Jennifer C. Nash Samantha Pinto A New Genealogy of “Intelligent Rage,” or Other Ways to Think about White Women in Feminism I n 1988, Patricia J. Williams published “On Being the Object of Property,” a Signs article that would become a chapter in her 1991 critical memoir, The Alchemy of Race and Rights. The article bears little change in its appearance in her book save for its subtitle: “a gift of intelligent rage” (216). While the text is often cited for its thoughtful consideration of whiteness— signaled through a rumination on polar bears—we begin with Williams’s sub- tle subtitle change to the least subtle of emotions, rage, in a contemporary moment when rage, as a feminist and particularly Black feminist political strat- egy, is at center stage in the feminist imagination. Williams’s vulnerable, con- templative chapter on intelligent rage moves in multiple ways: through more traditionally recognized eruptive public rage and through her own critical reckoning with individual injury, political righteousness, and what it means to keep living, working, and feeling in a world organized through racism: “Reclaiming that from which one has been disinherited is a good thing. Self- possession in the full sense of that expression is the companion to self-knowledge. Yet claiming for myself a heritage the weft of whose genesis is my own dis- inheritance is a profoundly troubling paradox” (217). We invoke Williams as a foremother in the articulation of Black feminist rage as both a necessity and a paradox, one whose work productively troubles the affective genealogy of rage’s political genesis and effects. In this article, we consider the question of intelligent rage as a form of Black feminist consciousness, an analytic of critically distant self-reflection, and a form of letting go of individualist solu- tions to the problem of white supremacy. We also examine how intelligent rage has been translated in the contemporary moment by scholars and public intellectuals such as Brittney Cooper (2018), who celebrates “eloquent rage” as a Black feminist ethic; Tiffany Lethabo King (2019), who diagnoses “the ecology of white feminine aggression as ‘our shared now’”; Rachel Cargle (2018), Jamilah Lemieux (2017), and a raft of scholars and thinkers on the contemporary “problem” of white women in relationship to Black femi- nism (King 2019). Beyond this very recent trajectory, we trace another ge- nealogy of Black feminism’s strong feelings around white women and white [Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2021, vol. 46, no. 4] © 2021 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2021/4604-0005$10.00