Brittney Cooper

“Treating Black feminism as primarily an anti-racist intervention within feminism continues to render it as a disruptive and temporary event, to be addressed, responded to, and moved on from, back to the regularly scheduled course of things.”

“I am often confronted by Black women with the question about why should we be feminists when white women are so terrible, when they’re untrustworthy, when they politically undermine all of our gains? And I understand that my short answer to Black women is always well because white women, as we can clearly see from their voting behavior, didn’t invent feminism, right? They are not the source and the origin of that particular movement for liberation, which is why they cannot be the arbiter of our commitment to it.”

“When we wonder why white women keep on voting for Republicans, they are doing that because they understand that their caretaking role in their community is to pass down a world in which white men get to be on top.”

“Sass becomes a way to sanitize black women's anger and then make it palatable to the white masses and it becomes a thing to laugh at and say, "Oh, they're just over-the-top and emotional and irrational." Where as when we begin to talk about righteous rage, then we get to questions about justice. "Well, why are you so angry?" Very often black women get that whole, "Why you so mad?"”

“Very often many of us have been asked to try to be respectable so that we don't reinforce the "angry black woman stereotype" and I want to say in this book: "Let's say that we're mad as hell. Let's own the truth of that and then let's see it as a thing that actually strengthens us and if we embrace it can become a superpower."”

“Embodied discourse refers to a form of Black female textual activism wherein race women assertively demand the inclusion of their bodies and, in particular, working-class bodies and Black female bodies by placing them in the texts they write and speak.”

“Black women's leadership memoirs have been a critical site for the articulation of their intellectual and political goals. Less concerned with the interiority of their subjects, this genre afforded Black women, particularly those who emerged during the 1890s, the opportunity to theorize about race and gender politics in ways that their lack of access to producing more formal academic texts did not.”

“Anti respectable in its rejection of traditional gender roles, Blackhood as a form of revolutionary, queer, Black racial sociality, had the potential—and indeed even the intrinsic demand—to formulate new ideas about the performance of Black gender identities.”

“But part of what I’ve been trying to say is that rage can help us build things, too. The clarity that comes from rage should also tell us what kind of world we want to see, not just what kind of things we want to get rid of.”

“The lie we are told is that white rage and white fear are honest emotions that preserve the integrity of American democracy. More often than not, we keep learning that white rage and white fear are dishonest impulses that lead us toward fascism. White rage and white fear are reactions to perceptions among white people that their power might be slipping away.”

“The truth is that Angry Black Women are looked upon as entities to be contained, as inconvenient citizens who keep on talking about their rights while refusing to do their duty and smile at everyone.”

“White privilege works by making the advantages white people have invisible while making the supposedly 'poor' choices of people of color hypervisible.”

“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.”

“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.”

“If you say fuck the patriarchy but you don’t ride for other women, 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. It isn’t true.”

“Real radicalism implores us to tell the whole ugly truth, even when it is inconvenient. To own the hurt and the pain. To own our shit, too. To think about it systemically and collectively, but never to diminish the import of the trauma”

“We live in a nation that does everything to induce our rage while simultaneously doing everything to deny that we have a right to feel it. American democracy is as much a project of suppressing Black rage as it is of legitimizing and elevating white rage. American democracy uses calls for civility, equality, liberty and justice as smoke screens to obscure all the ways in which Black folks are treated uncivilly, unequally, illiberally, and unjustly as a matter of course.”

“Sexism, like every other “ism,” is a willful refusal to not see what is right in front of you.”

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