But if I believe that I can become beautiful, I become an economic subject. My desire becomes a market. And my faith becomes a salve for the white wo… - Tressie McMillan Cottom

But if I believe that I can become beautiful, I become an economic subject. My desire becomes a marker.

White women need me to believe I can earn beauty, because when I want what I cannot have, what they have becomes all the more valuable.

White women need me to believe I can earn beauty, because when I want what I cannot have, what they have becomes all the more valuable. I refuse them.

If I believe that I can become beautiful, I become an economic subject. My desire becomes a market.

My first black president seems to think that he could raise his daughters to believe in systemic racism without legitimizing the idea of systemic reparations. He thinks that he can be his brother’s keeper without changing the policies, laws, and investments that keep his brothers in bad jobs, in poor neighborhoods, with bad educational options, and at the bottom of the social hierarchy. My first black president seems to think he can have black cool without black burden. For all his intimacies with his white mother and white grandparents, my first black president doesn’t appear to know his whites.

Throughout the public discussions about “white people calling the cops on black people who are just living” is the idea that black people were, in almost all of these cases, buying something. Or they had rightfully bought something: a house, a meal, a cup of coffee. People made many appeals to the right of consumption. Americans have the right to buy! It is a tenuous right indicative of our consumer society. Being a consumer, or not, should not condition your civil rights. That kind of thinking is how we end up with cruel policies that police where homeless people can sit in public or where poor people can stand without violating an ordinance.

I fix myself, even when it causes great pain to do so, because I know that I cannot fix the way the world sees me.