Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower

by Brittney Cooper

The system’s response to seeing us bend is to break us entirely.

Reminiscent of earlier periods of racial terror for African Americans, traffic stops have again become the pretext for the reckless taking of Black life by police.

Charlene Carruthers, national director of the Black Youth Project 100, has said “When people disrupt highways and streets, it is about disrupting business as usual. It’s also about giving a visual that folks are willing to put their bodies on the line to create the kind of world we want to live in.”

What does it look like for Black women to move freely through space when we are always confronting the precariousness of life at the intersections of race and gender, of class and mental health, of love and dreams?

Black women did not agree to or apply for the job of baggage handlers for the nation. With histories as forced laborers and forced breeders, so much of our employment history in this country has simply not been up to us. Our lives are strewn about with structurally deposited baggage. If we assume the radical position that it isn’t ours to carry, we are called lazy. Degenerate. Angry. Irresponsible. The nation waves its fingers at us in accusation, demanding that we take the weight.

These books and magazines acted as therapy for my working-class single mom who couldn’t afford to sit on someone’s sofa once a week to discuss her problems. She had a daughter to feed and bills to pay.

I believe wholeheartedly in the internal spiritual work that Black women must do to save our own lives. But I also wonder whether our spiritual work is a match for the structural systems that would crush us alive. Audre Lorde famously said, “If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.” But what do we do with this push for self-definition and self-recognition in a system that would crush us anyway?

There is no shame in having an abortion. I consider the right to choose the conditions under which one becomes a parent to be one of the most important social values. But I believe that decades of discourse about poor Black women and unwed Black mothers being “welfare queens” who unfairly take more from the system than they put in has shamed many Black women into not bearing children that they otherwise might consider having. The idea that only middle-class, straight, married women deserve to start families is both racist and patriarchal.

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. The powerlessness and capriciousness of being repeatedly jammed up at the personal and political crossroads of one’s intersections while a watching world pretends not to see you there, needing help, is how it feels to be a Black woman on an ordinary day.

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.

For my Gram, access to birth control mattered greatly. She told me that she would have opted for only two children rather than the six she’d had (and raised and loved) if birth control had been widely available to Black women in the 1950s and 1960s in rural Louisiana. “But we couldn’t get the stuff,” she told me. In her own way, I think my grandmama let me know that the women’s movement was a win for Black women, too, because in the twenty-first century, it meant her granddaughter could have a wonderful sex life without bearing children, until she chose to.

For clarification, even though I was Southern and Baptist, my church and most Black churches in the South were not in fact part of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). Those were the white Baptists—the ones who were pro-slavery and pro-segregation. In fact, the SBC did not issue a formal apology for slavery until 1995.

The regulation of sexuality by white Christians in the United States has always been about the propagation of a socially acceptable and pristine nuclear family worthy of having the American dream, a family that was heterosexual, middle class, and white.

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

What I learned from watching white kids who were set up to succeed while Black kids were set up to fail, even in matters of intimacy, was that sexual self-regulation was critical to my success. It took me being a grown woman to recognize all the ways that systems of white supremacy regulate our intimate lives, too.

To justify enslaving, raping, and breeding Black women and girls, white Americans created a mythos around Black women’s sexuality. They cast us as sexually insatiable, unrapeable, licentious, and dirty. Today, Black women still experience much handwringing around owning our sexuality.

We do a kind of violence to ourselves when we shut down our sexuality.

The thing we would all do well to remember is that conservative Christian theology was used to enslave Black people. We can use our theology to oppress people or to liberate them. That’s our choice.

To be Black in the United States is to be taught our flesh is dirty and evil.

A liberatory theology for women cannot set us at war with the desires for touch, companionship, and connection that well up like deep springs in our spirits.

The primarily white male theologians who created the systematic theology of evangelical Christianity were trying to make sense of a theology that fit their own lives and their own worldview. This is why so many white Christians can read the Bible and still vote Republican. Because for them, nothing about the Bible challenges the fundamental principles of white supremacy or male domination.

What Black feminism and my grandmother have taught me is that Black women are experts on their own lives and their own well-being. Grandmama taught me that all the sacrifices I was making for middle-class aspirations weren’t entirely worth it. That if I made it but I was lonely and miserable, then that was a failure, not a win.

This is about not standing by idly or, even worse, participating as white evangelicals and their enthusiastic Black counterparts hand to us a theology that does the dirty work of racism, patriarchy, and homophobia.

Respectability politics, the belief that Black people can overcome many of the everyday, acute impacts of racism by dressing properly and having education and social comportment is, first and foremost, performed as a kind of sartorial prerogative.

Black women’s hairstyles are their own cultural vocabulary, which change depending on mood, life circumstance, and who exactly will be seeing us on any given day.

Respectability politics are at their core a rage-management project. Learning to manage one’s rage by daily tamping down that rage is a response to routine assaults on one’s dignity in a world where rage might get you killed or cause you to lose your job.

Taken to its extreme form, respectability politics will net you Black people who don’t love Black people.

Anna Julia Cooper wrote about needing to use the bathroom at a train station. When she approached the door, each was marked with a sign, one reading “for ladies,” and the other “for colored.” Which sign should she, a consummate colored lady, choose?

One of the most unique things about Black women’s experiences in this country is that we are the only group of people whose bodies have ever been legally mandated as the place that reproduced noncitizens. Indigenous women were never striving for their children to have American citizenship, but rather sovereignty on their own terms. And Latina immigrant women who are unfairly maligned for giving birth to children on American shores are hated precisely because they, too, can pass on the rights of citizenship to their children, even if they have been denied access to it themselves.

African American respectability might bring us to the highest office in the land, but it could not ensure any level of long-term respect for Black humanity, Black womanhood, Black manhood, or Black childhood.

Blaming Black mothers for having normal boundary-testing teenagers didn’t sit well with my mother, a single mom herself. Her act of solidarity with the other single mothers in the room mattered all the more because my mother was raising a veritable, rule-following, Bible-toting Goody Two-Shoes. But she refused the carrot of thinking herself better than other folks because her own child didn’t have the behavior problems or classroom demeanor of some of the other children.

The logic of otherwise disparately placed men—in public policy, in Hip Hop, and in the church—converges on the truth that if Black women would just be better mothers, the state wouldn’t be so taxed, our communities would not be in such a shambles, and brothers wouldn’t be so short in the pockets. That’s a huge minefield of structurally induced hatred to navigate.

To be clear, the term “school resource officer” is a just a fancy name for police officers in schools, doing the kinds of jobs that used to be reserved for principals and school counselors.

Rage and respectability can’t exist in the same space. But cussing and praying absolutely can. These forms of expression, themselves tethered to those spaces between disrespect and respectability, hold Black women together when the violence we encounter would otherwise rip us apart.

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. The consequence of all these antirespectable choices range from violence to death.

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.

Rage is costly. And its costs are directly proportional to the amount of power any given woman or girl has when she chooses to wield it.

Individualized acts of eloquent rage have limited reach. But the collective, orchestrated fury of Black women can move the whole world. This is what the Black Lives Matter movement has reminded us. There is something clarifying about Black women’s rage, something essential about the way it drills down to the core truth. The truth is that Black women’s anger is not the problem.

American democracy is as much a project of suppressing Black rage as it is of legitimizing and elevating white rage. American democracy uses calls for civility, equality, liberty, and justice as smoke screens to obscure all the ways in which Black folks are treated uncivilly, unequally, illiberally, and unjustly as a matter of course.

White rage and white fear are reactions to perceptions among white people that their power might be slipping away. Black rage and Black fear are fundamentally more honest, because they are reactions to the violence of white supremacy.

The problem with the 2016 presidential election is simple: White feminists did not come get their people. Who are the people of white feminists? Other white women.

As I made clear earlier, I have always known of white women’s great capacity to be treacherous. But I did not know that they suffered a far more acute version of a problem that white feminists have for decades diagnosed Black women with having: For white women, their race comes before their gender.

White girls usually cry white-lady tears after they have done something hella racist and then been called out by the offended party for doing so. To shift blame and claim victimhood, they start to cry. The world falls apart as people rush to their defense. All knowledge of the fact that they are the ones who caused the problem escapes the notice of everyone except the person or people they disrespected. It’s a phenomenon that Black folks know well.

Watching white women take it to the streets to protest an election outcome that was a result of white women’s powerful voting bloc felt like an exercise in white-lady tears if I ever saw one, and I knew I couldn’t be trusted to act right amidst a sea of pink pussy hats and white women struggling to understand what intersectionality means.

White-lady tears might seem not to be a big deal, but they are actually quite dangerous. When white women signal through their tears that they feel unsafe, misunderstood, or attacked, the whole world rises in their defense. The mythic nature of white female vulnerability compels protective impulses to arise in all men, regardless of race.

Let me also note that phrases like “this is how we do” and “shake it off” are themselves Black cultural sayings, indigenous to the Hip Hop generation.

The ability to take on and peel off the parts of Black culture that you like at will is exactly what is meant by the term “white privilege.” And while culture sharing is fine, white people have proven that they have a problem sharing. White people don’t share. They take over. They colonize. They claim shit as their own and then accuse others of being territorial and retrograde for pointing out these aggressive borrowing practices that shape white culture. It’s wrong to use Black aesthetics, Black cultural vernaculars, and Black dance in your videos without any kind of citation or homage.

We all have a political and ethical duty to reject the monsters white supremacy created, but we can’t forget that white patriarchy itself is the biggest bang of them all.

I believe wholeheartedly in the right of all consenting adults to choose the kinds of partnerships that are best for them, but I’m tired of the lie that relationships and love are not political. The struggle of queer folks to build families in the ways they desire demonstrate that love is political. I’m tired of the lie that desire is a pure social category, unhampered by the politics of race and gender.