Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower

by Brittney Cooper

White rage is deeply connected to a fear of losing privilege and status in a browning American empire.

But I am as judgmental as I can possibly be of white fear. It is an illegitimate political emotion that has done no good that I can think of, and more harm than it is humanly possible to tally.

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.

They view this rage with a studied indifference and a willful ignorance that is about not seeing or validating Black people’s fear and right to be afraid.

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

White fear of Black people is not limited to white Americans. It is rooted in the ideology of white supremacy, a virus that infects us all.

Voting once or even twice for a Black man is not enough to undo years of anti-Black social conditioning. Fear and feelings, especially about racism, have to be managed constantly. White supremacy does not fall through singular acts of white resistance and magnanimity.

Politicians on the right know that the kind of work we do in college classrooms—the work of inquiry and deep questioning, the work of nurturing curiosity, the work of exposing the myths and fantasies that inform students’ fears—can create an informed and powerful citizenry. The students who sit in college classrooms like mine today can become powerful leaders in the fight against racism, sexism, and homophobia two decades from now. Politicians seek to quash all possibility of this kind of work.

Being under the presence of the white gaze is supposed to elicit different behavior from me—namely to curtail whatever illicit behaviors that I am automatically presumed to be engaging in.

Incivility is not illegal.

When Beyoncé tells all the fly chicks to get in formation, she is asking us to get our shit together so we can do the work that needs to be done.

When Black girls get in formation, the nation should follow.

“All those books gone run ya crazy,” she’d pronounce emphatically. Maybe she was right.

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.

They made me feel unlovable.

At what point is it fair to ask men to act like grown human beings?

Black male teenagers, boys who were not yet men, became bona fide enemies of the state, the primary targets in law enforcement’s war on drugs and crime.

Black men as an “endangered species” to name the epidemic levels of casualty and out-migration of Black men into prisons that we witnessed.

It’s that they have far more chances to get it right. White people have more access to marriage and partnership because they have more access to absolutely everything else: jobs, housing, safety, and wealth.

That is nearly a decade without being touched, desired, complimented, or engaged at any significant intimate level.

Recognition is a human need, and there is something fundamentally violent about a world that denies Black women recognition on a regular basis.

I saw Tyler Perry’s movies and Harvey’s book as an opportunity to delve into the emotional lives of Black men.

“Well, the reason your fathers left is often because they didn’t know or care to learn how to be good partners to your mothers. I just find it interesting that for a whole generation of you, y’all don’t ever think critically about what you should do differently about the partnership piece.

I have no idea how it feels to be a man’s number-one priority.

“I want a partner, someone who shows up for me, offers emotional support, and someone to share my life with.”

When I pointed out the contradiction of hating women who were independent and hating women who were “gold diggers” (and therefore by definition, too dependent), all I got was a Kanye shrug.

This is what intimate solidarity and just Black Love look like—acknowledging that we need each other, committing to showing up for each other, and committing to radical honesty and realness with each other.

Second, Black men have to stop heaping all of their anger and resentment over the way that patriarchy has failed them on the backs of Black women. Far too many brothers conceptualize freedom as the sharing of power with white men.

I realized that even though my assessments about the legitimacy of his feminist politics were right, and our intellectual kinship mattered, in the end he chose a partner with whom he could find unadulterated joy.

There is often little peace and quiet and even less space to think when violence can show up in your living room at any given time.

asking Black women to move back into violent, under-resourced spaces didn’t seem particularly revolutionary to me.

But Black women’s revolutions are always about safety, food, and education for women, children, and the elderly.

Being singled out as exceptional by the adults at home and school created its own set of problems among my peers. I became a target of other Black children in the community, who accused me of “talking too proper” and “acting white.”

wondering what was wrong with the kind of Black girl I chose to be,

Many of those children continued to labor under the assumption that white people, and we Blacks who supposedly wanted to be white, had a monopoly on smartness. Nothing about our deeply segregated school system ever challenged their ideas.

I 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.

Somehow, we both moved along the trajectories that my town seems to set up for Black girls. Either you become an exceptional achiever, or you settle into a life of low-wage work and children. Exceptionalism or struggle should not be the only pathways available to Black people.

I was able to see my childhood, the bullying, and small-mindedness as a function of retrograde racial politics that became magnified in the context of a small town in the semirural deep South.

When she framed their childhood disdain toward me as jealousy, what I heard, more precisely, was an awareness of an injustice. Black children know when they are being left behind, devalued, and overlooked.

“Who isn’t in the room? Who are we excluding?” These questions matter, but they can also be deeply annoying because very often they are a performance of middle-class angst.

Black women’s consistent philosophy is “If we eat, everybody eats.” If I’m not struggling, no one in my family struggles either.

Relying on the favor of God to open doors for us is not a plan for systemic change or justice at any broad level.

Black children and Black people are told that if they simply follow the rules, they can make it into the middle class, where the hope is that they will experience some level of stability. When this respectability formula links up with Christian dogma about God’s favor, one comes to believe that their access to a stable social life, with the ability to pay their bills, have secure and affordable housing, healthy and affordable meals, good public schools, and a bit of discretionary income is a function of God’s blessing and favor.

theology becomes a substitute for demanding that the system be more just.

marked by a social abdication of responsibility to create systems that help the vast majority of citizens achieve some notion of the good life. Instead, neoliberalism turns our attention to individual self-regulation, and notions of personal empowerment, as the pathway to having anything in life.

It turns out that the entire respectability formula for raising Black socioeconomic status is a fail. Going to college, raising children in a two-parent home, working full-time, and spending less do not make it possible for Black people to close the wealth gap that they have with white people. White people have more money because their ancestors made money from owning our ancestors.

“Oh, but children are resilient!” Celebrating the resilience of poor folks is a perverse way of acknowledging the unreasonable demands placed upon people who already are struggling to make it.

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.”

first day of my life that I wasn’t presumed to be the smartest Black person in my classroom. Suddenly I was in the middle of 360 degrees of Black brilliance and, briefly, I was shook. Who was I, if “smart Black girl” fit fully 60 percent of the people on campus? Suddenly I was no longer the only one,