Politics & Power Quote by Maya Angelou

Formidable is doing double duty here: it’s a compliment and a warning label, a word America has often reserved for Black women when it wants to acknowledge strength while quietly resenting it. Angelou names that reflex with unsparing clarity. The “amazement, distaste and even belligerence” isn’t about personality; it’s about the cultural shock of seeing someone refuse the scripted roles of servility, silence, or gratefulness. Her line catches a familiar national maneuver: celebrate Black women’s endurance as myth, then recoil when that endurance produces power, boundaries, and authority in real life.

The subtext is that “formidable” isn’t an accident of temperament. Angelou frames it as an “inevitable outcome” of survival, a trait forged under pressures the country rarely wants to itemize: racial terror, economic extraction, domestic labor, sexual vulnerability, the daily negotiations of dignity in a society built to deny it. By calling these women “survivors,” she implicitly rejects the condescending narrative of pathology and replaces it with lineage: struggle not as a personal tragedy but as collective victory, “won” through persistence and ingenuity.

She’s also correcting the moral math. Respect, she suggests, is the minimum debt owed; “enthusiastic acceptance” would be nicer, but the real indictment is that even basic recognition is withheld. In a few tight clauses, Angelou flips the gaze: the “belligerence” belongs not to the Black woman deemed too strong, but to a culture threatened by the evidence that oppression failed to fully script the self.