Systems of exchange tend to generate the kind of ideas that work well as exchanges. Because it can be an idea and a good and a body, beauty serves ma… - Tressie McMillan Cottom

The hyper-visibility means that you both can't hide, but also never really feel completely seen by authority figures and by your peer groups. Trapped in that space of hyper-visibility, I think, is where we wrestle with the ideas of, 'What part of me matters?'

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.

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.