Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower

by Brittney Cooper

sass is simply a more palatable form of rage.

Black women turn to sass when rage is too risky—because we have jobs to keep, families to feed, and bills to pay.

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. Those who feel “empowered” talk about their personal power to change their individual condition. Those with actual power make decisions that are of social and material consequence to themselves and others.

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.

However, the subtlety in her refusal of pomp and circumstance belied a deep disdain for the way in which the American people had rejected her work,

We can’t kill. But we can slay.

Rage is a kind of refusal. To be made a fool of, to be silenced, to be shamed, or to stand for anybody’s bullshit.

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.

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.

“The white man made the Black woman the symbol of slavery and the white woman the symbol of freedom. Every time I embrace a Black woman I’m embracing slavery, and when I put my arms around a white woman, well, I’m hugging freedom.… I will not be free until the day I can have a white woman in my bed and a white man minds his own business. Until that day comes, my entire existence is tainted, poisoned, and I will still be a slave—and so will the white woman.”

but there’s a problem when your notion of recognition is predicated on someone else’s exclusion. 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.

The image of children stomping up the stairs and slamming doors after getting mad at their parents was some shit reserved for white families on TV.

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

At age seven, my latchkey status became official. I was just going to have to “be a big girl,” get over my fear of monsters in the closet and boogie men under the bed, and do my mama a solid.

I don’t know if latchkey adulthood is a thing, but since I have lived alone for the entirety of my adult life, I do often still turn on all the lights when I arrive home and walk into all the rooms to make sure there are no intruders. Part of what being a latchkey kid taught me is that overcoming fear is first and foremost about having the courage to look under the bed.

In other words, white fears rest on the presumption that they are rooted in fact; everyone who is nonwhite is treated as though their fears are the stuff of fantasy.

At some point, brothers gotta own their shit here. They have to own their fear. They have to own that they have always gauged their nearness to patriarchal dominance by measuring both how far beneath white men they fall and how far above Black women they rise.