Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower

As a doctoral candidate I had to finish this book before starting my research because there is so much I have to do when I begin the work in my community. The depth and perspective written here? YES!!!As my Grandma used to say, “If you can’t say ouch, say AMEN!” I have “Amen!” highlighted all throughout this book and will be referring to it to remind myself why the work is necessary.

I would recommend this book to every single woman. Black women (cis and trans), this is for us. All other women: you’ll learn something, as there are gems for you, too. Cooper’s words are thoughtful and compelling. She will have you saying “amen”, “mmmhmm”, “daaaaamnnn”, and “yasssssss”. Thank you, Dr. Cooper.

Easily one of the best books I’ve ever read. I know I will return to it many times over the course of my life. While reading it, I felt as though I had long been thirsting for these words. I’m so grateful to Dr. Cooper for this gift.

This is the best book that I have read in years. I have followed Dr. Cooper since I first saw her on the MHP show and this book is absolutely fantastic. Dr. Cooper perfectly breaks down Black feminism in a way that is accessible and relevant in this day and age. I could not put this book down because as a Black woman from the south in academia I related so much to what she wrote and she did a beautiful job of weaving in theory with personal and modern day applications. I definitely plan on buying this book for my girls this Christmas! This is a must read!

Everyone should read this book. Dr. Cooper writes brilliantly, beautifully and courageously about her journey to embracing her rage as a Black woman. This book is a cathartic read and made me feel full of hope.

This is my first time doing an amazon review but I had to stop mid-read because this book is EVERYTHING. More people should be reading this book and talking about it because it is such a beautiful and insightful book about feminism. I read a lot of books about feminism and sometimes they blend together but this one has a completely different aspect to it. I can’t recommend this book enough.

I loved this book!!! This book creates connections between historical experiences for Black women,systemic oppression, and various daily challenges clear. Dr. Coopers use of personal narratives, reflection on challenges, vulnerability and knowledge made this book thought provoking, tear jerking, and a wonderful way to understand the complex life implications on living at the margins. Definite must-read. Invest in this book, it is amazing

Loved this book! So much of the author’s story resonated with me. I particularly found the white women = freedom/Black women – slavery concept thought-provoking.

Dr. Cooper is real, she is honest, and truthful. Listening to her wisdom and her history was an honor and a privilege I’ll never be able to repay. Books like this show the importance of listening and elevating Black, Feminist voices, as they have so much to offer our society, our communities, and our futures.

As a 40 yo white lady on a quest of continuous improvement, and as someone striving for social justice, this book opened my eyes to so much. Thank you, Dr. Cooper. 10/10 will read again.

I loved this book, it is a brilliant read. Relatable, informative, and well put together. Thank you Brittney for writing this I learned so much and will share this with as many people as I can.

One of my if not the best read for 2020. I also have it on audible.

Brilliantly weaves together narratives, history, politics, popular culture, and truth. This book affirmed and saved my existence. Will read over and over.

This book was the FIRST TIME I’ve felt HEARD SEEN and APPRECIATED as a Highly Educated Independent Single Black Woman pushing 40!!I saw it on screen in Gabrielle Union’s BET show Being Mary Jane! But I felt it in my soul that Brittany could relate to me in this book she touched on innumerable topics such as Perfectionism, Colorism,Sexuality, White women’s tears, and so many other things that affect me as I move through my life on a daily basis. This book was a warm cup of hot cocoa with a shot of bourbon! I felt like I was talking to a girlfriend and often Amened, Yes girled, and Got damn righted my way through this brilliant piece of literature!!I first heard of this book on the black girl podcast Getting Grown and needless to say it was life-affirming!! Also check out Girl, Woman Other!

Love, love this book. It’s been weeks since I’ve read it and I’m still reciting parts in my head. Cooper came strong; she preached in only a way a Black Feminist can. This book is dense with sharp and insightful social criticisms. Strongly recommended.

Thought provoking. I was able to both identify with some of the authors experiences and feel enraged at what Black people have suffered for doing everyday things I have done myself.

I absolutely loved this book. The chapter White Women’s Tears should be required reading. I saw Dr. Cooper at an event and she is just as wonderful in person. Highly recommended!

This is a must have for Black women who understands what it feels like not to be heard and have your rage misidentified! I literally feel like I am reading the pages of my own journey and it reassuring to know that I’m (we’re) not alone. Cooper loves us so deeply and passionately and in a world that hardly ever looks to affirms us, I am grateful that this work was created

The longer I live the more layers of privilege I uncover, and I thank @ProfessorCrunk for graciously offering lessons for many years. (Have you seen her @TEDTalks from #TEDWomen?)This book gives me a chance to put money in her pocket by buying it and telling you to buy it. She should be richly rewarded for her scholarship and for making it accessible.Rage is a superpower indeed and I am glad the author has chosen to deploy hers in this way.

Eloquent Rage is an essay collection that centers Black feminism and Black women. Cooper writes about a wide range of cultural, personal, and political topics including respectability politics, neoliberalism, and the myth of exceptionalism. Cooper’s writing is sharp and incisive. It will make you reflect and reconsider long-held assumptions and biases. What I particularly appreciated in her collection is how Cooper encourages us to celebrate and harness rage and anger as a way to fight against oppression, and how she weaves in anecdotes about her own experience.This is an excellent collection of essays about intersectional feminism. There are so many passages I highlighted and flagged as I read through this book. This is a powerful and personal read that I cannot recommend more highly. I’ll leave you with a few quotes that have stuck with me from Eloquent Rage: “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.” “The lie we are told is that white rage and white fear are honest emotions that preserve the integrity of American democracy…White rage and white fear are reactions to perceptions among white people that their power might be slipping away. Black rage and Black fear are fundamentally more honest, because they are reactions to the violence of white supremacy.”

I am grateful to my granddaughter who introduced me to this book. The use of self and connections with the South drew me in even more. I was unaware of drunk and now on a quest with that. I also see Beyonce music in a new awareness and understanding. This book was refreshing and enjoyable.

Just an absolutely phenomenal book. I couldn’t put it down and I would not put it down for anything. So honestly refreshing and relatable on so many levels. Thank you so much Ms. Cooper for this insightful, intriguing masterpiece.

This, more than any other book, gave me a very current and pragmatic understanding of what it means to be a woman today. The way Cooper breaks down her personal struggles within the context of racial politics helped me understand my own guilt and gave me practical tools for channeling my emotions into productive action. This book posits the strongest type of feminism, a loving feminism that puts gender before race. It’s prereq for any white woman that wants to win the fight and take all her sisters with her.

Cooper is a professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers University and has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other media. She tells the feminist story from her experience as a Black woman growing up poor in the south. In her opening chapter she says, “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.” She notes (quoting Audre Lorde) that, “Rage is a legitimate political emotion. Focused with precision, it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change.” She speaks to many issues with unapologetic honesty. It is generally understood that the oppressed are the ones who know more clearly what is going on in the dynamic of oppression; and in sexism and racism, Black women are the oppressed of the oppressed. Cooper, however, does not see herself as a “feminist killjoy.” She notes that the clarity that comes from rage tells us what we want to be rid of and also what kind of world we want; so we need to help people find better tools to work with. A Christian, Cooper ends her book like all good church services with a Benediction, the last part of which is: “May your rage be a force for good.”

Read this book for my black feminist theory class. Right from the beginnjng, I knew that I was going to learn a some lessons in life from this poignant and well written book by a very intelligent black woman

Readimg Cooper’s work was like sitting down at the kitchen table having an authentic fierce chat on self awareness, awakening, identity politics and black feminism all at once. Cooper’s prose are critical and inviting. It moved me to reconsider my own body mapping as a source of meaning, vitality, and my vocational direction!

It was actually the pod-cast episode “But that’s another story”, in which author and Professor Brittney Cooper spoke about religion, coming-of-age, and her love of the “Babysitters Club” that initially brought me here. In that episode (which I highly recommend), Cooper discussed growing up in a community where church was paramount, and asking questions was at best weakly tolerated, and at worst, blatantly discouraged. It took me back to my (very different) cultural upbringing, but a similar experience in my own catechism classes as a child asking questions about what a term or passage meant, and being either underwhelmed with the answer – or worse, ashamed at even having asked. Like Cooper, it took a long time to come to my own terms with what religion and spirituality meant to me. I had never heard this type of ambivalence and candidness in a discussion about religion before, and that podcast episode particularly resonated with me and eventually led me, here, to this book.Now on to the book: “Eloquent Rage” was phenomenal. Cooper somehow weaves the personal, the political, and everything in-between into a very readable and striking format. She uses rage as a tool to methodically and effectively call out injustice and fight for change. She holds no punches when pinpointing the social, political, economic and institutional forces that bolster racism and sexism. I learned a lot here, even as someone who (mistakenly) thought that they had been primed on feminism by taking women’s studies classes in college and digging into the required and suggested readings mentioned in the syllabus. However, though I had learned much about Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, and Susan B Anthony – I hadn’t heard of Ida B. Wells or Audre Lorde before this book despite their very prolific bibliographies and very clear contributions to the feminist movement. She uses this and many other points to illustrate how the contributions of Black women have been overlooked. To be honest, I also hadn’t heard the term “respectability politics”, though I was well aware of its contents (one of my parents being an immigrant from Asia). Cooper calls out respectability politics throughout the book, showing how it is used to rationalize injustice and only reinforce the existing patriarchy. This isn’t a dry textbook, and Cooper uses statistics sparingly, but the ones she uses are an effective and shocking indictment of the systems that be, illustrating the wide discrepancies of wealth based on race and sex.One passage that particularly stood out to me was the use of the term ‘resilience ‘and her very real explanation that term: ‘The logic of relying on people’s resilience goes something like, ‘Let’s see just how much we can take from you before you break. That is evil.” The use of this term as an excuse for idly allowing suffering and discrimination, is despicable. It also got me thinking about how the term ‘model minority’ plays into this logic – it’s a counterpart to the very faulty idea that personal traits can overcome structural problems. The idea of the underdog who breaks through boundaries and beats the odds to become something exceptional is a romanticized idea, forged in the old Western fables that accompanied the Gold Rush and the “rags-to-riches” novels that dominated the Gilded Age, but it is a fundamentally flawed and unfair expectation. By definition, exceptionalism is – well, exceptional. And, as Cooper notes, celebrating hard-earned success is distinct and separate from ignoring the barriers that stood in their way of getting there.This book left me, as another reviewer put it, ‘speechless’. It is brilliant, subversive, and honest and definitely the best (non-science) book I have read all year.

The writing, the personal connections, the rage. I’m so glad I purchased this book. If you were ever feeling lost, like myself, this book will give you new purpose.

My God!This book has changed the way i view my own personal journey into feminism.Definitely a must read.

I love this book and the way she put my thoughts into perspective. I highly recommend for anyone wanting to know more about black feminism and how it applies to our current society.

As a white woman pastor and author, I needed every ounce of courage within me to read this paradigm-shifting book. Unlearning my perceptions and beliefs (wrongly believing I am an amazing feminist) is now my daily work. Brittney Cooper’s Eloquent Rage benefits anyone who claims to love equality, equity, and justice for all. Her book will be my feminist Bible. The final chapter gave me permission to acknowledge my ignorance and go forth with purpose and joy.

This book speaks to everything black women experience on a day to day. It truly captures the essence of how it is to exist in this world.

I enjoyed it. It making reflect things on my own life. There are a lot of question i need to ask and answers.

Eloquent Rage is about constructive discomfort. In an accessible voice that, nevertheless, refuses to sugarcoat or trivialize some of the most pressing issues facing us, Brittney Cooper uses her personal and intellectual history to teach, entertain, and anger the reader productively.As an example, one chapter juxtaposes a personal struggle of Cooper’s against Sandra Bland’s tragic and unjust demise against a history of violence directed at marginalized communities and black women in particular. In this chapter and others, Eloquent Rage shows us how we might see our lives in the contexts of our world and, most importantly, process what we see and decide where we go next.

Get this book- Now. You will not regret it. Brittney Cooper has a beautiful or should I say Eloquent way of explaining the struggles that people of color, particular women go through. I think that every white person should get a hold of this book, swallow a little of their pride, be ready for their privilege to be pointed out, and really get to know and understand why this book is important and why it needed to be written.

If you want to read a work that critically engages Black women’s rage, this is it. Cooper’s text shows a beautiful mind at work, tackling issues, concerns, and plights, Black women and girls face. While not a difficult read, there is nothing simple about it. She has a way of taking a thing from the margins, dragging it to the center, no matter how painful or difficult, and capturing the very essence of it. This is what critical memoir is meant to do at its very best.

I kept coming across this book while searching for something new to read but I didn’t know if I wanted to read it at first. I’m glad I made the decision to buy it because it is an absolute gem! It felt like someone answered my questions and mirrored the anger I’ve felt in various situations. This book was released at the perfect time and I think it’s something everyone should read at least once.

I loved this so much!!! I literally have 5 other women reading it right now. I appreciate the words. Cooper masterfully articulated the struggle is black girls feel!

I was reading this book to understand my own rage and the feeling of I am not alone and the understanding behind some of my anger that I couldn’t put into words has helped me immensely. Dr cooper gives you the words you have been searching for to dissect the anger black women have had since childhood.The kind of stuff you see happening but can’t figure out why it bothers you and then wonder so long that you think it’s just you. As a woman who grew up in a white school and made it I struggle with my blackness and this book helped put a lot into perspective

I still don’t know how to fix the system, but I now have a more grounded empathy for some of the people most affected by it.

This is the first book I’ve read in entirety in Black feminism. I have never been interested in feminism as a topic or philosophy. This book and its author’s humor allowed me to think differently about current political affairs and process experiences that I never quite had the vocabulary to speak truth to situations I’ve experienced. I am new to Ms Coopers work and am looking forward to following her work.

I read this book to learn more about intersectional feminism. Brittney Cooper has taught me about what it’s like to live as a black women in the United States. Strongly recommend to ANYBODY.

just finished Eloquent Rage! THIS BOOK in every way speaks to the most profound and difficult discussions I’ve had with Black men, white men and women, and other Black women since I turned 18. Cooper captures so much in such a short text, but leaves with laughter and concepts for joy. I think this could be an amazing text for anyone wiling to change the way they see the world.