This week and I got off on the wrong foot. Weird things were happening with my mood, I couldn’t sit still and I was feeling generally out of sorts. So, I decided do what I always do when I’m feeling in a funk: I get books.

I drove up to the north part of my city to the public library that I prefer– brand new, new books, and a general sparkle that always inflates my mood. I didn’t have any books in mind– I thought I’d just go have a look around and see if anything caught my eye. When nothing did, I took to the computers to see if they had any of the books that I needed for comps. After spending about five minutes in the search engine, I began to notice a trend. Every time I would search a book that I wanted (The New Jim Crow, Audre Lorde’s Collected Poems, Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti, Eloquent Rage, etc.), my heart would leap with excitement upon noting that the library had the book, and do a mild decrescendo upon realizing the availability was at the library downtown.

As I left the library fuming about the inconvenience of having to drive all the way across town to the other library, it struck me that all the books that I wanted were Black books and they were all housed in the library smack in the middle of the Black neighborhood. Quelle surprise. As if Black books were not able to take up space in a predominantly white space. As if all a Black populace would be interested in is Black books. As if white populations would not be interested in Black books. (Granted there were thousands of books in both libraries, but I’m still frustrated that the majority of the Black books were in the “Black” library.)

Shocked at my own naiveté, I decided half way home that driving the 25 minutes across town was worth it if it meant getting Brittney Cooper’s Eloquent Rage. This library was dimly lit and generally of a poorer disposition than the library in the white part of town, but within minutes, my arms were full of my beloved Black books, including a Okorafor book, The Book of Phoenix, Ibram Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning, Zadie Smith’s Feel Free and of course, as the title of this piece implies, Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower by Brittney Cooper.

After simmering down from the injustice of realizing my books had been segregated, I settled into the couch to read the opening chapter of Eloquent Rage. Within moments, I found myself chuckling at Cooper’s candor, snapping my fingers in agreement with many of her sentiments, and riveted by her analysis which seamlessly wove together theory and personal anecdotes which produced scholarship which would be palatable to a broad range of audiences.

Damn, I thought, drowning in my own admiration, I want to write like her when I grow up.

In Eloquent Rage, Audre Lorde shares the stage with Beyoncé, who shares with Patricia Hill Collins, who shares with Michelle Obama. Black women have been theorizing about anger forever, both in academic and non-academic spaces. Cooper breaks down and analyzes Beyoncé’s “Formation” video with the same care that she defines ‘feminism’ and ‘intersectionality.’ For that, I am eternally grateful because I have seen what the type of public facing scholarship I want to write looks like in Cooper’s work.

In addition to discussing Black women’s rage, which as Audre Lorde notes is both full of information and energy, and an appropriate response to racism (Sister Outsider), Cooper discusses understanding her own feminist identity in conjunction with other identities that don’t always inherently mesh well together. I am thinking specifically of when she discusses being a Christian feminist and also being a heterosexual Black feminist. Cooper’s right that feminism has yet to really take into that God plays a big part in a lot of Black feminists’ lives, but I think she’s also right to point to the fact that Black churches still tend to be sites of Black patriarchy run amok. How do we reconcile those two spaces? How do we become good God-fearing Christians while also wanting to smash the patriarchy?

Another topic which I think Cooper nails in “Love in a Hopeless Place,” is difficulty heterosexual Black feminists face while in pursuit of relationships, a place I only know too well. I am either too intimidating, too angry, too sassy, too opinionated, too bossy, or too independent– words that essentially equate to “You cannot be forced into submission by me. I find that threatening.” Cooper’s analysis is rife with statistics and a much more eloquent analysis than what you will find here. She turns a conversation about a difficulty find mates into a debriefing on the Moynihan Report, which essentially calls the Black family a “tangle of pathology” and that our maternal led households are a part of the problem. Much of the Moynihan Report is based on the assumption that “legitimate” families are constituted of (1) father, (1) mother and (2.5) children. (Maybe not the 2.5 kids part but the “nuclear family unit” piece is there.)

Using Beyoncé as a jumping off point for discussing feminism, Cooper states that feminism’s tagline should be, as her idol says, “I love being a woman and being a friend to other women.” (28) If that’s not your MO, then you’re not a feminist, Cooper decides. That goes for nonsense about not having Black female friends because “they’re too much drama” or you “get along better with men.” Cooper explicitly says:

Friendships with Black girls have always saved my life. I give the side eye to any Black woman who doesn’t have other Black women friends, to any woman who is prone to talk about how she relates better to men than to women, to anyone who goes on and on about how she “doesn’t trust females.” 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, seducing you with the belief that men care more about your well-being than women do.

It isn’t true.

(p. 13-14)

I can say with absolute certainty that Black women friendships have given me the most out of life, from my intellectual soul sisterhood with Micah, to my coffeeshop buddy Kels, to my homie Alexis and my cousin Leah, I would not be the woman I am today without each one of them. They lift as they climb, they’re there for me, they understand me and most of all they listen with care when I come home from class after three hours of having to listen to racist, homophobic vitriol.

Brittney Cooper’s book, which touches on everything which matters to Black women, from dating to hair, as touched my life in important ways, namely by making me feel seen. Thanks to Cooper, I, as a big black girl nerd from the South, that had trouble making Black girl friends growing up and trouble dating, who grew up in a devout faith, but is, without a shadow of a doubt, a feminist, feel like part of my story has been told. A story that has only partially been exposed. From her complicated relationships with white women, to her mixed feeling about Hillary Clinton and Tevin Campbell obsession, Cooper and I might be of different generations, but her story is mine and I loved reading every second of it.

11/10 would recommend and am currently trying to figure out if I can add this to my Comps list.

But, seriously, don’t take my word for it, check it out for yourself.