... I try really hard not to write dumb things. I cannot speak for Mr. Brooks. - Tressie McMillan Cottom

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.

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

It is the industrial complex of cosmetics, enhancements and services that promise individual women beauty. The idea that Big Beauty is evil but good men are nice is part of Big Beauty’s systematic charm. Big Beauty is just negging without the slimy actor. The constant destabilization of self is part and parcel of beauty’s effectiveness as a social construct. When a woman must consume the tastes of her social position to keep it, but cannot control the tastes that define said position, she is suspended in a state of being negged. A good man need only then to come along and capitalize on the moment of negging, exploit the value of negged women, and consume the beauty that negs. It is really quite neat, if you think about it.