"When people talk about for-profit colleges, they often do so with a lot of disdain. If traditional colleges that take in a fraction of willing stude… - Tressie McMillan Cottom

Systems of exchange tend to generate the kind of ideas that work well as exchanges. Because it can be an idea and a good and a body, beauty serves many useful functions for our economic system. Even better, beauty can be political. It can exclude and include, one of the basic conditions of any politics. Beauty has it all. It can be political, economic, external, individualized, generalizing, exclusionary, and perhaps best of all a story that can be told.

Being too much of one thing and not enough of another had been a recurring theme in my life. I was, like many young women, expected to be small so that boys could expand and white girls could shine.

When I would not shrink, people made sure that I knew I had erred.

Smart is only a construct of correspondence between one's abilities, one's environment, and one's moment in history. I am smart in the right way, in the right time, on the right end of globalization.