Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower

by Brittney Cooper

Intersectional education happens primarily in the kinds of college classrooms that cause conservative politicians to lose their shit on the regular.

I couldn’t fall apart like I wanted to because, well, I’m a Black girl, and we don’t get the luxury of doing frivolous shit like that.

The system’s response to seeing us bend is to break us entirely.

Reminiscent of earlier periods of racial terror for African Americans, traffic stops have again become the pretext for the reckless taking of Black life by police.

Because traffic stops are frequently a life-or-death matter for Black people, stopping traffic has become one of the primary modes of protest for the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM).

Intersectionality makes clear the ways that systems of power interact in Black women’s lives to restrict social mobility and to hinder us from moving unencumbered through the social sphere.

She was right there. Right there. At the intersection of destiny, dreams, and death. Death won, assisted in its victory by those with real power.

For many who are apologists for state violence, her declaration of her freedom and her rights sounded like an invitation to harassment.

By declaring her rights to travel, to freedom, and to happiness to be natural rights, Korryn Gaines invoked a very particular political discourse about the origin of our natural rights. If freedom to travel and freedom to be happy are civil rights or legal rights, they exist entirely at the whim and fancy of the U.S. government. If however, these matters are natural rights, they are not bound by the exigencies of policy and procedure.

This long history of Black women enduring violent harassment while they are on their way somewhere—anywhere—makes Korryn Gaines’s demands to be recognized and respected as a “free traveler” far less preposterous.

After the abuse she suffered during my childhood, my mother, tired of being used and abused, began the process of healing herself in my tween and teen years. Years later, she would tell me, “I wanted better for you, and if I wanted better for you, then I had to want better for myself.”

On the one hand, I have made many a bad decision, tolerating bad friends and even worse dudes, because I didn’t love myself as well as I should have. Therefore, I merely accepted what others offered, even when it was so much less than what I am worth.

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

The idea that only middle-class, straight, married women deserve to start families is both racist and patriarchal.

Less outrage was reserved for the police who decided that shooting her son who, thankfully, survived was a reasonable price to pay for apprehending his mother, who had committed the crime of failing to pay a traffic ticket.

The irony is that I traded being one kind of Black woman statistic for another. I’m now among the scores of professional Black women who are unmarried.

But suffice it to say that we thought, as all young people do, that we had endless time, that our chosen boos would arrive, and that our advanced degrees would bring us into a world of men with advanced degrees and earning potential, too. It hasn’t worked out that way for a great many of us.

Black women deserve more options than these extremes—that the same choices we make to not ruin our lives as young people become the choices that make us miserable twenty years later.

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.

But “empowerment” is a tricky word. It’s also a decidedly neoliberal word that places the responsibility for combating systems on individuals.

Have you ever noticed that people who have real “power”—wealth, job security, influence—don’t attend “empowerment” seminars? Power is not attained from books and seminars. Not alone, anyway. Power is conferred by social systems. Empowerment and power are not the same thing.

Those who feel “empowered” talk about their personal power to change their individual condition. Those with actual power make decisions that are of social and material consequence to themselves and others.

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.

Individual solutions to collective problems cannot work, no matter how personally empowering they may feel.

The weight of the nation is not ours to carry.

For my Gram, access to birth control mattered greatly. She told me that she would have opted for only two children rather than the six she’d had (and raised and loved) if birth control had been widely available to Black women in the 1950s and 1960s in rural Louisiana.

She looked at me with those laser eyes that Black mamas use to see right through you, and commanded me to “start having sex.” She meant real, good sex.

The regulation of sexuality by white Christians in the United States has always been about the propagation of a socially acceptable and pristine nuclear family worthy of having the American dream, a family that was heterosexual, middle class, and white.

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

And what is perhaps most interesting is that white people believe this myth as much today as they believed it in the racially volatile 1960s.

To justify enslaving, raping, and breeding Black women and girls, white Americans created a mythos around Black women’s sexuality. They cast us as sexually insatiable, unrapeable, licentious, and dirty.

The problem is that I still inherently saw my “stuff” as bad, as the source of a temptation so mighty that it could derail my relationship with God and my life goals all at the same time.

In places where abstinence is the only form of sex education, teen pregnancy rates are alarming. In places where access to contraception and proper information about birth control is available, teen pregnancy rates have decreased astronomically.

having a male head of household was not, in fact, desirable.

Black women had the right to dissent from theologies that didn’t serve them well.

These days, I’m sure that between peals of laughter, God is sitting somewhere, saying, “Girl, bye. I didn’t tell you to throw away all those books and that perfectly good vibrator.”

But when my grandmother showed me that I could take a different approach to my theology, that it could be a push and pull, a debate, and even an ongoing set of arguments with God, she freed me up from my investment in being a Christian Goody Two-Shoes.

The thing we would all do well to remember is that conservative Christian theology was used to enslave Black people. We can use our theology to oppress people or to liberate them. That’s our choice.

Perhaps it’s time for us to read some other sacred texts alongside the Bible. My grandmother’s words are a sacred text to me—a sacred text of country Black girlhood. My mother’s words are a sacred text to me—a sacred text of grown Black womanhood. The words of Sojourner Truth, and Alice Walker, and Zora Neale Hurston, and Audre Lorde, and Patricia Hill Collins, and Anna Julia Cooper, and Beyoncé and my homegirls are all sacred texts to me. Black feminism has been a liberatory theology for me in its own right.

What Black feminism and my grandmother have taught me is that Black women are experts on their own lives and their own well-being.

Freedom is my theological compass, and it never steers me wrong.

She also looked fed up and ready to go.

Respectability politics, the belief that Black people can overcome many of the everyday, acute impacts of racism by dressing properly and having education and social comportment

Chopping it all off meant she was going through something exceedingly terrible.

in Mrs. Obama’s case, our running cultural commentary about her hair was one of seeing her and feeling seen. It meant that there were Black girls in the White House with hair—challenges, and woes, and triumphs—just like us.

But there was also something about the refusal to perform the public standard—a standard that Mrs. Obama had herself set—that marked an unceremonious ending. Her hair was a signal to the world that what we were about to witness was some bullshit. She knew it. We knew it. “Do y’all see this shit?” that hair asked of all of us who were watching or deliberately not watching our complicated American homeland being placed in the hands of a mentally unwell fascist.

It was the combination of this kind of informal updo with a dress that was pretty, but also unremarkable, that signaled a kind of pulling back, a disengagement, with the American public. Mrs. Obama didn’t throw her middle fingers up at the system that had just elected Donald Trump. However, the subtlety in her refusal of pomp and circumstance belied a deep disdain for the way in which the American people had rejected her work, and that of President Obama, by installing his nemesis—a man who had started a whole movement questioning his citizenship—in the White House.

Learning to manage one’s rage by daily tamping down that rage is a response to routine assaults on one’s dignity in a world where rage might get you killed or cause you to lose your job.

Rage is a kind of refusal. To be made a fool of, to be silenced, to be shamed, or to stand for anybody’s bullshit. It is a refusal of the lie that Black women’s anger in the face of routine, everyday injustice is not legitimate.

Black women’s rage is a kind of orchestrated fury.