If I believe that I can become beautiful, I become an economic subject. My desire becomes a market. - Tressie McMillan Cottom

Being structurally incompetent injects friction into every interaction, between people, and between people and organizations, and between organizations and ideologies. Frictionless living is the promise of neoliberal capital — that is, if you are on the winning side of power. But when black women in the United States are dying trying to give birth and their babies are dying trying to get born, not simply because of poverty but because the grotesque accumulation of capital in the West is predicated on our structural incompetence, then we can see the ends of hypercapitalism in daily life.

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.

When I write, I am fixing my feet. I am claiming the ethos, or moral authority, to influence public discourse. And I am defying every expectation when I do it.