24 Quotes by Brittney Cooper

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.