Top 40 Brittney Cooper Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “I eat white-lady tears for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”

— Brittney Cooper

2. “When I talk about owning eloquent rage as your superpower, it comes with the clear caveat that not everyone is worth your time or your rage.”

— Brittney Cooper

3. “Black feminism is not a reactionary project. It is not about the damage that white girls do. Not solely or primarily. Black feminism is about the world Black women and girls can build, if all the haters would raise up and let us get to work. When I talk about owning eloquent rage as your superpower, it comes with the clear caveat that not everyone is worth your time or your rage. Black feminism taught me that. My job as a Black feminist is to love Black women and girls. Period.”

— Brittney Cooper

4. “One of feminism’s biggest failures is its failure to insist that feminism is, first and foremost, about truly, deeply, and unapologetically loving women.”

— Brittney Cooper

5. “Black women turn to sass when rage is too risky – because we have jobs to keep, families to feed, and bills to pay.”

— Brittney Cooper

6. “Sexism, like every other “ism,” is a willful refusal to not see what is right in front of you.”

— Brittney Cooper

7. “The truth is that Angry Black Women are looked upon as entities to be contained, as inconvenient citizens who keep on talking about their rights while refusing to do their duty and smile at everyone.”

— Brittney Cooper

8. “This doesn’t mean I’m never afraid. Being never scared has a cultural inflection to it that is about defiance, and about a refusal to be cowed into submission. To be black is to know you are being watched – at all times – anyway.”

— Brittney Cooper

9. “Voting once or even twice for a Black man is not enough to undo years of anti-Black social conditioning. Fear and feelings, especially about racism, have to be managed constantly.”

— Brittney Cooper

10. “I found it especially terrible that when it came to racial politics, many young progressives, across racial lines, were far more willing to train their hatred on Hillary Clinton, a white woman, than on Bernie Sanders, a white man. White women have absolutely been accomplices to the American project of white supremacy, but their husbands, brothers, fathers and sons have always been the masterminds. Let us never forget that.”

— Brittney Cooper

11. “White privilege works by making the advantages white people have invisible while making the supposedly ‘poor’ choices of people of color hypervisible.”

— Brittney Cooper

12. “I love being a woman and being a friend to other women,′ should be feminism’s tagline.”

— Brittney Cooper

13. “I have always lingered over stories of women who lead, women who know what they want out of this world, and women who demand that others respect them and recognize their magic.”

— Brittney Cooper

14. “Before we fully learn to love ourselves, all people of color in the United States learn that we are supporting characters and spectators in the collective story of white people’s lives.”

— Brittney Cooper

15. “When Bill Clinton signed the 1994 crime bill into law, effecting policy at the federal level, it created a ferment of tough-on-crime policies in forty-five states. The crime bill also funded massive increases in police officers across the country. Most striking were laws that allowed juveniles to be tried as adults for violent crimes, and laws that allowed juvenile offenders to receive automatic life sentences for certain crimes.”

— Brittney Cooper

16. “The lie we are told is that white rage and white fear are honest emotions that preserve the integrity of American democracy. More often than not, we keep learning that white rage and white fear are dishonest impulses that lead us toward fascism. White rage and white fear are reactions to perceptions among white people that their power might be slipping away.”

— Brittney Cooper

17. “In other words, white fears rest on the presumption that they are rooted in fact; everyone who is nonwhite is treated as though their fears are the stuff of fantasy.”

— Brittney Cooper

18. “Loving Black girls is complicated, but loving oneself in a world where there is always someone ready to do you harm is even harder.”

— Brittney Cooper

19. “According to several years of reports by the Violence Policy Center, in this, the second decade of the twenty-first century, eight Black women per week, more than one per day, are murdered, usually with guns, and usually by a Black male they know. More than one thousand women of all races are murdered each year, in similar incidents, usually by men of their own race. It has been said before, but it is worth saying again: Toxic masculinity kills.”

— Brittney Cooper

20. “But sometimes the only thing that is in order is to act out of order. To turn up, show out, and disrupt.”

— Brittney Cooper

21. “The lie we are told is that white rage and white fear are honest emotions that preserve the integrity of American democracy... White rage and white fear are reactions to perceptions among white people that their power might be slipping away. Black rage and Black fear are fundamentally more honest, because they are reactions to the violence of white supremacy.”

— Brittney Cooper

22. “We should not have to rely on supernatural acts of God to keep women safe.”

— Brittney Cooper

23. “White lady tears might seem to not be a big deal, but they are actually quite dangerous. When white women signal through their tears that they feel unsafe, misunderstood, or attacked, the whole world rises in their defense. The mythic nature of white female vulnerability compels protective impulses to arise in all men, regardless of race.”

— Brittney Cooper

24. “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. There is no other group, save Indigenous women, that knows and understands more fully the soul of the American body politic than Black women, whose reproductive and social labor have made the world what it is.”

— Brittney Cooper

25. “The collective, orchestrated fury of Black women can move the whole world.”

— Brittney Cooper

26. “White fear is not subject to any such cultural or religious scrutiny. In fact, white fears are routinely treated as fact rather than fantasy.”

— Brittney Cooper

27. “Those who feel “empowered” talk about their personal power to change their individual condition. Those with actual power make decisions that are of social and material consequence to themselves and others.”

— Brittney Cooper

28. “I stand by the notion that the ideas I learned in those places, and that all the things Black feminism has taught me, can help our folks get free.”

— Brittney Cooper

29. “May you ask more and better questions. Homegirl interventions leave me with more questions than answers. But usually they leave me with far better questions than I began with. May your curiosity be unceasing.”

— Brittney Cooper

30. “What you build is infinitely more important than what you tear down.”

— Brittney Cooper

31. “We live in a nation that does everything to induce our rage, while simultaneously doing everything to deny that we have a right to feel it. American democracy is as much a project of suppressing Black rage as it is of legitimizing and elevating white rage. American democracy uses calls for civility, equality, liberty, and justice as smoke screens to obscure all the ways in which Black folks are treated uncivilly, unequally, illiberally, and unjustly as a matter of course.”

— Brittney Cooper

32. “Still, our guilt over leaving people behind nips at our heels, at every new station that we reach. For instance, whenever there is a convening at an academic conference, invariably some young radical person will get on the mic to ask, “Who isn’t in the room? Who are we excluding?” These questions matter, but they can also be deeply annoying because very often they are a performance of middle-class angst.”

— Brittney Cooper

33. “Most white people fixate on the anger and rage that feels palpable at Black Lives Matter protests. They view this rage with a studied indifference and a willful ignorance that is about not seeing or validating Black people’s fear and right to be afraid.”

— Brittney Cooper

34. “We need to embrace the ways we are in process more.”

— Brittney Cooper

35. “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.”

— Brittney Cooper

36. “I am always struck by the ways other people’s stories about my father tend to highlight his empathy and kindness for others. I wonder about a world in which you can be kind to everyone but the people who belong to you.”

— Brittney Cooper

37. “White women have absolutely been accomplices to the American project of white supremacy, but their husbands, brothers, fathers, and sons have always been the masterminds. Let us never forget that.”

— Brittney Cooper

38. “Black women have long been aware of what it means to be stuck in traffic, confined to the intersections of social discourses that bypass us on their way to futures to which we don’t have access.”

— Brittney Cooper

39. “The thing I know today, after many cycles of homegirls, many more years of girl crushes, and a life of straight sexual activity, is that one can’t truly be a feminist if you don’t really love women.”

— Brittney Cooper

40. “But part of what I’ve been trying to say is that rage can help us build things, too. 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.”

— Brittney Cooper

41. “I’m not planning to go back home to live, because where I’m from is no place for a radical feminist Black girl who likes to challenge preachers in her spare time. But I am responsible in big and small ways for making that place and places like it better, more equitable and more just.”

— Brittney Cooper