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

Trump’s election could be seen as white voters reclaiming this nation as theirs

When the privilege to read and to think comes great responsibility. When you have that privilege precisely because so many others like you — black women — are systematically filtered out of every level of social status, then the responsibility is especially great.

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.