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.
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Appearances
crate of glass objects that I could throw at said wall and a container of metal bats and about 20 minutes and a soundtrack of my choosing. And so I just wailed for 20 minutes. I broke shit. I threw it at the walls. I had my own contained temper tantrum.
And I know that's not what y'all expected me to say, but listen, because this is rage inducing and then you roll around and you carry it in your body and you don't have any way to get it out. And I think the thing is that we have been provoked, mistreated, and we're gonna be mistreated even more. So if there's the like, how do I not complain? What do I do with all of my frustration and my anger?
It is like, find a healthy way to actually go and take it out in a more contained space. Because what we are living through is a world where white people are, not the lovely white folks here, not that I need to say that, but the white folk in the aggregate who voted for this, are like, you know, I think, let me say it in an even more specific framework.
We still didn't manage in this election to like win white women over. Now the college educated white girls actually did better. And I want to acknowledge that because I think that's significant. And I'm like, okay, y'all got it. Y'all just need to organize your people a little bit more. So there's that.
But I was like, why would white women keep voting for this while they're also like bleeding out in parking lots? Like, why would they keep doing it? But I realized that some of it is because
Their whole view of their identity and value in a system where they don't have money or power, but they have proximity to those things, is they've got to be able to pass on a world to their sons that was like the world of their fathers and their husbands. White women have been told that to be a success as a white woman is to pass on a world where your white sons can be rich forever.
can be powerful, can be at the top of the heap, and that your daughters will have these kind of men to marry. Like, it's very heteronormative. I mean, I ain't even thinking about queer folks at all. But it is literally to secure property, money, and power for white boys and teach them how to rule the world so that then they can just continue to reproduce themselves.
That's their emotional investment in it. Then, so when this masculinity, this violent masculinity that Rebecca's talking about, I love Jesus, right, and I hate D.E.I.,
What that converges in for white women is, and in order for you not to be a failure to the race and not to be a failure as a woman, your job is to secure a set of conditions for your sons to be ascendant and for your daughters to just reproduce that ascendancy over and over again from generation to generation, right?
So that is the world that they're trying to get back to is a world where white ascendancy was guaranteed and their fight over the 50s and 60s is a fight about that. And so the thing that I also then came to around this is that does devastate me. And I think this is the best way to say it.
I wrote this essay this morning at the Substack I run with my feminist collective, with the Crunk Feminist Collective. And I said, oh, the 20th century project is dead. That's what these in their desire to resuscitate the 50s and 60s. These folks are saying we want to resuscitate the great American century.
But what they have actually done is killed the things that were solidly good about the 20th century. Right. All of the civil rights legislation that we get in these people literally with the swipe of a pen and a rogue Supreme Court, they have literally killed it. Their plan is. was to kill the project of the 20th century in this quarter century into the 21st century.
And for young people listening, you know how y'all are always like, you know, because the 1900s, right, which takes me out every time they say it, right? Young people talk about the 1900s like we talk about the 1800s, right? That's right. And so these people are like the 1900s, you know, when y'all used to do all this kind of stuff, these folks have come along to kill the 1900s. Right.
And to say that all of the things that actually made America that won the American century, it wasn't just that we were a world superpower and a military superpower after World War II. It was also that when we then had the upheavals of civil rights and black power,
to a certain extent, we were able to assimilate some of the lessons and make space for the emergence of a Black political class, a Black professional class, some measure of integration. Now, a lot of that stuff gets pushed back even before we leave the 20th century, but you can see an appreciable difference
in the second half of the 20th century that you'd seen in any other time of the nation's history. And what this essentially did yesterday was to say that that project is dead.
And one of the things that's gonna be really hard for those of us who are over the age of 25 is that we have lived in a world where that project, and particularly the more progressive parts of it, have shaped our idea of the possible. And now all of it is gone away. And so we have to have some new idea of the possible. And we don't have a 21st century version of the possible beyond Barack Obama.
And I would say that, quite frankly, he's really just evidence of the long 20th century. I don't even know if his story fully belongs to the 21st century. And I know I'm being super wonky and academic or whatever, but I'm really just trying to say that these folks have killed effectively the parts of the 20th century that those of us who were progressive minded are proud of.
Like that when we're confronted as a country with the bad parts of ourselves, we're willing to try to use our systems to make them better. These guys have said, we don't want to do that anymore.
Yeah, it feels directional. And it's not just like, white women also have a history of having to be stalwart. Those first wave white ladies, those suffragists, Susan B. Anthony and Alice Paul and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Listen, I'm not saying they didn't have some problematic, you know, racial politics or whatever.
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