Fox News scaled new heights of shrill paranoia. Then they built a stair lift to the top for their predominantly white, elderly audience. - Tressie McMillan Cottom

Here is where anyone who does not look white or black will find me ridiculous. Such people are asked all the time where they are from. People ask the question of persons whose physical or cultural presentation disrupts the questioner’s intuitive understanding of race. Black people do not have blue eyes — where are you from? Asians are from China and Japan, but you are brown — where are you from? You are blond but you are speaking Spanish, which is what Mexicans speak — where are you from? The question is not strange for its being asked, but for its being asked of me. My entire life I have had absolutely no gap between how I perceive myself and how the world perceives me. I identify as exactly what I look like I am. It is a kind of privilege in a world where conforming to somatic expectations of race, gender, and sexuality minimizes invasions of your privacy and property. But it is a complicated privilege

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

Being too much of one thing and not enough of another had been a recurring theme in my life.