White women need me to believe I can earn beauty, because when I want what I cannot have, what they have becomes all the more valuable. - Tressie McMillan Cottom

Black girls have not, for most of my understanding of our history in this nation, had the power to cause those kinds of problems. Black girls and black women are problems. That is not the same thing as causing problems. We are social issues to be solved, economic problems to be balanced, and emotional baggage to be overcome.

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

Black girlhood ends whenever a man says it ends.