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

I am, by most measures, pretty smart. My grandmother was smarter. She was do-the-Times-crossword-in-pen smart.

As I have argued elsewhere in this volume, whiteness has the political power to be elastic. Originating as it does not from nation or kin but from the primordial ooze of capitalism, whiteness can only be defined by state power.

What we forget, if we ever knew, is that what we know now about status and wealth creation and sacrifice are predicated on who we are — that is, not poor.

If you change the conditions of your not-poor status, you change everything you know as a result of being a not-poor. 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.