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 … - Tressie McMillan Cottom

Beauty isn't actually what you look like; beauty is the preferences that reproduce the existing social order.

I was just a black girl, a little long in the tooth, but still in my mind just a black girl writing. Black girls do not cause problems for powerful white women or august professional publications or public discourse. 3 Black girls have not, for most of my understanding of our history in this nation, had the power to cause those kinds of problems. Black girls and black women are problems. That is not the same thing as causing problems. We are social issues to be solved, economic problems to be balanced, and emotional baggage to be overcome.

The joke was not on enslaved black women of yesteryear but on the idea that it would take a totalizing system of enslavement to counter the structural violence that beauty does to Jones in her life today.