It has to be for whiteness, at any point in time or space, to enact its ultimate expression: elasticity. Whiteness, the idea, the identity tethered t… - 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.

Throughout the public discussions about “white people calling the cops on black people who are just living” is the idea that black people were, in almost all of these cases, buying something. Or they had rightfully bought something: a house, a meal, a cup of coffee. People made many appeals to the right of consumption. Americans have the right to buy! It is a tenuous right indicative of our consumer society. Being a consumer, or not, should not condition your civil rights. That kind of thinking is how we end up with cruel policies that police where homeless people can sit in public or where poor people can stand without violating an ordinance.

When we perform some existential service to men, to capital, to political power, to white women, and even to other “people of color” who are marginally closer to white than they are to black, then we are superwomen. 7 We are fulfilling our purpose in the natural order of things. When, instead, black women are strong in service of themselves, that same strength, wisdom, and wit become evidence of our incompetence.