They say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and that ugly is as ugly does. Both are lies. Ugly is everything done to you in the name of beauty… - Tressie McMillan Cottom

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.

Compared with the forms of oppression they can now see via their proximity to me, it may seem to privileged people that it is easier to fix me than it is to fix the world. I live to disabuse people of that notion.

My first black president seems to think that he could raise his daughters to believe in systemic racism without legitimizing the idea of systemic reparations. He thinks that he can be his brother’s keeper without changing the policies, laws, and investments that keep his brothers in bad jobs, in poor neighborhoods, with bad educational options, and at the bottom of the social hierarchy. My first black president seems to think he can have black cool without black burden. For all his intimacies with his white mother and white grandparents, my first black president doesn’t appear to know his whites.