered, the state murders Black men, women, and children, citing the rule of law.

definition of freedom is a desegregated patriarchy.

It is our own country that uses war as a tool to compel violent submission from those people in other places that we claim to care about.