#Brittney cooper books driver#
#Brittney cooper books series#

It’s always New York, Oakland, and Los Angeles. I’m unimpressed with the whole “New York is so progressive” and the rest of the world is not. Typically, I’m often saying to my New York folks that I’m not impressed with y’all. We can even find that in the South of the late 20th and 21st centuries. We can find the South as a space where Black women can be shaped into having a radical politics.

Southern Black people are often cast as being so politically retrograde, churchy, and morally conservative that they’re not on board with a progressive social project. I also wanted to highlight Southerness because there’s a way that some of the progressive kinds of discourse, particularly around feminism, are seen as not coming out of the South.

#Brittney cooper books driver#

I recently flew into Atlanta, and when the driver picked me up, I was like, “There’s Blackness, and you’re nice!” It just made me feel at home and happy, so I always want to be grounded in particular kinds of Southerness that feel familiar. It affects how I think about my interactions with people. I understand Southerness to be core to my identity. I’m simply a Southern girl, even though I feel like a Southern expat living in New Jersey. Was discussing region as it relates to identity important to you as you crafted the book?Ībsolutely. In the book, you spend a lot of time positioning yourself as a Southern Black girl.

And in this interview, she breaks down the difference between eloquent and righteous rage, the importance of positioning the South as a home for radical feminism, and how Black Feminism can be more constructive and less reactionary. Cooper’s book will bring many women into feminism in the way that Joan Morgan’s 1999 manifesto, When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: My Life as A Hip Hop Feminist. She doesn’t create villains, but she does hold people accountable for maligning Black women and causing us harm. Since January 2017, Cooper has released three books, and she’s finishing out this trifecta with Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower, a memoir that combines cultural criticism and personal reflections to explore how she, and the Black women she’s encountered, use rage (and joy) to carve unique spaces for themselves.Įloquent Rage is striking because Cooper carefully constructs the people in her orbit. Whether it’s the students in her classes at Rutgers University, audiences watching her on various MSNBC shows, or the scholars and other students who pack her lectures around the world, Cooper has demonstrated her command of a multitude of topics, including the ever-evolving political project of Black Feminism, the history of Black women intellectuals, and how hip hop has informed her feminism. Brittney Cooper speaks, the world stops to listen. This story was originally published on February 20, 2018. Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9

It is our hope that by the end of it, you’re revved up and ready to rage in a time when it’s more important than ever to put women’s anger to work.

#Brittney cooper books series#

We get to decide how we wield our anger, and this series is a mere entry point for a canon of work about women’s rage. “The Future is Furious” is a weeklong series about women’s anger-and, more specifically, about how that anger is policed, dismissed, and overlooked because its potent, transformative social and political power terrifies people. Women’s anger is a powerful, unshakeable force that sends people from marginalized communities into the streets, the courtrooms, the classrooms, and beyond to fight for the more just world that our ancestors fought for and our descendants will fight for long after we’re gone. Women’s anger has fueled every political movement in the United States, from suffrage to Civil Rights to #MeToo.