—
Buy it on Amazon.
I have been angry most of my life. And not just angry. Rage-full. Over the course of many decades, I have expended an absurd amount of energy and effort in camouflaging that rage and blocking access to my hidden, more authentic self.
It wasn’t until I opened a copy of “Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Super Power” by Brittney Cooper that I was able to understand how several sociopolitical and theological systems — some that have roots in doctrines that long predate the founding of this country — have necessitated the employment of strategic acts of concealment and obstruction, and how these systems have historically been perpetuated and how they continue to affect the lives that Black women and girls lead.
The mostly quiet, attentive, neatly dressed, anxious, intermittent overachiever I was as a child became a taller, slightly more loquacious version of that little girl, but that was not who I ever really wanted to be. What I didn’t understand then was how utterly conscripted my choices were long before I was born. In Eloquent Rage I found a painstakingly thorough and highly readable articulation of the direct causal relationships between the ways that the intersection of the gargantuan themes of patriarchy, racism, and sexism have combined to determine both the abstract and concrete boundaries of Black women’s lives in America since before the 18th century. For the record, that’s a hell of a lot of bandwidth. [To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
Two particular strategies Cooper writes about will be unfamiliar to the greater American audience but each profoundly affected my sense of myself as an individual, born in this nation and traveling throughout the world. Cooper writes,
Though good behavior has its place, it’s the disruptive girls, the loud, rowdy, attitudinal Black girls, and the defiant, quiet, insolent Black girls who expose every day exactly what this system is made of.
The girls Brittney Cooper has described here are fully repudiating the dogma of “respectability politics.” She goes on:
Respectability politics, the belief that Black people can overcome many of the everyday, acute impacts of racism by dressing properly and having education and social comportment is, first and foremost, performed as a kind of sartorial prerogative.
Respectability politics are at their core a rage management project. Learning to manage one’s rage by daily tamping down that rage is a response to routine assaults on one’s dignity in a world where rage might get you killed or cause you to lose your job.
This late 19th and early 20th century idea first found its way into the homes of Black Americans considered part of the “talented tenth” – the phrase popularized by W.E.B. DuBois (after being promulgated by Northern white philanthropists) that described the percentage of Black men who, through education and direct involvement in social change efforts, believed would help save the Negro race at a time when it was in steep peril from the massive violence being perpetrated by angry racist whites across the country. These self-appointed Negro leaders were to guide the “the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst” by encouraging Blacks to take on the kinds of socially conventional behaviors and appearances that would facilitate their assimilation and (presumed) acceptance into the larger society of White Americans still smarting a full generation after having lost the Civil War. It was first and foremost a conservative survival strategy. But as Cooper maintains:
The problem with all provisional strategies, particularly when they begin
to work for the exceptional few, is that they rise to the level of ideology.
There are numerous reasons why this strategy hasn’t worked and never will, but there are far more examples that show how it hasn’t worked. Two come quickly to mind: Professor Louis “Skip” Gates being arrested for breaking into his own home, and First Lady Michelle Obama being called an “ape in heels” by a West Virginia county official. Respectability politics only works when the white majority decides its whims and standards are being met.
The second noteworthy survival strategy that Cooper recounts is the “culture of dissemblance,” a term first coined by Professor Darlene Clark Hine. It describes a “cult of secrecy” first practiced during the era following Reconstruction that sought to allow Black women to “protect the sanctity of inner aspects of their lives.” Although the behaviors described arose more than 150 years ago, they continue to be practiced today, because the same sets of toxic physical, emotional, and social challenges that originally called them up are still very much in existence. For any White person who has wondered why a Black woman is slow to open up, please go directly to the “History” category on the Jeopardy big board and answer “Culture of Dissemblance,” not forgetting to put it in the form of a question.
For anyone who ponders why Black women seem to think that theirs is an immeasurably harder row to hoe, allow me to conjure this mental exercise: Picture a man juggling three regulation-size golf balls; now picture a woman juggling three standard-size soccer balls; okay, now picture another man juggling three medicine balls embedded with spikes of varying sizes; finally, picture a woman juggling three spike-embedded medicine balls that have been filled with nitroglycerin. Now assign a race to each of those four people. Easier to do than you thought, right?
When Brittney Cooper writes about the peculiar burdens and hazards of being a Black American female and offers embracing and learning to articulate their well-deserved rage as her cure for them, she is singing a song that I’ve always known the music for but not the words. Now I have a balm and know the words.
—
This article originally appeared on The Head Butler
Photo: Pexels
