My first black president seems to think that he could raise his daughters to believe in systemic racism without legitimizing the idea of systemic rep… - Tressie McMillan Cottom

This moment of global inequality demands incompetent subjects. The status quo and ever-intensifying versions of it require incompetent consumers who will learn to want technological solutions to their political problems.

I have the job and the title and the letters after my name that black people are so fond of calling our educational credentials. Still, there is some tension about how I got here and what I do here. I feel the tension from colleagues who cannot process why I receive so much attention. I feel it from publics who cannot fathom why I do not get more attention or different kinds of attention. Editors want me to be a journalist. Journalists want me to stay as far away from their beat as possible. Publishers want a black woman on their pages without the expense of adding one to their mastheads. No one quite knows what to make of the work that represents the intellectual journey I took from little black girl to black woman who thinks for a living.

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.