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But sometimes I think this has something to do with my own ingenuity, or that I have simply dated less partners than my mother and grandmother have dated, and perhaps it’s very sadly just a numbers game. At 37, I’ve managed to not be a victim of domestic violence, and so hopefully that means that I’m able to break the cycle.

It’s one thing to hear the stories it’s another to sit down and write them down and realize that you might be living in a pattern you didn’t even know you were a part of. When I wrote that chapter, I didn’t realize the generational levels of violence.

#Brittney cooper books how to#

If structural conditions don’t get better and folks don’t have more access to mental health, and there’s increasing pressure to do more with a decreasing level of the social safety net, and an internal pressure with each other around how to be romantic partners, helped along with the explosion of romantic narratives-all of that is a stew for failure. I think that within our communities, there is deep-seated rage and not a lot of resources to deal with that. And when I talk to my homegirls, they share similar stories, so sexual violence is still pervasive. But still it’s so normative that if I talk to the women in my mom’s generation, in my family, they can share stories of brutal violence. Are we still dealing with the same toxic explosion of these issues? Have we made any progress on this front?ĭomestic violence rates in this country have gone down astronomically since the 1970s, and that’s true across races, so I don’t want to suggest we haven’t made any progress. Going back to your father’s story, I thought it was interesting the way you connect intimate violence, racism and militarism. I noticed when you talk about generational differences between yourself, your mother and your grandmother, the theme of violence is present. What bothers me when I hear people talk about Black relationships in the Steve Harvey/Tyler Perry pop-culture way is that we often get away from the structural causes, and Black women end up blaming themselves or seeing themselves as inadequate. It’s rare for us, I think, to address the struggles Black women face in finding and sustaining intimate relationships through a wider political and social lens. You were able to connect the personal with the political, with social structures and policies. I was especially moved by your chapter, “The Smartest Man I Never Knew,” about your absentee father. I want to be able to communicate homegirl-to-homegirl about patriarchy, which is what I attempted to do with Eloquent Rage. I write both academically and for popular audiences, but I care more about how to move communities and to write in community.

It required a different emotional labor, but it wasn’t the academic research labor. Eloquent Rage is a different kind of writing. Writing back-to-back was insane! But it’s how the chips fell. Could you talk about your writing process? It’s interesting how you wrote two books back to back, one that’s more academic, and the other that is more for a general audience. Cooper about her latest work-and how often the personal becomes the political. Touching on topics as varied as feminism, antiracism, Black Lives Matter, the Black Church, Beyoncé and Hillary Clinton, Eloquent Rage is a tour de force page-turner that bridges the urgency of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me with the grown-woman honesty of Joan Morgan’s When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost. Black feminist public scholar and Rutgers University professor Brittney Cooper has authored a new book, Eloquent Rage, on the heels of her accomplished scholarly work, Beyond Respectability.