#brittney cooper

[blackqueernotables]

Brittney Cooper: professor, author, activist, and cultural critic.

[readtilyoudie]

“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.” ― Brittney Cooper, Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower

[blackchildrensbooksandauthors]

📢New Picture Book Alert

📖Stand Up!: 10 Mighty Women Who Made a Change

From the New York Times bestselling author of “Eloquent Rage” comes a powerful, groundbreaking picture book debut introducing young readers to ten revolutionary Black women -- both historical and contemporary -- who changed the world for the better, inspiring readers today to know their strength, to be brave, and to STAND UP!

Brittney Cooper

Cathy Ann Johnson

Scholastic

Ages: 4 and up

Pages: 40

[dottiep]

[nostalgiaissue]

The Soundtrack of My Rage

by Makayla Williams, design by Bela Chauhan

(CONTENT WARNING: The following piece contains mentions of bullying, self-harm, body dysmorphia, depression, and suicidal ideation. There are also extended mentions of anti-Black racism, misogynoir, and white supremacy.)

Introduction

“Black women are mad as hell… and they should be.”

With 1976’s “Network,” actor Peter Finch cemented his place in pop culture history, thanks to the now-iconic line: “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore.” As TV news anchor Howard Beale, Finch’s oft-quoted declaration conveys a specific type of rage. It’s the kind someone feels when they come to terms with how powerless and alone they feel. It's a boiling, heartbreaking rage over the way life keeps disappointing you.

Howard’s outburst – now part of modern cinema history – succinctly sums up my adolescence. I wasn’t always an angry kid, but, whenever I think back to my childhood, I only remember the rage.

When I look at pictures from my youth, I always hone in on the big smile on my face in nearly every school photo. Maybe that girl had everyone else fooled, but I knew how angry she was. The memories that stick out from are the bad ones, namely the bullying and how it came in different flavors, like a shitty, knockoff version of Baskin-Robbins.

I was overweight, so thinner girls and heavier-set girls made fun of my body. I was shy, so extroverted kids made me feel bad for not talking enough. I was tomboyish, so I got sneers from girls who hated how I dressed and fangirled over “Doctor Who” and “The X-Files.” 

The teasing over my weight led to an unhealthy relationship with my body and food. Eventually, I became convinced that I didn’t deserve to be alive. Suicidal thoughts suddenly became a constant in my life, and they continue to be part of my young adulthood. Worst of all, I took that pain out on others. I shut out anyone, kids and adults alike, who tried to bond with me. Most of the time, I thought I didn't deserve friendship, that I deserved to be sad and lonely.

Then, the switch was flipped. I can’t recall when but I was certain of one thing: I was mad as hell, and I wasn’t going to take it anymore.

Who’s Afraid of the Angry Black Femme?

In her 2018 book “Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower,” author Brittney Cooper makes a provocative declaration: Black women are mad as hell… and they should be. “Black women have the right to be mad as hell,” Cooper writes, “There is no other group, save Indigenous women, that knows and understands more than fully the soul of the American body politic than Black women, whose reproductive and social labor have made the world what it is. This is not mere propaganda. Black women know what it means to love ourselves in a world that hates us.”

To a white reader, Cooper’s words are incendiary. How dare she say such a thing? Does she know how far she is setting back Black women right now? To a Black femme reader like me, her words were a balm. Here was a Black woman acknowledging the pain and fury of fellow Black women and femmes, telling them they had every right to be angry. Given how much we put up with in this country, from living with the chronic stress brought on by daily racism and misogynoir to being forced to shoulder the unrealistic (and racist) burden of being the savior of America, why shouldn’t we let the world know we’re pissed?

Yet, Cooper’s words were a deliberate rejection of what I had to adapt to as a kid. Indirectly, I was taught that the worst thing a Black woman or femme could be was angry. We needed to be calm and approachable. I watched my father, a Black man who can freely express his fury, tell my mother to “calm down” whenever she was in distress. I, too, got the “calm down” refrain from my dad and my mom. Being told to “calm down” peeved me more than some random kid making fun of my hoodie.

If my parents weren’t telling me to calm down at home, I was hearing about people (read: white people) telling a Black woman to calm down. During the Obama years, Michelle Obama would easily be branded “the angry Black woman” because she refused to be in the background. Michelle always spoke up for herself and for those who couldn’t, but she might as well had been committing an act of treason every time she spoke.

It was reminiscent of how Serena Williams’ rage on the tennis court was used against her in the press. At best, her rage was unsportsmanlike; at worst, it was ugly. As a result, Serena was seen as a raging animal or, worse, a crybaby. Seeing Serena and Michelle get torn down in the press or on social media sparked an awful thought in my brain: this is routine for us. Black women and femmes were always at risk of being subjected to misogynoir – a cross-pollination of racism and misogyny directed squarely at Black women and femmes – in their day-to-day lives. Thus, the famous “mad as hell” scene from “Network.”

Watching misogynoir happen in front of me, long before I knew such a word even existed, was distressing. I had to escape it – no, I needed to escape it. So, I ran headfirst into an unusual space, one where rage wasn’t this beast that threatened to swallow society whole: alternative rock.

“I’ll Stop the Whole World from Turning Into a Monster”

Today, there’s a running gag on Twitter about Black people loving Paramore, but, back in middle school, I treated them with abjection. In the mid-2000s, it was cool to hate on the “Twilight” franchise and the teenagers who loved it. Although Paramore had a song on the “Twilight” soundtrack, to be outed as a “Twi-hard” was a social life death sentence.

So, in 2011, I listened to Paramore for the first time, free from any dumb pretensions about “Twilight.” A random music channel happened to be playing the music video for “Monster,” which was featured on the soundtrack for “Transformers: Dark of the Moon.” The most vivid memory I have about “Monster” was Hayley’s red hair. It was a light red with tinges of blonde at the roots, but still fiery. It was like Molly Ringwald got the makeover instead of Ally Sheedy in “The Breakfast Club.” In Paramore’s world, the outcast was the cool girl. But more than that, the outcast got to speak her mind.

Reading the lyrics of “Monster” now, it is obvious that Hayley is directly addressing how she was vilified by her former bandmates in a blog post. Despite being twenty-three, I still interpret them the same way I heard them at twelve-years-old: a scathing screed against a rapidly crumbling world. 

Coupled with a grungy aesthetic and shots of the band running through an abandoned hospital, “Monster” captured my teenage experience. Whatever innocent world I lived in was shattered by wall-to-wall news coverage of Black bodies being brutalized by police officers and white supremacist vigilantes and the Black Lives Matter protests that arose in response. Adding insult to injury, of course, was the misogynoir prevalent in mass media and pop culture. When all you see is the horror of being Black in America, a decrepit, abandoned hospital quickly falling apart felt like an apt description of my Black adolescent experience.

Somehow, these three white twenty-somethings from Tennessee captured what it felt to be a Black pre-teen witnessing the beginnings of the Black Lives Matter movement and coming to grips with the insidious anti-Blackness of American life. It was unsettling. It was also the most realistic representation of Black American teen life I’d ever seen.

After “Monster,” I immediately sought out more Paramore. I listened to their music, including “Decode” from the “Twilight” soundtrack, for the rest of that evening. Not just because I loved what I was hearing, but because, for the first time in a long time, I didn’t feel so alone and helpless.

“All That I Want is to Wake Up Fine”

As the world began to grasp the scope of the global coronavirus pandemic in 2020, I was also preparing to start my first year at UCLA.

The fall quarter was supposed to be – please forgive the “High School Musical” reference – the start of something new.  For three years, I worked hard throughout community college, pushing myself to get my associate’s degree. There were lots of tears, sleepless nights, and anger, but somehow I pulled off the impossible. Additionally, I was learning to live with anxiety and clinical depression. After years of struggling with ill mental health, I discovered what I was experiencing had a name and others my age were coping with the same struggles. Heck, I’d even gotten my first steady job working at the local movie theater.

For the first time, things weren’t so bleak. I actually felt like a (mostly) functioning young adult. Then, the world shut down.

For yet another year, I was at home with my parents, stuck in my tiny, messy bedroom. I had to subsist off unemployment checks that barely covered textbooks, let alone basic necessities. I had to learn how to navigate life with a mask on and re-learn how to go inside a store without having an anxiety attack. And, I had to make my bedroom a functional learning space, which was hard to do with all the Funko POPs that took up space on my desk.

All of these circumstances reignited the rage I thought I had left back in high school. Worst yet, they also triggered depressive episodes that grew harder to recover from. Since I couldn’t see my therapist in person, I had to talk to her over the phone or Zoom, but this didn’t help. That simmering rage was now coupled with sadness.

The seemingly endless news coverage of the police lynchings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and the white supremacist vigilante killing of Ahmaud Arbery didn’t help either. I couldn’t bear to see more Black lives snuffed out by a colonial-capitalist white supremacist empire. Their faces, their deaths, their grieving families … they were all over my Instagram feed and the national news cycle. It was a brutal reminder that not only was Black death a constant fixture of the pandemic, but that Black death was a constant fixture of American life.

For the first time in a few years, I re-listened to Paramore’s 2016 album, “After Laughter.” Combining the zany, upbeat flare of the synth-heavy 80s New Wave with classic coming of age themes, “After Laughter” honestly confronted the brutal and messy transition from adolescence to adulthood. As Hayley Williams told The New York Times: “You can run on the fumes of being a teenager for as long as you want, but eventually life hits you real hard.”

I didn’t appreciate “After Laughter” when it was first released. Partly because I thought it was childish to be nostalgic for the stuff that brought you joy as a kid, and partly because I didn’t want to relive the worst years of my life during what proved to be the worst year of my young adulthood. So, I shut Paramore out.

Fast forward to 2020, and I was listening to “Hard Times,” the first song off the album.

“All that I want,” sings Hayley in the first verse, “is to wake up fine/Tell me that I’m alright/That I ain’t gonna die.” Despite the aggressively joyful synth-pop beat, that first verse summed up how I was feeling in the early days of the pandemic.

More than going outside or being around my friends, all I wanted was to wake up the next morning and feel okay. Like the world as I knew it wasn’t teetering on the brink of collapse. Needless to say, I got choked up listening to “Hard Times.”

I already knew the song was inspired by Hayley’s battles with depression, so that wasn’t the reason I had that painful lump in my throat. Like they did when I was twelve, Paramore captured what it felt like to be Black, femme, and in distress. Most importantly, Paramore gave me a much-needed space to let out all the emotions I had been stifling throughout the pandemic– especially that twisted, monstrous fusion of rage and sadness. I was mad as hell, and I couldn’t take the depression, the anxiety, and the Black death anymore.

I was tired of the constant negging on about staying positive; there was nothing positive about what we were living through. Being told repeatedly to “stay positive” or “remain calm” felt like more of the respectability politics I had swallowed since I was a kid. How was I supposed to stay calm in the face of both a global pandemic and exacerbated anti-Black racism? Matter of fact, why should I have to?

Black femme rage is a terrifying thing, no doubt about it. When Black women and femmes get angry, it has the potential to upend everything the colonial-capitalist white supremacist empire holds near and dear. We can transform that anger into meaningful action; just look at how we turned Donald Trump into a one-term president.

Mass media says we saved American democracy by rejecting the neo-fascist, white nationalist reality TV reject, but really we just aren’t the type to suffer fools lightly. Nor did we save American democracy; it is just as corrupt as any of the institutions that have sprung from it. It’s been that way for awhile; it didn’t start when Trump got elected. We’re just waiting for everyone else to get a clue. 

For Paramore, “ignorance is your new best friend” makes for a great chorus. For the rest of America, it makes for a reality we’re tired of. If there’s one thing I have learned from this pandemic, it’s that America has been friends with ignorance for too long. Paramore grew up and dropped the deadweight that held them back from growing up. Maybe it’s time for America to do the same.

[books-in-media]

Emma Watson, (Instagram, October 30, 2018)

—Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower, Brittney Cooper (2018)

—Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Audre Lorde (1984)

—Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger, Rebecca Traister (2018)

[kenyatta]

“But “empowerment” is a tricky word. It’s also a decidedly neoliberal word that places the responsibility for combating systems on individuals. Neoliberalism is endlessly concerned with “personal responsibility” and individual self-regulation. It tells us that in a free market, devoid of any regulation or accountability at the top, what happens to those on the bottom is entirely our fault. Did we have enough drive? Enough vision? Enough hustle to change our condition? The politics of personal empowerment suggests to us that if we simply “free our minds, then our asses will follow.” I’m not convinced that this is true. Why? Have you ever noticed that people who have real “power”—wealth, job security, influence—don’t attend “empowerment” seminars? Power is not attained from books and seminars. Not alone, anyway. Power is conferred by social systems. Empowerment and power are not the same thing. We must quit mistaking the two. Better yet, we must quit settling for one when what we really need is the other.”

― Brittney Cooper, Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower

[benedictusantonius]

I have too much feminist shit to do to spend my time hating white women. Any time a white woman says something wrong these days, there's an army of Black Feminist writers at the ready with think pieces that can snatch her wig and have her picking her face up off the floor months later. Going after white women online will get you lots of clicks and likes, but you’ll feel exhausted at the end, and often white women’s attitudes won’t have changed one iota. I’m not saying white women don’t do treacherous shit. Far too often they are straight up enemies to the work of ending patriarchy and racism, but we still can’t let white women become the center of a conversation that isn’t about them.

Brittney Cooper Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower (2018)