Much as we interrogate what a woman was wearing when she was raped, we look for ways to assign personal responsibility for structural injustices to b… - Tressie McMillan Cottom

...I had also parsed that there was something powerful about blondness, thinness, flatness, and gaps between thighs. And that power was the context against which all others defined themselves... beauty isn’t actually what you look like; beauty is the preference that reproduce the existing social order.

Whiteness exists as a response to blackness. Whiteness is a violent sociocultural regime legitimized by property to always make clear who is black by fastidiously delineating who is officially white. It would stand to reason that beauty’s ultimate function is to exclude blackness.

What is beautiful is whatever will keep weekend lake parties safe from strange darker people.