Truth-Telling Is Too Much For The Cowardly Right-Wing Mob

Brittney Cooper's Truth-Telling Is Too Much For The Cowardly Right-Wing Mob



Cooper is one of America’s leading academics on race and gender, and she represents a younger generation of Black academics who speak truth to power beyond the ivy walls, without the usual social niceties that mute the message. She recognizes that a system of white supremacy and misogyny wants to destroy her, destroy Black people, and destroy Black women, and she is not vague in talking about its strategy and tactics.

When Cooper appeared on the Root Institute, a series of conversations hosted by The Root’s Michael Harriot, the discussion centered on the topic of critical race theory, the graduate-level framework that right-wing mobs now pretend is being taught to preschool students to make white kids feel bad about themselves. White people are invested in their possession of power, Cooper said, and it corrupts and terrifies them when Black people obtain some of that power in a pluralistic, more diverse society.

In the conversation, Harriot presents Cooper with two options: White people either give up their privilege, or they hold on to it. If those are the options, then what are Black people to do with the concept of white supremacy and the power attached to it?

“There is no answer that is sufficient,” Cooper replied. “The thing I want to say is that we’ve got to take these muthafrickas out. But we can’t say that. I don’t believe in a project of violence. I truly don’t. Because in the end, our souls suffer from that.”

“We’ve got to take these muthafrickas out” ? the right-wing media ecosystem seized on the soundbite. They had what they needed to activate the customary tsunami of faux outrage. The mob follows the same strategy every time.
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