Tressie McMillan Cottom Quotes

The easiest answer is that racism and sexism and class warfare are resilient and necessary for global capitalism.

When the privilege to read and to think comes great responsibility. When you have that privilege precisely because so many others like you — black women — are systematically filtered out of every level of social status, then the responsibility is especially great.

Political theorist Corey Robin understands the history of the conservative right in the United States as a search for a fight, because the act of being conservative necessitates an undesirable progress against which it can rebel. In a sort of manifestation politics, the “right” co-creates or at least abets social progress against which it can be juxtaposed. Staid conservatism is far from seeking stasis. It is provoking and reactive because without progress there is no reason to prefer the lack of progress.

If beauty matters at all to how people perceive you, how institutions treat you, which rules are applied to you, and what choices you can make, then beauty must also be a structure of patterns, institutions, and exchanges that eats your preferences for lunch.

The joke was not on enslaved black women of yesteryear but on the idea that it would take a totalizing system of enslavement to counter the structural violence that beauty does to Jones in her life today.

Our whites are southern, like me. Even if they spent some time in places north and west, to become white in the South is to absorb some large part of its particular iteration of the U.S. racial hierarchy.

black women are rational and human.