Brittney Cooper
speaker
90 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Brittney Cooper’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Yeah. You know, Rebecca and I were chit-chatting right before we went live today, and we were talking about this notion of like standing still or sitting still or just, you know, it's like when you're doing yoga and you have to breathe into the stretch, right? You have to get all the way into that. tension. And it reminds me of like, you know, I come from very Southern rural people.
And when we used to have thunderstorms down South, my grandmother would say, turn off all the lights and sit down. The Lord is at work. Right. And so we weren't allowed to move around the house when, when it was thundering and lightning, there was this kind of inherent reverence for like, we are not in charge right now. The earth is in charge. The cosmos is in charge. And our job is to
take a beat, right? And sit and hope for a better outcome. So it is not about retreating. I don't think it's about running away, but I do think that there's, so I think a couple of things. One is that we have to learn what it means when Black women and just old folks say, be still. And they would say it in the biblical sense, be still and know that I am God.
However you understand God to be, however you understand the world to be organized in that way. But there's something about the stillness that brings clarity because there's all this energy, all this chaos, all of this whatever. And a lot of it is designed to make us not be able to hear ourselves think. Right.
And so I think that we can give ourselves, we already know, one, we've had a peek at the playbook. Two, we've had an empirical experience of the foolishness. So we already know that what they plan to do is maximum chaos and destruction, not unlike what Rebecca said about toddlers. And I actually had a similar vision of that this morning, Rebecca. I was writing
And I was like, oh, no, they're like throwing a tantrum. And when they're throwing a tantrum, what they're doing is attention seeking. Right. And Trump in particular, though I'm loathe to say his name, the thing that is most true about him is that he is an attention seeker. He is a showman. The thing that he most wants is all eyes on him.
So the refusal to grant him that, the ratings, I mean, this man has moved his inauguration indoors, not because of the cold, but because he knew he wasn't going to do the numbers. Right. One of my friends was like, let me see. A few days ago, one of my friends said, let me see if I can get a hotel room in D.C. this week. A hundred percent. Yeah.
And there was plenty of availability all throughout the city. And so he knew he wasn't going to have the numbers. And so he said he was protecting the people, right? So I think that there's a thing in this moment about just the choice to be still. And then from that position, the other thing I was thinking, which is... a thing that I'm working through.
I was part of that generation of feminists who were like, we're throwing off our strong black woman capes. We're not doing this strong black woman shit anymore, you know, because we deserve to be vulnerable in the soft life and all of this stuff. And the thing that losing my mother has taught me is, and it is akin to the thing Rebecca said about the political work that I do,
is that one thing that I think we have not prepared our slightly younger forebears for is that there are some moments in American history where the soft life is not an option and where you either are strong or you die. And that is it. And that all of those Black women that today, Black feminists like myself and those younger than me, like to look at them and say, why are they so hard?
Why are they so unfeeling? Why are they so cold? Why are they impenetrable? Because that was the way that they survived. Now, do I think that that's emotionally healthy? No. Do I think that there are real consequences to that? Sure. But have I now confronted a set of circumstances in my life where my two options were
You leave your mother in this graveyard and you go forward with your life or you die here with her. There are no options in between there. There are not. And this is the place that we are. There is not fluffiness. I am not saying we can't have gentleness and kindness and care and compassion. I am saying...
that whatever this version of we all want to be vulnerable, feel all our feelings everywhere, and have a world where everyone is like... Look, I teach young people, and the level at which they want us all to put up foam buffers around their lives so that they don't ever have to hit a hard corner is weird. And I'm like, oh, we're done with that. And so...
I don't know how to deal politically with the fact that I have a set of feminist principles that are all about care and softness and our right for vulnerability and our right to process our trauma. And I am like, these motherfuckers are coming for us. And when I look... at the Black women in the 19th century who grew up in Reconstruction thinking, look, we're on the dawn of a new era.
And then by the time they're 30, Jim Crow has set in. And they're lynching Black people by the thousands. And they are hunting folks with dogs. And they are snatching women off the streets and raping them. And that's their literal reality. I'm not being hyperbolic. That's literally what happened. in a world where they had been granted rights, where the trains had been desegregated.
All of that shit happened in this country in the 1860s. And then by the 1890s, it's all gone. And those women, what they did was they like straightened their backs and they said, all right then, We see you. And so we don't have time for all our feelings and our musings and our whatever. We have to build a civil society that is going to take care of the most vulnerable.
We have to continue to say that this is not the way we want the world to work. But we have to do that while we are building hospitals. hospitals and schools, a healthcare system, a protection system, and a mode of being with each other that is going to help us to outlast this thing that seeks to destroy us. And in order to do that, first, you got to work on feeling all your feelings.
And then you got to recognize that there are sometimes only two options. And I hate it. I'm not saying I don't resent it. I'm not saying I don't want a different reality, but I am telling you from the depths of my
own grief and journey around having to rebuild my life again that sometimes there are only two options and those options are be strong or die that is it and I think that a bunch of badass women together will just figure out how to fucking be strong
Let's sit and look at what this victory looks like. Can I jump in and say, one of the ways that I think that people can accept this better is to do what I did on my birthday, which is that I went to a rage room. And in that rage room, there was a picture of Trump's face on the wall. And I was given a
Showing 41–60 of 90 · page 3 of 5
← Previous
Next →