Smart is only a construct of correspondence, between one’s abilities, one’s environment, and one’s moment in history. - Tressie McMillan Cottom

What so many black women know is what I learned as I sat at the end of a hallway with a dead baby in my arms. The networks of capital, be they polities or organizations, work most efficiently when your lowest status characteristic is assumed. And once these gears are in motion, you can never be competent enough to save your own life. That is how black feminism knows the future.

Political theorist Corey Robin understands the history of the conservative right in the United States as a search for a fight, because the act of being conservative necessitates an undesirable progress against which it can rebel. In a sort of manifestation politics, the “right” co-creates or at least abets social progress against which it can be juxtaposed. Staid conservatism is far from seeking stasis. It is provoking and reactive because without progress there is no reason to prefer the lack of progress.

The assumption of black women’s incompetence — we cannot know ourselves, express ourselves in a way that the context will render legible, or that prompts people with power to respond to us as agentic beings — supersedes even the most powerful status cultures in all of neoliberal capitalism: wealth and fame. In 2017 Serena Williams gave birth to her daughter. She celebrated with an interview, as is the ritual custom of celebrity cultures. In the interview, Serena describes how she had to bring to bear the full force of her authority as a global superstar to convince a nurse that she needed a treatment. The treatment likely saved Serena’s life. Many black women are not so lucky.