Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower

by Brittney Cooper

When it comes to Black women, sometimes Americans don’t recognize that sass is simply a more palatable form of rage.

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.

Black women have the right to be mad as hell. We have been dreaming of freedom and carving out spaces for liberation since we arrived on these shores. There is no other group, save Indigenous women, that knows and understands more fully the soul of the American body politic than Black women, whose reproductive and social labor have made the world what it is. This is not mere propaganda. Black women know what it means to love ourselves in a world that hates us. We know what it means to do a whole lot with very little, to “make a dollar out of fifteen cents,” as it were. We know what it means to snatch dignity from the jaws of power and come out standing. We know what it means to face horrific violence and trauma from both our communities and our nation-state and carry on anyway. But we also scream, and cry, and hurt, and mourn, and struggle. We get heartbroken, our feelings get stepped on, our dreams get crushed. We get angry, and we express that anger. We know what it means to feel invisible.

We need to embrace our messiness more. We need to embrace the ways we are in process more.

That’s kind of how it feels to be a Black woman. Like our victories belong to everyone, even though we do all the work.

I worry about a world in which Black girls on their way to becoming women are taught to distrust women. I worry about a world in which Black women who are raising boys cultivate distrust for girls by looking upon every girl who shows interest in their sons with distrust. We wonder why young men hate women and, sometimes, the sad truth is that their mamas and aunts and sisters act as an arm of the patriarchy by parroting the refrain that “girls simply can’t be trusted.”

We live in a world that tells women to distrust other women. And those of us who do dare to love other women hard are taught to distrust our impulses, to see that love as queer and wrong.

We were overachieving Black girls in predominantly white classrooms, and what that trip to learn about our heritage had taught us was that our story bound us together and didn’t allow us the privilege of building friendships based on shared affinity and personality alone. Black girls had to stick together.

Our embrace of femininity was its own armor in a world where white women said that Black women should never be called ladies. If I have to pick a side, I’d say I’m second wave enough to put middle fingers up to the patriarchy and I’m third wave enough to affirm that beauty and the desire to be wanted still matter.

Feminism wouldn’t be feminism if it didn’t encode a healthy skepticism about the politics of getting dick. And feminism wouldn’t be feminism if it didn’t celebrate the power of pussy.

My trans-women comrades have taught me that you don’t have to have a vagina to have a pussy. And my lesbian homegirls have extolled to me the virtues of the “D” their own lesbian partners are throwing down. The larger point is that however dope fellatio may be, fellating the patriarchy is no way to win.

All I had imagined for my personal life at age twenty was that I would get married, have three kids, and enjoy taking care of a family. It’s laughable now since I don’t particularly like children, unless they belong to people I love. I had nuclear-family dreams because I had bought into the notion that the way I grew up—in a single-parent home, with a mismatched family of aunties and uncles and cousins and grandparents bringing up the rear—was not optimal. So part of my success story involved having it all—the house, the car, the career, the pretty man, and the kids.

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

And while it is okay to acknowledge that all kinds of women, whether white, Black, Indigenous, Latina, Asian, cis, gender nonconforming, trans, queer, bi, or straight might have different experiences, it’s not cool to act as though transwomen are in some entirely separate category from the more general category of woman. That is something that feminism needs to be clear on—that it isn’t feminism if all women’s concerns, particularly the most marginalized women’s concerns, aren’t taken seriously.

Loving Black girls is complicated, but loving oneself in a world where there is always someone ready to do you harm is even harder.

Many of us who couldn’t access pretty privilege, those of us who weren’t popular or cool, those of us nerdy girls who stayed to ourselves, wrote stories and dreamed of lives as writers, grew up and found a home in feminism, a place where we were seen, a place where others were as mad about injustice as we were.

I wondered yet again about why it is so easy for Black women to ignore how important feminism is to our lives. I began by reminding her of the obvious: despite white women’s racism, Ida B. Wells felt she had a right to be at the suffrage march. Black women care about feminism because sexism and patriarchy affect our lives, too.

I’m not merely a feminist who happens to be Black. I’m a Black Feminist, capital B, capital F. That means I learned my feminism from Black women, and my feminist theory and praxis is situated in the particular ways Black women have understood, thought about, and written about the problems of racism and sexism across space and time.

Going after white women online will get you lots of clicks and likes. But you’ll feel exhausted at the end and, often, white women’s attitudes won’t have changed one iota. I’m not saying white women don’t do treacherous shit. Far too often they are straight-up enemies to the work of ending patriarchy and racism. But we still can’t let white women become the center of a conversation that isn’t about them.

Black feminism is not a reactionary project. It is not about the damage that white girls do. Not solely or primarily. Black feminism is about the world Black women and girls can build, if all the haters would raise up and let us get to work. When I talk about owning eloquent rage as your superpower, it comes with the clear caveat that not everyone is worth your time or your rage. Black feminism taught me that. My job as a Black feminist is to love Black women and girls. Period.

It’s odd in this political moment that Black feminists resent white women more than Black men because when I think of the harms I’ve dealt with and who has caused the most pain, done the most emotional and physical violence, it is always always always Black men. They have done the shooting, the cheating, the beating, and the devaluing. Yet when a young Black man gets killed by police, my ass is in the street proclaiming that “Black lives matter.” When Black women get killed, Black men never manage to plan such marches in solidarity with us. Though our bros ain’t loyal, we insist on showing up for them. In a world where capital “B” Blackness matters as much as it does, I’m not sure that this obviously contradictory approach to our feminist politics will change. Where brothers are concerned, shit is and will always be complicated.

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 stories we watch and read ask us to put aside their whiteness and relate to their very “universal” human struggles around conflict with the world, the self, and others. 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.

So much of Hillary Clinton’s career in the public eye reads like a modern version of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew.

My relationship with white girls is and remains complicated. And in the public parts of my life, for good or ill, white women’s racism has never kept me from admiring them, befriending them, or supporting them. This has been true for multiple generations of Black women, especially in the South.

The things that made others distrust Hillary Clinton were the things that made me like her. Something about her social awkwardness, her detail-oriented policy-wonk tendencies, and her devotion to the long game of racking up qualifications through intentional résumé building feels familiar, because it is the very same strategy of every high-achieving Black woman I know. Often Black women are cast as cold and unfeeling for having these qualities. But the hustling spirit that I saw in Hillary Clinton resonated with the oft-repeated Black proverb: You have to work twice as hard to get half as far. Black women and girls are forced to navigate the unreasonably high expectations that go along with proverbs like this throughout their lives.

Hillary appealed to the parts of me that care far less about impressing people than about figuring out the nuts and bolts of the kind of thinking that will actually help people. She appealed to the parts of me that despise the insincerity and superficiality of small talk. She appealed to the parts of me that come alive in intimate settings when I have the chance to connect with real people. My ability to empathize with a woman whose life and political commitments diverge significantly from my own is rooted in the ways I learned in early childhood to understand and negotiate the complex humanity of white women even before I learned to negotiate my own. I learned to like and value certain white women, despite their racism, long before I learned how to prioritize and value my own Black-girl magic.

It didn’t matter to me that Bernie had participated in the civil rights movement and, frankly, his close proximity to that degree of racial animus made his absence of racial analysis more than fifty years later even more egregious. Moreover, I found it especially terrible that when it came to racial politics, many young progressives, across racial lines, were far more willing to train their hatred on Hillary Clinton, a white woman, than on Bernie Sanders, a white man. White women have absolutely been accomplices to the American project of white supremacy, but their husbands, brothers, fathers, and sons have always been the masterminds. Let us never forget that.

Our nation’s story is one of men using violence—against Native folks, against Black folks, and against women—to build and fund a grand “experiment in democracy.” Very often, when we think about the way the United States likes to wield its “big stick” abroad, through military might, we forget that this project is inherently phallic. Picking on countries full of people of color with less money and resources is also a racist and imperial project. Lots of young activists of color that I know point to this. They point to the way police occupy Black communities like our military forces occupy places abroad. But militarism isn’t just racist. It’s also patriarchal, sexist, and masculinist.

Men aren’t born destroyers. Many men imbibe scripts of toxic masculinity almost from birth. And on their way to becoming men, they enact those toxic scripts in the lives of the women around them. It’s important to remember that this conclusion is not inevitable. But that’s the thing that will drive you mad when you lose someone tragically—wondering about the inevitability of the outcome.

I am always struck by the ways other people’s stories about my father tend to highlight his empathy and kindness for others. I wonder about a world in which you can be kind to everyone but the people who belong to you.

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.

Every opportunity I get, I stridently discourage the young men in my family from treating the military as their pathway out. Far too often, in these days of endless war and in wars past, it sends or has sent back to us men with war raging in their hearts and ringing in their ears. Those men, who cannot cut through the madness of the violence they’ve seen and in which they’ve been forced to engage, see Black girls and women as targets—as objects for violent sexual release, as punching bags, as emotional chopping blocks.

What does it mean to build a world in which Black women and Black girls are safe?

Black men often parrot this logic of the U.S. nation-state, engaging either in the politics of doing harm or the politics of doing nothing. And we—Black girls, Black women—are not saved.

I’m a Black woman who wants to live in a nation that believes it has a responsibility to Black women, as citizens and as people, to make the world safe for them.

So when the good brothers come to stay, looking so much like the enemy, when they come in talking sweetly and meaning it, being loving and meaning it, occupying your thoughts and taking up space, it feels just like that—like an occupation.

But patriarchy is nothing if not the structurally induced hatred of women. If every woman and girl learned to love herself fiercely, the patriarchy would still be intact; it would demand that she be killed for having the audacity to think she was somebody. Individual blame isn’t enough to solve the problem.

How are Black girls supposed to grow up to be Black women in love with themselves in a country built on the structural negation of Black women’s humanity and personhood? Too much of the conversation about patriarchy in Black communities pivots on Black women’s low self-esteem. Black women are often admonished to make better choices.

Young women encountering violent men today deserve those options, too. It’s not enough to teach women how not to attract violent men. We have to spend our time teaching young men how not to be violent men and partners. Surely Mann and Bob

The violence that men do demoralizes them, too.

every part of their lives, young men need access to conversations about what it means to be a man in ways that are not rooted in power, dominance, and violence. We owe it to ourselves to imagine what a post-patriarchal Black masculinity might look like. And, frankly, until we have that conversation, men will continue to kill Black women (cis and trans). And they will continue

Social scientists have spoken of a phenomenon that they call the “racial empathy gap,” in which people, regardless of race, believe that Black people experience less physical pain than white people experience. This racial empathy gap influences everything from harsher sentences for crime to differential prescribing practices for pain medication based on race.

The presence of both a racial empathy gap and a gender empathy gap doesn’t bode well for Black women, even though they haven’t been a direct focus of these pain-management studies. Because Black women are viewed as preternaturally strong, our pain often goes unnoticed both in the broader world and in our own communities. Black men frequently don’t acknowledge our vulnerability, don’t seem to think we need defending, and don’t feel a political responsibility to hold Black women (who aren’t their mothers or sisters or daughters) up and honor them. There seems to be no empathic register for understanding the sheer magnitude of the physical and emotional pain that systems of racism, capitalism, and patriarchy inflict on Black women every day. Black men grow up believing and moving through the world politically as though they have it the toughest, as though their pain matters most, as though Black women cannot possibly be feeling anything similar to the dehumanization and disrespect they have felt. That it might, in many cases, be worse for us seems to many men a preposterous supposition.

Our government does not just wage war abroad. It wages war in Black communities at home, controlling Black folks through surveillance and violence, demanding their submission and compliance. When submission and compliance is not freely offered, the state murders Black men, women, and children, citing the rule of law.

Black men, demoralized by wars both at home and abroad, took possession of the one thing that was left—the women, treating us as their own kind of trophies, pretty objects that bolstered their social capital while commanding or compelling no responsibility from them for, and to, us.

So many Black men escaped the racist wars of segregation and criminalization being waged in their own backyards by agreeing to fight America’s many racist wars of aggression abroad. That is a perverse model of both masculinity and freedom, and it is Black women and girls who have paid the highest price for it. But Black men have paid the price, too.

It is our own country that uses war as a tool to compel violent submission from those people in other places that we claim to care about. But unchecked violence does not just topple empires. It also devastates men.

Intersectionality is not only not objective, it sneers at claims to objectivity, arguing that none of us is purely objective. We all come with a perspective and an agenda. We all have investments.

Not only do most Black women not have $500 to spare in case of emergencies, but many don’t have networks of family or friends with that kind of money to spare either.

Caring for Black women’s actual lives means sitting with the acuteness of our fragility. We break, too.