Beauty isn't actually what you look like; beauty is the preferences that reproduce the existing social order. - Tressie McMillan Cottom

Being too much of one thing and not enough of another had been a recurring theme in my life. I was, like many young women, expected to be small so that boys could expand and white girls could shine.

When I would not shrink, people made sure that I knew I had erred.

It has to be for whiteness, at any point in time or space, to enact its ultimate expression: elasticity. Whiteness, the idea, the identity tethered to no nation of origin, no place, no gods, exists only if it can expand enough to defend its position over every group that challenges the throne. White is being European until it needs to also be Irish because of the Polish who can eventually be white if it means that Koreans cannot. For that situational dominance to reproduce itself, there must be a steady pole. That pole is blackness.

their feet. That is a black woman’s specialty. The personal essay had become the way that black women writers claim legitimacy in a public discourse that defines itself, in part, by how well it excludes black women. In a modern society, who is allowed to speak with authority is a political act.