Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower

by Brittney Cooper

When it comes to Black women, sometimes Americans don’t recognize that sass is simply a more palatable form of rage.

Black women at whom everyone loves to laugh—women like Tyler Perry’s Madea, Mammy in Gone with the Wind, or Nell from that old eighties sitcom Gimme a Break! These kinds of Black women put white folks at ease.

Black women turn to sass when rage is too risky—

Black women have the right to be mad as hell.

“I think you’ll really like this essay on multiple jeopardies by Deborah King.”

give the side eye to any Black woman who doesn’t have other Black women friends, to any woman who is prone to talk about how she relates better to men than to women, to anyone who goes on and on about how she “doesn’t trust females.”

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.

We wonder why young men hate women and, sometimes, the sad truth is that their mamas and aunts and sisters act as an arm of the patriarchy by parroting the refrain that “girls simply can’t be trusted.”

And feminist principles about how the patriarchy has made us beholden to beauty culture do nothing to assuage the desire we all have to be seen and affirmed.

“Shit. I’ll fuck you.”

Deep and abiding love can be sisterly and it can be erotic, and sometimes it can be and needs to be all these things at the same damn time.

I am saying that far too many women leave behind the freedom feminism offers because they want to stay on patriarchy’s dick,

which is to say they want to secure their straightness and their options for getting chosen.

“gay shit”

One of feminism’s biggest failures is its failure to insist that feminism is, first and foremost, about truly, deeply, and unapologetically loving women.

I love being a woman and being a friend to other women should be feminism’s tagline. If

Loving Black girls is complicated, but loving oneself in a world where there is always someone ready to do you harm is even harder.

I’m a Black Feminist, capital

B, capital F.

Maria Stewart,

Black lady abolitionist, who was schooling audiences of men and women, Black and white, in Boston in the 1830s.

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.

This is why I worry about a Black feminist politic that spends all its time tearing down Black girls who aren’t deemed radical enough

Black girls learn about the inherently tough conditions we face, about how much effort it will take to prepare us to face a waiting world, about

where our safe havens are and always will be—in community with women. Who you let put their fingers in your head is sacred.

Students said I needed to be more feminine. I should wear stud earrings rather than my signature hoops. To this day, I only occasionally deviate from hoops.

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. I really wish people would just go to therapy.

White women have absolutely been accomplices to the American project of white supremacy, but their husbands, brothers, fathers, and sons have always been

the masterminds. Let us never forget that.

White women taught me about racism; Black institutions, like Howard and the Black Church, gave me a primer on sexism.

I love, embrace, and keep company with Black men who have yet to fully or even remotely reckon with their sexism, because those Black men are my father figures, brothers, cousins, friends, and lovers.

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.

women of all races are murdered each year, in similar incidents, usually by men of their own race.

“men are victims of abuse, too,” I want to hit them myself.

But the humiliation of learning that you have taken so much that no one in your home wants anything you have to give is surely an unbearable feeling.

And they will continue to kill each other.

gender empathy gap.

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.

Miriam Carey

Tanisha Anderson

Walter Scott

Korryn

Philando Castile,

Michael Brown and left his dead body lying in the street for four and a half hours.

“For a protest to be effective, you have to stop traffic.”

Kimberlé Crenshaw

Korryn Gaines

clarity can be crazy-making.

when more than 70 percent of Black households are female-led. Black women have