Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America

By my third semester at Vassar, I learned it was fashionable to call Cole’s predicament “privilege” and not “power.” I had the privilege of being raised by you and a grandmama who responsibly loved me in the blackest, most creative state in the nation. Cole had the power to never be poor and never be a felon, the power to always have his failures t

Not only is white woman exceptionalism false, but in it lies the implication that if you are the exception, other white women around you are the rule. You believe that you’re better than them. How can that be healthy? How can that be sisterhood?

I’d only been alive seventeen years and I was already tired of paying for white folks’ feelings with a generic smile and manufactured excellence they could not give one fuck about. I’d never heard of white folk getting caught and paying for anything they did to us, or stole from us. Didn’t matter if it was white police, white teachers, white studen