Black women have worked hard to write a counternarrative of our worth in a global system where beauty is the only legitimate capital allowed women wi… - Tressie McMillan Cottom

Beauty is not good capital. I compounds the oppression of gender. It constrains those who identify as women against their will. It costs money and demands money. It colonizes. It hurts. It is painful. It can never be fully satisfied. It is not useful for human flourishing. Beauty is, like all capital, merely valuable.

Beauty is not good capital. It compounds the oppression of gender. It constrains those who identify as women against their will. It costs money and demands money. It colonizes. It hurts. It is painful. It can never be fully satisfied. It is not useful for human flourishing. Beauty is, like all capital, merely valuable.

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.

"When people talk about for-profit colleges, they often do so with a lot of disdain. If traditional colleges that take in a fraction of willing students every year annoy you, then you might be disdainful of their "prestige cartel." If you are concerned about vulnerable people making expensive educational decisions with little education, then you might disdain the "predatory" for-profit schools. If you think that a strong work ethic can trump all manner of troubles, you might disdain the "weak" people who go to a "predatory" school. What is interesting to me is how much disdain is spread among students and schools and how little disdain there is for labor markets."

"I just like what I like" is always a capitalist lie.