Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower

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.