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

I am, by most measures, pretty smart. My grandmother was smarter. She was do-the-Times-crossword-in-pen smart.

Then, and only then, will you understand the relative value of a ridiculous status symbol to someone who intuits that they cannot afford to not have it.

When we perform some existential service to men, to capital, to political power, to white women, and even to other “people of color” who are marginally closer to white than they are to black, then we are superwomen. 7 We are fulfilling our purpose in the natural order of things. When, instead, black women are strong in service of themselves, that same strength, wisdom, and wit become evidence of our incompetence.