Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower

by Brittney Cooper

So just know that you don’t have to have everything figured out to read and enjoy this book.

“We can neither heal nor fix that which we will not confront.”

“empowerment” is a tricky word. It’s also a decidedly neoliberal word that places the responsibility for combating systems on individuals.

Individual solutions to collective problems cannot work, no matter how personally empowering they may feel.

How do we balance the impulse to think that having degrees equips us to speak for people in their absence with the fact that the degrees in most cases actually do mean we have something of value to contribute that we might not otherwise have had?

It always annoys me to find out that the woke, radical, pro-Black, feminist position is uncritical valorization of the hood. Let me say this: If the people on the block had the answers, the revolution would have long since come. Disproportionate numbers of our people are locked in the structural hopelessness that attends concentrated poverty.

You can’t judge the effectiveness of a system by the success of its exceptional actors,

And more than that, I have a great sense of responsibility. I’m not planning to go back home to live, because where I’m from is no place for a radical feminist Black girl who likes to challenge preachers in her spare time. But I am responsible in big and small ways for making that place and places like it better, more equitable and more just.