Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower

by Brittney Cooper

One of feminism’s biggest failures is its failure to insist that feminism is, first and foremost, about truly, deeply, and unapologetically loving women.

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 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’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.

White privilege works by making the advantages white people have invisible while making the supposedly “poor” choices of people of color hypervisible. For instance, on the surface, it simply looks like white people have better access to education, jobs, and housing because they make better choices or because they work harder. And, conversely, it looks like Black people have less access to these same things because they are lazy. In fact, in most opinion polls, white people believe that Black people don’t work as hard as they do. 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.

Respectability politics are at their core a rage-management project.

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.

But when we turn it outward and focus it on the powers that would crush us into submission and give back to us a mangled image of ourselves, Black women’s rage is a kind of power that America would do well to heed if it wants to finally live up to its stated democratic aims.

A woke white feminism would recognize that even as they rebel against the sexual strictures of white patriarchy, through movements to reclaim the term “slut” and so forth, they have a duty to recognize that white men’s desires to regulate their sexual lives is predicated not just on controlling white women’s bodies, but also on criminalizing Black men and denigrating Black women.

Impact matters more than intent.

According to a joint study by the Institute for Policy Studies and the Corporation for Enterprise Development, it would take Black people 228 years to catch up to the amount of net wealth that white people currently possess. White people fear a fantastical rise of racial power that they have made damn-near structurally impossible for Black people to achieve.

In 2010, the Insight Center for Community Economic Development found that single Black women in the prime working ages of thirty-six to forty-nine have a median net wealth of $5. Five whole dollars. Single white women in this same cohort had a net wealth of $42,600.