Repeatedly people have said to me in their own way, from within their own stratified statuses, that I need to believe I am beautiful or can become be… - 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

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 to no nation of origin, no place, no gods, exists only if it can expand enough to defend its position over every group that challenges the throne. White is being European until it needs to also be Irish because of the Polish who can eventually be white if it means that Koreans cannot. For that situational dominance to reproduce itself, there must be a steady pole. That pole is blackness.

If my work is about anything it is about making plain precisely how prestige, money, and power structure our so-called democratic institutions so that most of us will always fail.