any system of oppression must allow exceptions to validate itself as meritorious. How else will those who are oppressed by the system internalize the… - 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./

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.

When the privilege to read and to think comes great responsibility. When you have that privilege precisely because so many others like you — black women — are systematically filtered out of every level of social status, then the responsibility is especially great.