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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.