their feet. That is a black woman’s specialty. The personal essay had become the way that black women writers claim legitimacy in a public discourse … - Tressie McMillan Cottom

In a modern society, who is allowed to speak with authority is a political act.

When oppressed people become complicit in their oppression, joining the dominant class in their ideas about what we are, it is symbolic violence. Like all concepts, symbolic violence has a context that is important for using it to mean what we intend to mean. It is not just that internalizing the values of the dominant class violently stigmatizes us. Symbolic violence only makes sense if we accept its priors: all preferences in imperial, industrialized societies are shaped by the economic system. There aren’t any “good” preferences. There are only preferences that are validated by others, differently, based on social contexts.

Our whites are southern, like me. Even if they spent some time in places north and west, to become white in the South is to absorb some large part of its particular iteration of the U.S. racial hierarchy.

We were respectable.13 We went to church and paid tithes and wore slips and we drank but had the good sense to be ashamed that we did.