Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower

by Brittney Cooper

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.