Indeed, any system of oppression must allow exceptions to validate itself as meritorious. How else will those who are oppressed by the system internalize their own oppression?

When oppressed people become complicit in their oppression, joining the dominant class in their ideas about what we are, it is symbolic violence.

It was over a plate of ribs at my aunt’s dining room table that I learned that being a woman is about what men are allowed to do to you.

All of my status characteristics screamed “competent,” but nothing could shut down what my blackness screams when I walk into the room. I could use my status to serve others, but not myself.

Our so-called counternarratives about beauty and what they demand of us cannot be divorced from the fact that beauty is contingent upon capitalism. Even our resistance becomes a means to commodify, and what is commodified is always, always stratified. There is simply no other way. To coerce, beauty must exclude.

Eventually I decided that asking me to be something other than black, exchanging black for being a person of color was anything but well-meaning. Finally, for now, I have decided on being as black-black as I can be. It is my protest.

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.

Then, and only then, will you understand the relative value of a ridiculous status symbol to someone who intuits that they cannot afford to not have it.

Being too much of one thing and not enough of another had been a recurring theme in my life.