40 pages • 1 hour read
Brittney CooperEloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Anger as a Source of Power for Black Women
Dr. Brittney Cooper starts with an assumption—that being angry, Black, and female is bad and not classy—and turns it on its head. This provocative reading of anger helps her deconstruct the Angry Black Woman trope (a recognizable and culturally significant concept or figure) and the Sassy Black Woman trope. She helps readers see that these tropes aren’t natural. They have a history that started when slaver owners and white supremacists sought to discipline Black women.
Cooper draws from multiple contexts to illuminate what rage looks like in Black women’s lives. She relies on Lorde’s “The Uses of Anger: Women Respond to Racism” as a frame for anger as a superpower. She reads Michelle Obama to examine the limits of respectable rage. She reads Beyoncé lyrics and moves to show creative, productive rage’s potential. She also includes more difficult stories such as that of Sandra Bland to show the dangers of rage in a society that relies on institutions like the criminal justice system to discipline Black women. These various figures bear out just how strategic Black women have to be in using their rage.
Cooper also develops a taxonomy for describing rage. There is eloquent rage—“clear and expressive” (6) rage that allows Cooper and others to identify injustice and demand accountability. There is “orchestrated fury”—managed rage that allows respectable Black people to express their fury and either hold on to their limited privilege or survive. There is quiet and disruptive rage such as Cooper’s mother interrupting a preacher. There is also loud and disruptive rage in the lyrics of crunk music. By offering a vocabulary to distinguish one form of rage from another, Cooper gives readers the tools they need to use rage strategically.
An understanding of intersectionality is central to Cooper’s concept of rage as power. Cooper includes examples of Black women dealing with specific challenges that come out from their overlapping forms of oppression and social identities. In Chapter 8, “White-Girl Tears,” for example, Cooper explains why appeals to feminism didn’t move her to participate in the Women’s March of 2016 because she was attentive to the privilege of white women. Cooper shows herself acting on and changing her own behavior by understanding rage as something that has a political meaning and thus deserves careful handling.
The Importance of Relationships and Vulnerability
Cooper presents Black feminism as a project in which the work frequently gets done in relationship with others, especially friends, lovers, and co-conspirators (engaged allies). In the very first essay of the book, “The Problem with Sass,” Cooper explains, “Black girl callouts, or ‘homegirl interventions’ as I call them in this book, have come from my grandmama, my mama, and my girls. And they have saved my life” (5). Cooper uses anecdotes about homegirl interventions to show the evolution of her feminism. She also uses the persona of the homegirl delivering an intervention to gain credibility and authority as she deals with sometimes touchy issues in Black communities.
Homegirl interventions are so fundamental to Cooper’s feminism that she credits one as being the start of her embrace of Black feminism. In Chapter 2, “Capital B, Capital F,” Cooper explains that she initially dismissed feminism as a project of white women. She identified as a womanist, a term coined by writer Alice Walker to describe a feminism rooted in Black women’s experiences and one that sees other Black women, Black men, and Black families as sources of strength rather than competition or burdens that impede women’s liberation. Cooper writes that her friend Tracey intervened by gently telling Cooper she didn’t know what she was talking about and followed up by giving Cooper books to read and invitations to talks by feminist scholars on campus. Interpersonal interactions like these occur throughout the book, and Cooper presents them as complements to her scholarly training.
Cooper builds on the importance of homegirl interventions in Black feminism to situate herself as a straightforward critic of structures, aspects of culture, and relationships that perpetuate inequality. In the first chapter of the book, Cooper states that “America needs a homegirl intervention in the worst way. So in this book, I am doing what Black women do best. I’m calling America out on her bullshit about racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, and a bunch of other stuff” (5). That statement inscribes Cooper as a homegirl, who, much like her friend Tracey, is willing to have uncomfortable conversations with her readers out of love and friendship. A relationship with a homegirl is different from one with a teacher or a professor in that it is a more equal one built on shared experiences and loyalty.
In the context of reader and writer as homegirls, Cooper is able to talk in provocative ways that are typical of interactions between friends. For example, she rewrites the biblical story of Ruth, Naomi, and Boaz to be one that shows true faith and sex are not exclusive of each other. She also explores the difficult subjects of misogynoir and violence Black men have perpetuated against Black women and children, noting that “when I think of the harms I’ve dealt with and who has caused the most pain, done the most emotional and physical violence, it is always always always Black men” (36). That is a risky admission to make in the context of culturally pervasive denigrating representations of Black men as inherently violent. By carefully positioning herself as a homegirl-critic, Cooper is able to create space to have these tough conversations.
The Personal Is Political: Storytelling as Feminist Practice
“The personal is political” is a tenet of feminism that gained currency during the 1970s. Feminist Carol Hanisch uses this concept in her 1969 essay “The Personal Is Political,” in which she argues that consciousness-raising activities where women explore the impact of sexism on their lives are political, despite some activists’ worry that these meetings are a distraction from political work.
When feminists of that period made this statement, they meant issues long seen as private—sex and domestic life, for example—were appropriate objects of public feminist analysis, lay talk, and action because they emerge from the same institutions and systems in society as what people traditionally think of as politics. Exploring and attacking how patriarchy plays out in an individual life or family can illuminate the nature of these systems. In practice, this principle means that feminist scholars readily incorporate autobiographical detail as evidence and use storytelling to generate critical frameworks.
Personal experience is central to Cooper’s Black feminism. Cooper “learned [her] feminism from Black women, and [her] feminist theory and praxis is situated in the particular ways Black women have understood, thought about, and written about the problems of racism” (34). Praxis is the enactment or realization of theory. Cooper is a thoroughly trained and influential feminist scholar who nevertheless has problems and challenges like every other Black woman; she uses stories to show how a Black feminist standpoint can help make sense of her life and the lives of other Black women.
She uses numerous stories from personal experience to explore the potential and roots of her feminism. In Chapter 3, “Strong Female Leads,” Cooper shares her evolving and sometimes problematic relationship with white female identity as an in to analyzing just what happened during and after Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. In Chapter 4, “The Smartest Man I Never Knew,” Cooper delves extensively into some of her deepest trauma—violence in her home and her father’s absence—and eventually ends up at a critique of the role of toxic masculinity in the wars that the United States has undertaken abroad.
Cooper also shares stories about dating struggles, going long periods without sex, living through bullying by peers, and responding to embarrassing and bracing talks with aunties and exasperated friends. Cooper lets the reader see the seams where she has incorporated theory and practice in her feminism. By embracing imperfection and contradiction, Cooper makes Black feminism more accessible for her readers.
