This moment of global inequality demands incompetent subjects. The status quo and ever-intensifying versions of it require incompetent consumers who … - Tressie McMillan Cottom

When you are vulnerable and on the losing end of a power dynamic, all you can hear of that kind of direct, unsolicited feedback is how — despite all of your hard work — /you are still doing everything wrong./

If my work is about anything it is about making plain precisely how prestige, money, and power structure our so-called democratic institutions so that most of us will always fail.

What we forget, if we ever knew, is that what we know now about status and wealth creation and sacrifice are predicated on who we are — that is, not poor.

If you change the conditions of your not-poor status, you change everything you know as a result of being a not-poor. You have no idea what you would do if you were poor until you are poor. And not intermittently poor or formerly not-poor, but born poor, expected to be poor, and treated by bureaucracies, gatekeepers, and well-meaning respectability authorities as inherently poor. 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.