A lot of food for thought here, especially as a white woman. There were a couple of things that I'm not sure I agree 100% with (the Cosby section, for example), but I will certainly keep thinking through a lot of what Cooper presents here.

I will not be finishing this book because a lot of the ideas go against what I fundamentally believe. I requested this title at an earlier time in my life. Since then, I have read a few books and articles that point out how "rage culture" does more harm than bringing about justice.
I realize that I have not read enough of the book (only read to 30%) to fully know if I agree or disagree with Mrs. Cooper. Due to that, I will not be posting a review at all so as not to unfairly harm the book's ratings.
Thank you for the opportunity to read this selection.

Enlightening, candid, passionate and timely. A perfect read right now. I was supposed to interview this author for Rebellious Magazine, but the interview fell through.

RATING: 4.5 STARS
2018; St. Martin's Press

"So what if it’s true that Black women are mad as hell? They have the right to be. In the Black feminist tradition of Audre Lorde, Brittney Cooper reminds us that anger is a powerful source of energy that can give us the strength to keep on fighting.

Far too often, Black women’s anger has been caricatured into an ugly and destructive force that threatens the civility and social fabric of American democracy"

Aahhh, this book was so well written and so powerful. Cooper's humour and wit lets each essay slip into your mind where it stays for days. If you are looking for feminist literature, Eloquent Rage is a must-read for your list. Cooper writes each essay with black women in mind the whole way through. I think this is such an important message. As a brown woman, I could relate to a lot of what Cooper was writing about, and found myself nodding to so many statements in this book. I am looking to read more by Cooper, and Eloquent Rage is definitely on my reread list. I would recommend that when you start this one, you have some time on your hand. Not only to read the book, but to do a lot of self reflection. I find that feminist pieces that have their own voice, really hit me harder.

***I received a complimentary copy of this ebook from the publisher through NetGalley. Opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own.***

I would read anything by Brittney Cooper. I've been a fan of her work for a long time and was absolutely thrilled with this collection of essays that unpack the Black female experience. She tackles so many great issues that not only deal with the oppression of whiteness, but also the oppression Black women experience within their own communities, from dating, sexual violence, and alienating successful Black women. Overall incredibly insightful. I hope she writes a lot more.

This is a brilliant essay collection that focuses on feminism and black women. Cooper discusses everything from the "angry black woman" stereotype to reproductive rights to faith to pop culture and how it all plays into feminism. It's a bit drawn out in places, but literally, everything the author writes is thought-provoking. If you are want to read something that will stretch your own way of thinking when it comes to the feminist movement, particularly one from the black perspective, you must read this. *ARC provided by the publisher in exchange for my honest review.

Brittney Cooper is calling us all out! This book contains so much thoughtful commentary and insight, while remaining hyperfocused on the key subject of black womanhood.

https://ofbooksandbikes.com/2018/04/14/recent-reading-4-14-2018/

Unapologetic, yet vulnerably personal, Dr. Cooper strips ambiguity from issues that can be tough to explain, like respectability politics, misogynoir, and White-lady tears.

Eloquent Rage isn't a rage that flails wildly at the world. It's a rage that is mature and well-honed on its mark. It's full of hard-fought and won clarity.

Cooper has had enough, and who can blame her?

I received my copy of Cooper’s essays free and early, thanks to Net Galley and St. Martin’s Press. Her prose is clear, articulate, and full of fire.

Had I read my post-Trayvon civil rights titles in a different sequence, I might very well have called this a five star collection. However, I read Samantha Irby, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Angela Davis, and Matt Taibbi first, and so the bar was set somewhere in the stratosphere when I opened this galley. I wanted Cooper’s viewpoints to be accompanied by some hard facts, complete with citations. However, for those looking to have their world view clarified and their consciousness raised, Cooper’s collection is recommended.

In many ways I really liked this book as I found it to be informative and readable. However, at times it felt like I was reading the memoir of someone I didn’t really know or have any interest in reading about. Don’t get me wrong, I do like memoirs, but I have to want to know more about the author’s life and this author just wasn’t someone I felt this about. So I think this could have done with some editing out of extremely personal stories that didn’t really seem to have a purpose or were repeated. This sounds like a negative review, but I actually did enjoy this book as it appeals to two of my major interests in non-fiction l: feminism and race. This author has a lot of potential and great ideas, I’m just not sure about the execution of this particular book.

An honest, smart, powerful read from a fresh, fierce voice. Read it.

Part memoir, part lecture series, these essays cover some serious ground. Cooper tackles everything from domestic abuse to intersectional feminism to Respectability Politics and the racism within the War on Drugs - all informed by personal experience but transformed into well-researched lessons on deconstructive sociology. The title was born from her journey learning to channel rage at injustice into productive, academic pursuits and it perfectly captures the thematic undercurrent of collection.

Eloquent Rage is an excellent and necessary book that is somehow as funny and irreverent as it is solemn and deadly fucking serious. Highly recommend it to anyone interested in Black Feminism - in Cooper's own words, "America needs a homegirl intervention in the worst way." The text falls somewhere between Ta-Nehisi Coates' We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy and Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist on the highbrow-to-accessible scale of discourse.

"The term 'feminist killjoys' is well-earned. Sometimes, in the bid for rightness, feminists and hyperwoke folks can take the joy out of everything. I actually think its irresponsible to wreck shop in people's world without giving them the tools to rebuild. It's fine to quote Audre Lorde to people and tell them, 'The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.' The harder work is helping people find better tools to work with. We have to smash the patriarchy, for sure. And we have to dismantle white supremacy, and homophobia, and a whole bunch of other terrible shit that makes life difficult for people. Rage is great at helping us to destroy things. That's why people are so afraid of it."

Words of Fire for These Times
An instant addition to my student development, toolkit, this is an erudite, if not always accessible, use of the power of Black feminist anger. The author confronts a society that has traditionally decided to diminish her contributions rather than elevate them, and delivers a clapback worthy of study, and in no small part, emulation.

Brittney Cooper is angry! She has every reason to be and so do we.
Eloquent Rage covers a range of topics from education to family, pop culture to spirituality. Brittany Cooper's writing is intelligent and accessible. I liked the clarity of her points and her vulnerability in speaking and owning her truth. I did find some of her views on dating a bit too traditional, haha. Bag Lady was a particularly poignant chapter, where she talks about the difference between empowerment (which black women are encouraged to attain) and power (what black women really need).

I received an advanced reader’s copy in exchange for an honest review.

There’s been a bunch of wonderful books published by Black Feminists this month, but this one really shines.. Cooper covers So many topics: family, race, pop culture, sexuality, domestic violence – but always in a way that is humanistic and pro-woman. There’s not a full snowed in this book, and while these topics can be heavy, her light and truth shine so brightly that the reader always feels inspired.

In an prose style both academically serious & yet casually accessible, Cooper gives readers a primer on the deep roots of feminism and how it can, ought to be practiced today. Her tone is at once personal, riveting, and urgent making these essays perhaps some of the best for those black women looking for solidarity--it is also perhaps one of the best critiques of white feminism one can find making it indispensable to white women and all men.

An absolute must-read--the book I have been waiting for. Brittney Cooper's voice is essential in the conversation about and fight for feminism. I'm adding this to the list of essential spring reading for my library's blog.

Eloquent Rage is a searing book on what it means to be a Black woman in America and the importance of Black feminism. Reflecting on her childhood, the family dynamic in which she grew up, attending both predominantly White public schools and a Black university, as well as examining her career as a professor of women’s and gender studies, Cooper is honest and thoughtful, presenting a necessary treatise for our society.

Black women in America have long been treated as a lower class within all aspects of our society. Within feminism itself, a call to consider race is called divisive. In politics, a call to consider gender is called divisive. When Black women speak up on any issue they are often labelled as angry, and again, divisive.

Brittney Cooper presents a feminism that is unapologetically Black and can be embraced by all. We aren’t getting anywhere by dividing and excluding. We won’t be respected until all of us are respected.

As a white woman reading this book, I gained so much that I will carry with me each day. As an ally who has already been cognizant of the fight that Black women put up daily in our society, I gained a lot more knowledge that I can take with me into my everyday spaces.

Do not turn away from this book because you think that it doesn’t apply to you. No matter your gender or your race, this is a book that you need to read. And if this book hits you so hard that you feel the need to argue with it, take a moment and realize that you really needed this book. If you feel called out by this book, you needed to be called out. This will be your turning point. This will be the start of your education, and through that process, a bigger step toward the society we all deserve.

Thoughts on our current crisis from a black feminist perspective. “Black-girl feminism is all the rage, and we need all the rage.” But she recognizes that rage is dangerous, especially for a fat woman: “if you have the nerve to be fat and angry, then you are treated as a bully even if you are doing nothing aggressive at all.” Cooper wants us, especially black women, to respect the messiness of emotion around the work of justice, which also means not condemning members of marginalized groups for not being perfect; as she points out, “[v]ery often Black girls don’t get the opportunity to be in process.” Furthermore, “the power of a good political analysis is that it can be a masterful cloak for the emotional work we haven’t done,” which leads us to tear down others just a few steps up the ladder (Beyonce is her example of this among Black feminists). Her job as a Black feminist, she says, is to love Black women and girls. She criticizes those in the community, male and female, who teach girls to distrust each other, and argues that Black men should, but too often do not, stand in solidarity when Black women are killed as Black women have done for Black men.

Relatedly, she discusses her complicated reactions to Hillary Clinton; “white women’s racism has never kept me from admiring them, befriending them, or supporting them,” especially given the “similarities between how Black and white communities constrict and resent women who seek power.” Clinton’s “social awkwardness, her detail-oriented policy-wonk tendencies, and her devotion to the long game of racking up qualifications through intentional resume building feels familiar, because it is the very same strategy of every high-achieving Black woman I know.” Still, white feminists need to do better, since just as Black men have expected Black women to subordinate themselves (and feminism) to equalize male status, white women have put race before gender. [I think she conflates “mainstream media didn’t pay attention to Bill Cosby’s verbal attacks on Black women and Daniel Holtzclaw’s rapes of Black women” with “white feminists didn’t pay attention”--I don’t think even white feminists control the mainstream media, and I did know about these things from mostly white feminists, but that isn’t to say that her main point is wrong.] “White women and Black men share a kind of narcissism that comes from being viewed as the most vulnerable entities within their respective races.” Black men have too often been frustrated patriarchs, seeking the same power white men have rather than seeking to overturn that power—using Cosby and Eldridge Cleaver as horrible examples in which toxic racism produces exactly the monsters that white people fear.

Cooper discusses the childhood lessons about exceptionalism she learned and later discarded, her friendships with white girls and a smaller number of black girls also in advanced programs, and her early conclusion that abstinence was critical to her success. This distrust of sexuality, she argues, is part of why Black women often struggle to find/reclaim their wholeness even when they have material success. “To be Black in the United States is to be taught our flesh is dirty and evil. A liberatory theology for us cannot set us at war with our very bodies.” Thus, she rejects “respectability politics” that try to rely on exceptionalism and performing conservative white values—reframing such politics as “at their core a rage-management project,” a survival strategy for the exceptional that has largely outlived its usefulness, and she prefers to manage her rage differently, especially since “when you are twice as good, white folks will resent you for being better.” Elsehwere: “American democracy is not interested in acknowledging that a Barack Obama can be found in every Black community.” Meanwhile, America legitimizes white rage: “Had Darren Wilson been just a bit more ‘civil,’ Mike Brown might very well be alive.”

I appreciated Cooper’s reading of Michelle Obama’s appearance at the Trump inauguration. Mrs. Obama always had to navigate hugely difficult territory, and she became a fashion icon, but she wore her hair back and a relatively plain dress at the Trump inauguration: a “refusal to perform the public standard” that was itself a statement of rejection: “a signal to the world that what we were about to witness was some bullshit.” I also liked Cooper’s discussion of emotions, including white fear: Emotions just are what they are, but that doesn’t mean that you should let them control your actions. And Black people don’t get to express emotions (or screw up and be redeemed, or carry guns openly) with the same freedom as whites do.

Cooper also discusses the fraught issues of interracial relationships between Black men and white women, and the underemployment plus prison pipeline that severely impairs Black women’s chances of forming long-term relationships with Black men. She describes knowing Black men who are overcompensating for their own fathers’ absence by becoming “super dads”—but notes that “none of you thinks anything about learning to be better partners,” even though one big reason their fathers weren’t around was that they didn’t know how to be good partners to their mothers. “Kanye made millions blaming Black women for desiring men to have some level of economic stability”—that’s the genius of structural violence, that it is often enforced most strongly and intimately by peers. Cooper wants their resentment to turn instead to the structural conditions that made Black men so disadvantaged compared to white men (though still outearning Black women, even though Black women have higher average educational attainment). Ultimately, solutions within the community won’t work—buying Black is all well and good, but it can’t close the wealth gap. She cautions against relying on “resilience,” which is another way of saying “Let’s see just how much we can take away from you, before you break.”