We know what it means to do a whole lot with very little, to “make a dollar out of fifteen cents,” as it were. Black women know what it means to love ourselves in a world that hates us. 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. We have been dreaming of freedom and carving out spaces for liberation since we arrived on these shores. And I was fooling no one.īlack women have the right to be mad as hell. She had seen through the veneer, seen the lie I was telling. And then she said, “Brittney, you know you’re angry.” I felt exposed. She fixed me with a telltale look that only another Black woman can give you, a look that said, Girl, be for real. Even though I was only in my mid-twenties at the time, I had already experienced many years of white people doing that thing they do to articulate Black women-always asking us “Why are you so angry?” I hated the accusation from others, usually white people, because it was unfair, a way to discredit the legitimacy of the things Black women say by calling them emotional and irrational. “I’m passionate.” By then, I was wary of the Angry Black Woman stereotype. What did she mean by rage? “I’m not angry,” I told her.
But it was, like, the most eloquent rage ever.” I immediately felt defensive. As we were standing around with a group of others, chatting, she said, “I loved having you as my professor. Erica was a brilliant Black girl who wrote great papers and asked really smart questions. Some years ago, I ran into a former student on the college campus where I was teaching. Don’t you just hate when folks yell at you to “Smile!”? I told the last man who said that shit to me, “ You smile!” 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.
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. The story goes that Angry Black Women scare babies, old people, and grown men. We are told we are irrational, crazy, out of touch, entitled, disruptive, and not team players. Angry Black Women get dismissed all the time. Owning anger is a dangerous thing if you’re a fat Black girl like me. But it’s unclear whether we are really being taken seriously. Black women who hold their communities together also hold our broader American community together. Black women turn to sass when rage is too risky-because we have jobs to keep, families to feed, and bills to pay. But this is not a sassy Black girl’s tale. Not wanting to offend this woman who I otherwise really liked, I simply said, “We’re not all like that.” She looked disappointed. She loved it, she said, when Black women put their hands on their hips and swiveled their necks in protest. To her, these stereotypical portrayals made Black folks seem understandable, even though to me, her descriptions felt like we were exotic others. My Malaysian roommate, who had seen many episodes of the old nineties sitcom Family Matters, told me that she loved Black women because we were sassy like Harriette and Laura Winslow, the main Black female characters on that show. Years after that, I was doing a summer abroad in South Korea. When I looked at her with question marks in my eyes, she said, “You know, they mean the way I talk to them and roll my neck,” and demonstrated it for me. In my first terrible job after college, my boss, an older white woman, told me that the students at the predominantly Black school at which we worked had deemed her an honorary Black woman. You know, those caricatures of finger-waving, eye-rolling Black women at whom everyone loves to laugh-women like Tyler Perry’s Madea, Mammy in Gone with the Wind, or Nell from that old eighties sitcom Gimme a Break! These kinds of Black women put white folks at ease. When it comes to Black women, sometimes Americans don’t recognize that sass is simply a more palatable form of rage. And that’s the place where more women should begin-with the things that make us angry. To be clear, I’m not really into self-help books, so I don’t have one of those catchy three-step plans for changing the world. These women want to change things but don’t know where to begin. This is a book for women who know shit is fucked up. This is a book for women who expect to be taken seriously and for men who take grown women seriously. This is a book by a grown-ass woman written for other grown-ass women.
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