If beauty matters at all to how people perceive you, how institutions treat you, which rules are applied to you, and what choices you can make, then … - Tressie McMillan Cottom

And sometimes, when we are trapped in the race not to be complicit in our own oppression, self-definition masquerades as a notion of loving our black selves in white terms. More than that, critique that hides the power being played out in the theater of our everyday lives only serves that power. It doesn't actually challenge it. When I say that I am unattractive or ugly, I am not internalizing the dominant culture's assessment of me. I am naming what has been done to me. And signaling who did it.

In sociology, we often refer to black people who are in the United States but who are not descendants of either the enslaved or, later, of those who experienced the Great Migration as “black ethnics.” It is a complicated term because it implies that black Americans do not have an ethnicity.

I want to be able to show up and raise the hell at the precise right moment that might tip the scales in a way that will make something a little more clear, or a little bit more just, for people I care about…