Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower

by Brittney Cooper

if Black folks learned to work hard, educate themselves, and stay out of trouble, white people would see that we were good, respectable people, human beings, worthy of both citizenship and protection.

The problem with all provisional strategies, particularly when they begin to work for the exceptional few, is that they rise to the level of ideology.

The Respectables, as I like to call them, claimed that our refusal to practice chastity and piety and avoid crime led to our low esteem among white people.

This sounds like good sense. It sounds like Black people taking on the very high levels of personal responsibility that those on the right love to talk about so much. But it doesn’t acknowledge that when you are twice as good, white folks will resent you for being better. And all human beings deserve at least a few slips.

The project of respectability had triumphed. It had proven that if Black people would simply get educated, be upstanding and respectable, and work hard, they could be absolutely anything—even president.

But the respectability project was particularly burdensome for Michelle Obama. She was policed and critiqued from head to toe by every community—white, Black, and in-between.

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.

It also bears noting that white people’s regulation of Black women’s bodies in the public sphere is one reason that Black people have been obsessed with outward appearance.

Meanwhile, Melania Trump was allowed to float above criticism, even though she initially refused to live in the White House and to take on the social demands of First Ladyhood. Had Michelle Obama dared to be so resistant, we would never have heard the end of the insults and bellyaching of the American public.

Black women’s experiences in this country is that we are the only group of people whose bodies have ever been legally mandated as the place that reproduced noncitizens.

African American respectability might bring us to the highest office in the land, but it could not ensure any level of long-term respect for Black humanity, Black womanhood, Black manhood, or Black childhood.

Too often, Black leaders think rooting for Black folks means shaming them into respectability.

But my mother was the first to teach me that we don’t have to accept nonsense simply because it is common.

But sometimes the only thing that is in order is to act out of order. To turn up, show out, and disrupt.

this preacher argued that the reason that Black children were out of line was that fathers were absent and mothers weren’t mothering well. My mother insisted on a different story. And she was willing to be disruptive in order to make that story heard.

The rub is that these mansplaining men think they are helping.

Many of the children who protested were Black, because Black children learn early that the best way to survive in a broken system is to go along to get along.

Because respectability is a rage-management project, those invested in Black respectability are often deeply uncomfortable with Black rage. Respectability tells us that staying alive matters more than protecting one’s dignity. Black rage says that living without dignity is no life at all.

But the collective, orchestrated fury of Black women can move the whole world. This is what the Black Lives Matter movement has reminded us.

It is not [our] anger which launches rockets … missiles, and other agents of war and death.”

The lie we are told is that white rage and white fear are honest emotions that preserve the integrity of American democracy. More often than not, we keep learning that white rage and white fear are dishonest impulses that lead us toward fascism. White rage and white fear are reactions to perceptions among white people that their power might be slipping away.

White supremacist gaslighting insists that what the statement really means is “only Black lives matter.” But that is willful ignorance on the part of folks who refuse to see that the conditions that prompted the proclamation in the first place were conditions that tried to assert that Black lives didn’t matter, that they were disposable, and that Black communities didn’t deserve justice. Black women, therefore, stood up and said, “We matter.” Too. Also.

the rage of Black women and girls does the necessary work of pushing American democracy forward, of exposing its flaws, of dramatizing its injustices, of taking its violent beatings.

In fact, in 2016, 3 percent fewer white women voted for Trump than those who had voted for Mitt Romney in 2012. That’s a significant political shift in one election cycle.

For white women, their race comes before their gender.

white feminists had a version of this problem, too. Namely, white women’s voting practices tell us that they vote with the party that supports their racial issues, even though this means voting with a party that hates women as a matter of public policy.

The comfort she felt in physically advancing on a stranger and expecting not to have any clapback for it is a comfort and a privilege that only white women have.

Watching white women take it to the streets to protest an election outcome that was a result of white women’s powerful voting bloc felt like an exercise in white-lady tears if I ever saw one,

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.” And while culture sharing is fine, white people have proven that they have a problem sharing. White people don’t share. They take over. They colonize. They claim shit as their own and then accuse others of being territorial and retrograde for pointing out these aggressive borrowing practices that shape white culture.

Wells also sought to call out the complicity of white women in this racial terror propagated against Black men. Not only weren’t they victims, but they were often engaging in consensual, though illicit, sexual relationships with Black men. Sometimes these women would cry rape when they were caught in the act. Sometimes the white men in their lives would cry rape for them. These white women’s tears proved deadly for Black men and Black communities. Meanwhile, the white men who were outraged over the rape of white women often raped Black women with impunity.

During the war, when they left their wives and daughters on plantations with these same Black men, there were few to no accusations of sexual assault. But after the war, suddenly (we are to believe), white men’s outsized outrage and paranoia over the safety of white women was about actual crimes Black men were committing rather than about white men’s deep and unbridled rage over losing power.

Her story demonstrates the extent to which white men were willing to go to protect and promote the narrative of vulnerable white femininity. But it also makes clear just how bothered white men were by the prospect of white women potentially sleeping with Black men.

I believe women when they say they are raped. No matter their race.

To find out that there are very compelling reasons to believe that Bill Cosby raped dozens of white women, and began doing so during the racially volatile 1960s, has been hard for many African Americans to accept. If the allegations are true, that would make Cosby as much of a monster as many white people love to think all Black men are.

Even as Black feminists rallied to denounce Cosby’s (alleged) despicable conduct and crimes, there was little to no outrage among white feminists when Daniel Holtzclaw, an Oklahoma police officer of Asian and white American descent, was accused of raping thirteen Black women, and was subsequently found guilty of eight of the rapes, in late 2015.

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.

Like many other white police officers who have killed unarmed Black people, her only defense was “I feared for my life.” Her fear became a lethal weapon

Black women have been some of Bill Cosby’s most vocal critics. We didn’t just leave white women to fend for themselves. We came and got our people.

No comparable outrage emerges from white feminists when Black women are under attack.

White women and Black men share a kind of narcissism that comes from being viewed as the most vulnerable entities within their respective races.

What I know is that rape is about power, and if a Black man has been serially raping white women for nearly fifty years, this is a violent patriarchal form of hitting back at white supremacy.

The movement to defund Planned Parenthood, an organization that provides critical health care to many poor women of color, has nothing to do with the desire of white men on the right for Black and Latina women to have more babies. Rather, these men seek to control reproduction itself because they want to control the life possibilities of all women.

The obsession with curtailing reproductive freedom in this country is about forcing white women to be hyperproductive in service of reproducing a white Republic.

However, what the Trump era has come to teach white women is that uncritical solidarity with patriarchy is tantamount to sticking your head in a lion’s mouth.

Blitt had gambled that coming face-to-face with their ugliest and most entrenched ideas about the Obamas, about Black men and women, and about Muslims would force American conservatives to realize the absurdity of these belief systems. It did not.

The cover seemed to reinscribe rather than to resist the stereotypes, since it trusted that white Americans would be able to acknowledge their own problematic assumptions about race.

The anti-Blackness at the heart of white fear is predicated on a misrecognition of the humanity of Black people.

Donald Trump deftly used the narrative of national belonging to make some groups, namely white male voters (across class lines), feel visible, heard, and affirmed.

there’s a problem when your notion of recognition is predicated on someone else’s exclusion.

“So scary are the consequences of a collapse of white privilege that many Americans have flocked to a political platform that supports and translates violence against the defenseless as strength.