Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower Quotes
"This is a book by a grown-ass woman written for other grown-ass women."
"What I have is anger. Rage, actually. And that’s the place where more women should begin—with the things that make us angry."
"Black women turn to sass when rage is too risky—because we have jobs to keep, families to feed, and bills to pay."
"Angry Black Women get dismissed all the time. We are told we are irrational, crazy, out of touch, entitled, disruptive, and not team players."
"Black women have the right to be mad as hell. We have been dreaming of freedom and carving out spaces for liberation since we arrived on these shores."
"Feminism can give us a common language for thinking about how sexism, and racism, and classism work together to fuck shit up for everybody."
"Focused with precision, [rage] can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change."
"America needs a homegirl intervention in the worst way."
"Black-girl feminism is all the rage, and we need all the rage."
"Friendships with Black girls have always saved my life."
"If you say fuck the patriarchy but you don’t ride for other women, then it might be more true that the patriarchy has fucked you."
"Black feminism is and has always been a fundamentally queer project."
"Even before I embraced feminism, the Howard campus election taught me that patriarchy is always on its job."
"My insistence on a uniform of jeans and tennis shoes was, I’m sure, a subconscious rebellion."
"The politics of respectability is predicated on extremely conservative ideas about what a proper race man and a proper race woman are and should look like."
"Black feminism taught me that in the battle with white women over racism and with Black men over sexism, I can never go wrong in picking myself."
"What does it mean to build a world in which Black women and Black girls are safe?"
"We were admonished each week to bring our unruly flesh in submission to our 'spirit man.'"
"Sex messed with your head, boys were fun, but trouble, and a baby before you wanted one, could ruin your life."
"White privilege works by making the advantages white people have invisible while making the supposedly 'poor' choices of people of color hypervisible."
"Healthy consensual touch is nothing short of holy."
"We do a kind of violence to ourselves when we shut down our sexuality."
"Freedom is my theological compass, and it never steers me wrong."
"Respectability politics are at their core a rage-management project."
"Black women’s hairstyles are their own cultural vocabulary."
"The lie we are told is that white rage and white fear are honest emotions that preserve the integrity of American democracy."
"The God of Christianity seems to love people who are engaged in all manner of scandals, affairs, and murders."
"Black women’s rage isn’t always healthy, particularly when we turn it on ourselves or on our children."
"Rage is costly. And its costs are directly proportional to the amount of power any given woman or girl has when she chooses to wield it."
"White women’s complicity and participation in state violence toward Black people has a long and sordid history."
"We are called divisive, man-hating, combative, unfeminine."
"Black feminists were roundly blamed for the film being a flop in theaters. Still the position of Black feminists remains clear: first, do no harm."
"Many Black men struggle to acknowledge that they experience male privilege."
"For one hundred years, Black men had never gotten away with it. They were killed, mostly for rapes they didn’t commit."
"Rape is about power, and if a Black man has been serially raping white women for nearly fifty years, this is a violent patriarchal form of hitting back at white supremacy."
"Black women were the literal site for the reproduction of slavery."
"The struggle of queer folks to build families in the ways they desire demonstrate that love is political."
"Black and white people have never had the luxury of apolitical romance."
"In every state in the United States, there are more single than married Black mothers."
"The movement to defund Planned Parenthood... has nothing to do with the desire of white men on the right for Black and Latina women to have more babies."
"To be Black is to grow up in a world where white feelings can become dangerous weapons."
"Rejecting the politics of fear is a primary sensibility if you were born into the Age of Hip Hop."
"Black women’s revolutions are always about safety, food, and education for women, children, and the elderly."
"Being excluded and being exceptional are the frequent prerequisites for a bad case of self-righteousness."
"Survivor’s guilt is about as useful as white guilt, which is to say, not useful at all."
"My mother is my shero. I’m the biggest beneficiary of her ingenuity and tenacity."
"What you build is infinitely more important than what you tear down."
"When the struggle feels unwinnable, may you never forget this one thing: You got this. We got this."
"Being singled out as exceptional by the adults at home and school created its own set of problems among my peers."
"Rage is great at helping us to destroy things. That’s why people are so afraid of it."
"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."