Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower

by Brittney Cooper

This is a book by a grown-ass woman written for other grown-ass women. This is a book for women who expect to be taken seriously and for men who take grown women seriously. This is a book for women who know shit is fucked up. These women want to change things but don’t know where to begin. To be clear, I’m not really into self-help books, so I don’t have one of those catchy three-step plans for changing the world. What I have is anger. Rage, actually. And that’s the place where more women should begin—with the things that make us angry.

Black women turn to sass when rage is too risky—because we have jobs to keep, families to feed, and bills to pay. Black women who hold their communities together also hold our broader American community together. But it’s unclear whether we are really being taken seriously.

If Black women don’t figure out how to love other Black women (cis and trans, queer and straight, and everything in between), it will be the death of us.

Sexism, like every other “ism,” is a willful refusal to not see what is right in front of you.

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. I’m asking what it will take to have a politics that puts Black women and girls (cis, trans, and everything in between) at the center and keeps them safe. What does that look like? Because I sure as hell know what it doesn’t look like.

Claudette Colvin was an unwed pregnant teen when she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus in 1955. Rosa Parks was a married, respectable officer of the NAACP when she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat. Pauli Murray was a masculine-performing queer Black woman when she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat. Every kind of Black woman has a stake in the proverbial “bus.” Every kind of Black woman has fought for our right to be free to travel in pursuit of dreams and destiny. One way to start shedding the baggage is to start telling our truths, to start opening the bags and exposing the lies that weigh us down. The weight of the nation is not ours to carry.

I eat white-lady tears for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

It’s fine to quote Audre Lorde to people and tell them, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” The harder work is helping people find better tools to work with. We have to smash the patriarchy, for sure. And we have to dismantle white supremacy, and homophobia, and a whole bunch of other terrible shit that makes life difficult for people. Rage is great at helping us to destroy things. That’s why people are so afraid of it. But part of what I’ve been trying to say is that rage can help us build things, too. The clarity that comes from rage should also tell us what kind of world we want to see, not just what kind of things we want to get rid of. I’m not interested in a feminist project that only works to tear down things. Black women know that justice is rarely found in the rubble. If your rage can do anything for you, I hope it can do for you what it has done for me—help us to build the world we want to see.

May you ask more and better questions. Homegirl interventions leave me with more questions than answers. But usually they leave me with far better questions than I began with. May your curiosity be unceasing.

May your rage be a force for good. What you build is infinitely more important than what you tear down. When the struggle feels unwinnable, may you never forget this one thing: * * * You got this. We got this.