Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower

Crunk may be a portmanteau (blending of two words) word from “crazy” and “drunk.” Crunk music is a raucous, loud, bass-heavy form of Southern Hip Hop that embraces defiance and disruption as central to Black self-representation. Bone Crusher, Lil Jon, and David Banner are important crunk musicians. Cooper identifies herself as a crunk feminist because Hip Hop fundamentally shapes her perspective on identity, race, sex, gender, and Black respectability. “Never Scared,” the title of one of her essays, is an homage to the Bone Crusher crunk anthem by that name.

Eloquent rage is reality-based, expressive anger that Black women strategically deploy to become more visible, call out inequality, and reveal the sources of their trauma. Cooper presents her cultural analysis as eloquent rage. Eloquent rage counters the stereotype of the Angry Black Woman, which attempts to represent anger as unreasonable even when Black women have every right to be angry.

A homegirl intervention is a loving but blunt calling out of behavior that is self-defeating or even dangerous. While homegirl interventions occur in the book in the form of Cooper’s friends taking her to task for unhealthy or ignorant behavior, Cooper also frames her own loving, sharp critiques of Black respectability, American imperialism, and misogynoir as homegirl interventions. This framing enhances Cooper’s credibility.

Coined by Black feminist Moya Bailey, “misogynoir” refers to anti-Black racism and misogyny directed against Black women, especially in popular culture and media. Misogynoir emerges from intersecting oppressions. Cooper identifies misogynoir in hostile institutions such the US political system but also on social media and in Black churches, where it may be deployed to force Black women to accept Black respectability. Cooper also regards misogynoir as a major impediment to good alliances and loving relationships between Black men and women.

Coined by Black legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, “intersectionality” refers to the way that Black women’s identities emerge at the intersection of multiple forms of oppression and social demands. For example, a Black woman’s experience of racism isn’t the same as a Black man’s experience of racism because gender inequality isn’t just an extra helping of adversity she must face. Sexism fundamentally changes how she lives and experiences racial identity. Cooper’s analysis of popular culture such as crunk music and icons such as Michelle Obama is intersectional feminist analysis in that it attends to just how these simultaneous and overlapping identities shape Black women’s self-representations and actions.

Drawn from Cooper’s reading of Audre Lorde, “orchestrated fury” is an intentional, sometimes subtle expression of anger by respectable Black people. Cooper identifies Michelle Obama’s understated hairstyle on the day Donald Trump was inaugurated as orchestrated fury that communicated her disdain.

Purity culture is a set of beliefs and representation of sex and sexual pleasure as pure in the context of marriage between a man and a woman who are cisgender and heterosexual. Sex outside of marriage and these identities is considered sinful and defiling. Popular purity culture was prevalent in Cooper’s church as she came of age during the 1990s. Cooper contends that purity culture is an impediment to Black women’s ability to engage in consensual touch, which can be holy and healing.

Toxic masculinity is a set of behaviors that include aggression and violence against women; anti-gay bias and a rejection of emotion and vulnerability as inherently emasculating; and dominance of others as the preferred way of being in relationship. Cooper argues that the toxic masculinity of Black men is on a continuum with aggressive, violent actions of the United States against communities of color and other countries abroad.