Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower

by Brittney Cooper

If you say fuck the patriarchy but you don’t ride for other women, then it might be more true that the patriarchy has fucked you, seducing you with the belief that men care more about your well-being than women do.

But it’s dangerous to get them in a context where you have no analysis of how and why those are your desires.

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.

Look, I know the world is not Black and white. But for Black women, our relationships to white women and Black men are still the primary definers of our feminism. Being in solidarity with the Latina chick or the Asian American chick in the struggle feels not uncomplicated but sensible. It’s dealing with all the feelings around white girls and black boys that get us all caught up. And in the midst of that predicament Black girls are always the compass, pointing us to the North.

Donald Trump sure ain’t pretty, but he is rich and well-connected, and that means that lots of white men who will never be either of these things secretly identify with him.

That’s all I’m saying—that so many of the emotional impulses that shape our engagements with powerful public figures have to do with the shit we went through in middle school.

While there are a fair number of Black women across history who have believed in revolutionary violence, the posture of burning shit down feels decidedly masculinist to me. 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.

According to several years of reports by the Violence Policy Center, in this, the second decade of the twenty-first century, eight Black women per week, more than one per day, are murdered, usually with guns, and usually by a Black male they know. More than one thousand women of all races are murdered each year, in similar incidents, usually by men of their own race. It has been said before, but it is worth saying again: Toxic masculinity kills.

Of my father, my mother has said, “Your dad and I would work all week trying to build something. And then in one weekend, he could go out and destroy everything we had worked that week to build.”

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.

Each and every time men try to deflect conversations about intimate partner violence in Black communities by talking about how “men are victims of abuse, too,” I want to hit them myself. Patriarchy and toxic masculinity (together with alcoholism and militarism) turned my father into a violent man. But patriarchy also killed him.

Men aren’t born monsters.

I inherited a slice of beauty, a slice of his joy, before being a Black boy in a world that hated Black boys hardened his heart and limited his capacity for kindness.

It has never been fully clear to me whether I was left on my own out of resentment, passivity, or some twisted belief that it would be sexist to stand up for a feminist, especially a physically large one who seems infinitely capable of defending herself. I have learned to defend myself because I’ve never been able to rely on a man to do it for me. That doesn’t mean I’ve never wanted a man to do it for me.

Dogma isn’t just dangerous. It’s deadly. Our politics and beliefs should serve us; we should not serve them.

I’m advocating for people-centered politics that hold the safety and protection of the least of these—among them Black women and girls—as a value worth fighting for.

That is why it felt so egregious to hear radical, progressive Black men in the United States talk about all the reasons why those little girls were not worthy of U.S. intervention. A Black man shot my mother. Four different Black men shot my father. One of those Black men killed him. Two different Black men put their hands on my mother. One of those men was my father.

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?

War narrows the frame of masculine possibility and tethers it irreparably to violence.

In 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.

Patriarchy numbs men’s collective pain sensors, and it causes Black men to not see Black women as worthy of care and concern. To be clear, showing care and concern for the women you want to sleep with or the women who are related to you is not the same as having an overarching commitment to Black women’s political, social, and personal well-being as a justice project.

It’s classic for writers to spend time waxing eloquent about the possibilities and perils of life’s metaphoric journeys, and the roads we either do or don’t travel. But the dangers that attend Black people’s actual travels are not in any guise metaphoric.

The struggle by Black people to obtain the free and full exercise of their natural rights and continual forms of structural opposition to these rights have been a fundamental feature of what it means to be Black in America.

How can this Black woman’s notions of freedom, her audacity in trying to live free, seem so preposterous and exasperating and so utterly reasonable and exhilarating at the same time?