White women need me to believe I can earn beauty, because when I want what I cannot have, what they have becomes all the more valuable. I refuse them. - Tressie McMillan Cottom

You have no idea what you would do if you were poor until you are poor. And not intermittently poor or formerly not-poor, but born poor, expected to be poor, and treated by bureaucracies, gatekeepers, and well-meaning respectability authorities as inherently poor. Then, and only then, will you understand the relative value of a ridiculous status symbol to someone who intuits that they cannot afford to not have it.

If you think that I am intelligent and ambitious and reasoned and formidable, if you think one good thing about me at all, then I insist that you reconcile that with me just being regular black-black.

He means what kind of special negro are you?