Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower

by Brittney Cooper

Today the number has tripled for Black men, but more than quadrupled for Black women. Black women who have never married outnumber Black men who h...

Most women across races list stable employment as a primary factor in whom they choose as a mate. It’s not even about a brother needing to be rich. But can he at least have a job and the ability to pay his own bills? When the Pew Research Center accounted for employment status using census data, they found that there are “51 employed Black men for every 100 young Black women.” Decades earlier, the numbers were far more equal: There were nearly 90 employed Black men for every 100 young Black women. Here’s the rub: “Among never-married white, Hispanic, and Asian American young adults, the ratio of employed men to women is roughly equal—100 men for every 100 women.” To add insult to this clear injury, Black folks attach far more importance to marriage than white folks do, a...

And we haven’t even begun to talk about what singleness means for Black women economically. In 2010, the Insight Center for Community Economic Development found that single Black women in the prime working ages of thirty-six to f...

Mike laps at my big-girl body and grabs my booty like he’s been waiting all his life to find it. That counts for something, too.

the government and as gold-digging baby mamas by Black men. 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.

Seeing the desire for partnership as gay is teenage-boy logic and it should have no place in the emotional lives of grown men.

Queer Black folks have survived precisely because they have refused to let traditional ideas about what love and relationships should look like dictate what is possible for them.

Partnership, and all of the practices that are necessary to achieve it, disrupt the social hierarchies that currently structure Black intimacy. Partnership demands that we meet each other on equal footing. Partnership stops placing the entire onus on Black men to profess, protect, and provide. That’s too much weight to carry. We all need someone to speak up for us, to look out for us, and to share resources to help us make it. We bring all our strengths and our weaknesses to the table. We agree that no matter what we ride for each other. We decide that we are coconspirators in a project of Black love. We agree to do the work we need to do to be together. We center a justice practice as a love language. We commit to being intimately and relationally just with one another.

That wasn’t feminist. 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.

But the stress showed up, too, in the form of my mother’s perpetually upset stomach, her painful and chronic ingrown toenails that there was no money to fix, and the kind of strictness that occurs when you don’t have time for your child to do anything but toe the line.

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

But President Obama’s invocation of “Cousin Pookie,” a stereotype signaling disengaged and disaffected young Black men, was an intentional bid for street cred through an appeal to a cultural narrative accessible primarily to Black folks.

You can’t judge the effectiveness of a system by the success of its exceptional actors, from the president on down.

That’s a truth to sit with, too: The harm is no less harmful simply because we know what caused it.

“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” The harder work is helping people find better tools to work with.