Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower

by Brittney Cooper

Moreover, if dating-site statistics are to be believed, Black women are the least likely of any demographic (Latina and Asian women, white, Black, Latino, and Asian men) to receive responses to their dating profiles. This cultural and intimate hatred of Black women is a feminist issue, one that all feminists, Black and non-Black alike, should care about.

In Kate Weigand’s book Red Feminism, she tells a fascinating story about Black women who participated in the Communist Party (CP) in the 1930s. In 1934, Black women organizers asked the Party leadership to outlaw interracial marriages among members. Many of the Black men had married or begun dating white women, but white men weren’t showing comparable interest in dating or marrying Black women. The Party’s leadership appointed Abner Berry, a Black party leader who was married to a white woman, to deal with the crisis. In typical Black-man fashion, he called Black women’s demands to outlaw interracial marriage “counterrevolutionary.” But he did institute organizing sessions on the triple oppressions of race, class, and gender that Black women faced. Apparently, the party members also tried to teach white male communists how to dance so they would be more comfortable approaching Black women at parties.

Those white women who have partnered with Black men must reckon with what that choice means, in light of histories where white women are cast as the stuff of which racial freedom dreams are made. White women and, specifically, white feminists have to reckon with their complicity and often full participation in this set of social narratives about Black sexuality that has been exceedingly dangerous to the well-being of Black lives.

The movement to defund Planned Parenthood, an organization that provides critical health care to many poor women of color, has nothing to do with the desire of white men on the right for Black and Latina women to have more babies. Rather, these men seek to control reproduction itself because they want to control the life possibilities of all women.

With his 1994 crime bill and his 1996 welfare reform package, Clinton, with the help of a Republican Congress, sounded a late-twentieth-century death knell for Black social progress, all rooted in an insidious narrative about the danger of Black sexuality—it turned Black men into rapists and Black women into baby machines. In this narrative, white women were everything Black women were not—socially responsible, well-behaved, marriageable. Therefore, they were the kind of women that Black men should desire but of which they should never ever understand themselves to be worthy.

The anti-Blackness at the heart of white fear is predicated on a misrecognition of the humanity of Black people. Whether that misrecognition is willful or unwitting matters less than its harmful outcomes. Impact matters more than intent.

There’s a problem when visibility becomes a zero-sum game, where making one group’s demands visible renders every other group’s political concerns obscure. Only white supremacy demands such exacting and fatalistic math.

Black children learn early that our fears are not, and cannot be, the first order of business in a family trying to survive.

According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, 60.9 percent of all Black families are headed by a single mother who is the breadwinner for the family. Another 20 percent of Black households rely on a married mother as the breadwinner. In every state in the United States, there are more single than married Black mothers. In every state in the United States, there are more married white mothers than single ones. In twenty-four states, the cost of childcare exceeds the cost of rent, and in many states the cost of childcare exceeds the 10 percent income-affordability threshold established by federal agencies.

Nearly thirty years after my mother was making these kinds of choices, working moms of color too often still have to choose between housing security and child care.

Often religious traditions, invested as they are in what many think of as the mythic and fantastical, are not given credit for being invested in anything real. But the Black Church is one of the historic structuring institutions for the social life of Black people, and it has always known that part of Black survival is about having the best tools to assess what is and is not a real threat. In other words, the Black Church doesn’t have the luxury of acting like white supremacy, sexism, and homophobia aren’t real. These structural forces take Black lives every day, sometimes through violent deaths, sometimes after a lifetime of privation.

And, frankly, modern-day Black churches also have to reckon with all the ways in which they have walked away from the clarity of King’s generation about the role the church should play in ending white supremacy.

White fear is not subject to any such cultural or religious scrutiny. In fact, white fears are routinely treated as fact rather than fantasy.

White fear is the cultural refuse of white supremacy. Strewn about and never properly disposed of, it becomes an environmental hazard for those of us who must live in the neighborhoods (metaphoric and otherwise) where white folks choose to dump all their shit.

Fear of Black people is one of the grandest delusions of white supremacy. It’s the reason why even police officers of color—Black, Asian, and Latino—are often quick on the trigger when they are policing Black men.

White fear of Black people is not limited to white Americans. It is rooted in the ideology of white supremacy, a virus that infects us all. That Black lives are at the mercy of those emboldened and sanctioned by the state to enact the worst of their fantasies upon us is enough to make us lose faith in the whole damn system.

What kind of world can (white) fear really create? What is the end game of white supremacy? And what would it mean to start from the fears of the marginalized and build a world that is safe for them?

It was years of extended access to the classroom that helped me overcome my fear of asking questions. If we cannot or will not ask questions, then we are far, far from the path to freedom.

Fear and feelings, especially about racism, have to be managed constantly. White supremacy does not fall through singular acts of white resistance and magnanimity.

What they mean by “liberal bias” is that they don’t want a Black woman standing in a classroom, teaching college students that racism is real, sexism is a problem, homophobia is repugnant, and capitalism and the elitism it begets are worthy of our deepest skepticism. This is not knowledge, they say. It’s my “racial agenda” governing how I run my classroom.

This is, in fact, the conundrum of being a Black woman in the academy; that we are simultaneously hypervisible and invisible.

Refusing to be nice to an officer, especially when he pulls you over on a ludicrous charge is not, in fact, against the law. Incivility is not illegal. The police know that, which is why they are jerks to Black citizens on the regular.

When Beyoncé used her own body to sink that police cruiser, she reminded us of all the ways Black women are willing to put their lives on the line to combat state violence. The sacrifices that Black women and girls make create more opportunities and possibilities for our communities. Getting into formation with other like-minded folks is one way we can help our fears not to win. In those formations, we can find joy, support, and strategies to help us overcome. When Black girls get in formation, the nation should follow.

But staying in the books and then later focusing on my career wasn’t in the least bit hard when literally no one was trying to date me.

I hadn’t wanted either of them and had cared little about their romantic assessments of me. Still, I winced upon learning that being smart had made me ugly to them. They were willing to say it, but I wondered what other romantic suitors had come to similar conclusions. Just how undesirable was I?

I wish I were mature enough, feminist enough, not to think of marriage or the securing of lifelong partnership as a win, or of the absence of these things as a loss, but I do. Despite myself.

Even though you look in the mirror and see someone attractive staring back at you, the fact that no one else ever seems to notice fucks with your head.

It had become exceedingly clear that my feminist analysis wasn’t gonna keep me warm at night or get me laid at all.

When I pointed out the contradiction of hating women who were independent and hating women who were “gold diggers” (and therefore by definition, too dependent), all I got was a Kanye shrug.

Solidarity and allyship matter as much in the bedroom as they matter in the revolution.

Lots of men have feminist rhetoric down, but many of them haven’t done the emotional work of showing up for a woman with dreams and visions of her own.

Given the hard realities that Black folks face in finding their way to one another, Black love is nothing if it is not simultaneously a conduit to Black joy.

Black church folks love to talk about how “blessed and highly favored they are.” It is the kind of explanation that comes to stand in, far too often, for structural inequality.

For those of us who watched our mamas work themselves damn near to death to raise up powerful daughters like us, attributing it to sheer strength of will and hard work is an American fable that doesn’t suit us. Liberal white folks tell themselves these kinds of stories—that they made it because of their own ingenuity and will. But most Black girls have enough humility to see ourselves as walking miracles who, as Audre Lorde famously said, “were never meant to survive.”

Exceptionalism or struggle should not be the only pathways available to Black people.

Black children know when they are being left behind, devalued, and overlooked.

Any educated sister who sends a considerable chunk of her paycheck home to the folks who haven’t yet made it out will tell you that we leave and return to the places that made us, many times over the course of a lifetime.

President Obama wanted us to believe that he knew a Cousin Pookie or two himself. The ability to claim proximity to such folks is just one way that elite and middle-class Blacks index their continued insider status in working-class Black communities. It’s highly problematic, mostly because it’s performative, and not just on Obama’s part. In other words, this kind of fronting doesn’t help anybody.

Relying on the favor of God to open doors for us is not a plan for systemic change or justice at any broad level.

Instead, neoliberalism turns our attention to individual self-regulation, and notions of personal empowerment, as the pathway to having anything in life. And yet, again, what we teach and preach in churches allows “God” language to do the dirty work of the system, namely, pretending to empower us while ultimately blaming our lack of social options on some flaw in our character or misstep in our conduct.

Celebrating the resilience of poor folks is a perverse way of acknowledging the unreasonable demands placed upon people who already are struggling to make it. In fact, in this moment, when a broad-scale conservative backlash threatens to absolutely gut the social safety net, “resilience” is a dangerous word. The logic of relying on people’s resilience goes something like, “Let’s see just how much we can take away from you before you break.” That shit is evil.

Those frameworks gave me what I needed to go back and see that my classmates and I had been victims of a system that pitted us against each other as a justification for its own logic of white dominance and Black exceptionalism.

Structural violence is rooted in the need to maintain hierarchies, but far too often its most gut-wrenching acts are enacted horizontally, by our peers, not by those positioned above us. Real radicalism implores us to tell the whole ugly truth, even when it’s inconvenient. To own the hurt and the pain. To own our shit, too. To think about it systemically and collectively, but never to diminish the import of the trauma.

The clarity that comes from rage should also tell us what kind of world we want to see, not just what kind of things we want to get rid of.

Maintaining the capacity for joy is critical to the struggle for justice. Things are still as fucked up at the end of this book as they were at the beginning. But we can’t let the messed-up state of the world steal our joy.

You got this. We got this.