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.
Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “The Problem with Sass”
Content Warning: This section of the book includes pejorative terms for Black people and women. These terms are preserved in quotes and titles only.
Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower “is a book by a grown-ass woman written for other grown-ass women […] who know shit is fucked up” (1). American culture seeks to sanitize and contain Black women’s rage by calling it sass. People believe sass in funny, but they dismiss angry Black women. This is true even in Black communities. Dr. Brittney Cooper learned to mask her rage in professional settings because she worried anger would diminish her credibility. One of her students observed that the rage was still visible but was an “eloquent rage” that illuminated and inspired. Black women have rage because of trauma, fatigue with mistreatment, and the sense that they are invisible. Cooper looks to Black feminist Audre Lorde, who taught her that rage is political. Cooper identifies tennis superstars Venus and Serena Williams as avatars of harnessing rage to become powerful.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Capital B, Capital F”
After a “homegirl intervention”—straightforward criticism—from a college roommate and friend named Tracey, Cooper realized that feminism could be valuable to her intellectually and personally. While the academic study of feminism could help her make sense of her life, friendships with women like Tracey and the pragmatic wisdom of Cooper’s mother and grandmother would be equally important to her understanding of Black feminism. In defining her feminism, Cooper says what it is not. The author refuses to spend her energy criticizing every white woman and Black man who is a bad ally. The most important thing Cooper learned from Black feminist practice and theory is that Black female rage can be costly when used without intention, but that it is also powerful when focused.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Strong Female Leads”
Cooper delves more deeply into her relationship with white femininity and power. As a girl, Cooper had friendships with white girls and consumed books such as those in The Babysitters Club series, which has mostly white characters. Those relationships and books always represented Black girls as peripheral; white girls in her friendship circle made racially insensitive comments. One white girl in her neighborhood even called Cooper the n-word. As flawed as those relationships and texts were, they taught Cooper that female friendship is important, and powerful women and girls are admirable. In college, Cooper learned an additional lesson about race, gender, and power when her peers at Howard University, one of the most prominent Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in the United States, refused to vote for her for student-body president because she did not embody respectable Black femininity.
Cooper consumes shows such as Gilmore Girls and commits the “country Southern Black-girl blasphemy” (40) of admitting that Rachel Ray is just as important to her cooking as her female kin. She is able to view these consumption habits critically, but she feels no sense of guilt or inauthenticity. Regardless of race, Cooper “like[s] strong female leads” (67) such as Hillary Clinton. Black women were disappointed when Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election because they understand that, like them, Clinton lost because she valued competence over stereotypical ideas about how women should behave. Cooper is willing to make common cause with white feminists so long as they avoid the assumption that white women are the leads and Black women are the supporting cast.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
Cooper establishes the tone and purpose of her collection in these three opening essays. She also builds different forms of credibility through her use of storytelling and allusions to popular culture.
In Chapter 1, Cooper presents herself as an imperfect, authentic Black woman who wants to struggle along with her readers to understand Anger as a Source of Power for Black Women. She makes a straightforward declaration of this purpose and the primary audience for the book in the opening lines. Those lines rely on ordinary diction and are peppered with profanity. They are also free of the jargon that might be a turn-off for general readers. In addition, Cooper relies on catchphrases and words rooted in contemporary Black vernacular—“doing the most, but achieving the least” (10), for example, and “homegirl”—to establish her racial and gender bona fides.
Cooper’s source materials allows her to develop connections with her readers. She uses allusions to pop culture figures such as Tyler Perry’s Madea character and to songs such as 1990s rap-rock band NWA’s “A Bitch Iz a Bitch,” which she revises to use as the title of the second essay in the collection. Through such Black cultural references grounded in popular culture of the last thirty years, Cooper signals to the reader that she gets who they were when they were girls and young women. She is a peer. She encourages readers to identify with her. Her self-deprecating stories about her social struggles are also designed to disarm readers and convince them that being a professor and exceptionally intelligent is no proof against the struggles that she and her readers experience.
In Chapter 2, “Strong Female Leads,” Cooper complicates her self-representation and representation of Black female identity by acknowledging that Black girls and women experience pleasure as consumers of texts that center white femininity. These texts have the potential to make a Black girl/woman “a spectator and coconspirator” (50) in her own Othering. Cooper develops a narrative of the pain and pleasure of her personal encounters with white girls when she was a child and her consumption of books like those in the Babysitters’ Club series. The reader is already aware that Cooper believes friendship among women is important because of her arguments in the first essay. When she includes friendships with white women and engagement with white femininity in popular culture in the genealogy of her Black feminism, she is showing the reader what intersectional feminism looks like in practice.
Extrapolating from these personal stories to explain her ambivalence about Hillary Clinton as a strong female lead, Cooper develops the theme The Personal Is Political: Storytelling as Feminist Practice. Her conclusion about Clinton and other white women is that there is a place for white female allies, just as there is a place for Black male allies. That conclusion is a perfect illustration of how Black women’s relationships and personal experiences emerge from intersectional identities and oppressions.
Cooper’s reliance on anecdotes and figures from popular culture, especially Hip Hop, is what makes the work in these first three selections Black feminism and more specifically “Hip Hop feminism,” a term coined by Joan Morgan, whom Cooper directly references in Chapter 2. Hip Hop feminism acknowledges that Black women have intersectional identities, that dance and music create cultural spaces that articulate those identities, and that intersectional identities can encompass contradictions such as Black woman enjoying a Hip Hop song that includes denigrating terms for women. Cooper represents herself as a gushing fan of Beyoncé and Venus and Serena Williams and offers quick, Black feminist readings of their bodies and work to show the reader what Hip Hop feminism and Black feminists look like.
Finally, Cooper’s work is Black feminism because it exemplifies the second-wave (1960-1970) feminist tenet that the personal is the political, but in a way that acknowledges that the personal for Black women emerges at the intersection of overlapping forms of oppression and social identity. The autobiographical moments in the essays, especially the “homegirl intervention[s],” show Black female friends helping Cooper refine her Black feminist framework by calling her out. These moments show The Importance of Relationships and Vulnerability in creating a theoretical and practical feminism that changes the way women move through the world. Having established the theoretical groundwork for her analysis, Cooper systematically moves through some of the most significant issues Black women face.
