Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower

by Brittney Cooper

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. We must quit mistaking the two. Better yet, we must quit settling for one when what we really need is the other.

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.

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

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. This rage is dangerous because it can’t be reasoned with, can’t be forced to accept the daily indignities of racism, and more than likely will fight back, rather than fleeing or submitting.

I know how to “count the costs” of my rage, but I wonder if we’ve learned how to count the costs of our respectability. It makes us emotionally dishonest. It makes us unable to see each other. It causes us to sympathize with the dignity vampires, come to take everything from us while claiming we brought it on ourselves.

Frankly, I resent others who allow their feelings to roam around unmanaged, demanding everybody’s attention.