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“Your hair thick, your nose thick, your lips thick, all of you just thick.” It was true if not artfully stated. Being too much of one thing and not enough of another had been a recurring theme in my life. I was, like many young women, expected to be small so that boys could expand and white girls could shine. When I would not or could not shrink, people made sure that I knew I had erred. I was, like many black children, too much for white teachers and white classrooms and white study groups and white Girl Scout troops and so on. Thick where I should have been thin, more when I should have been
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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. We work. Lord do black girls and black women work.4 We start work early before it is paid work. Then we start paid work and most of us never stop, are unable to ever stop. We work to keep churches financially viable,5 black colleges in business,6 black families functioning,7 black politics respectable,8 and black men alive.
Empirically, black women have generations of earned and inherited moral philosophy that has sustained families, communities, and institutions. Despite this, black women find that the public discourse is not generally willing to accept that we are moral authorities on much at all.
I am living in the most opportune time in black history in the United States and that means, still, that I will die younger, live poorer, risk more exposure to police violence, and be punished by social policy for being a black woman in ways that aren’t true for almost any other group in this nation. That is the best it has ever been to be black in America and it is still that statistically bad at the macro level.
We are people, with free will, circumscribed to different degrees by histories that shape who we are allowed to become. I am, by most measures, pretty smart. My grandmother was smarter. She was do-the-Times-crossword-in-pen smart. She was teach-yourself-liberal-arts-with-a-library-card smart. She was, for most of her life, a domestic worker for rich Jewish people who sent me cards when I got good grades in school. The Edelmans. The Goldmans. The Finkelsteins. When she died, quickly, thank God, all of my grandmother’s possessions fit inside the one-bedroom senior living apartment in the small
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With 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.
The white kids were your school friends, never your home friends. You took the gifted math classes together but you would not be on the lake with them over the weekend.
I had high school boyfriends. I had a social circle. I had evidence that I was valuable in certain contexts. But 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. That was beauty.
That Nyong’o was atop a list of the world’s most beautiful people does not invalidate the reality for many dark-skinned black women any more than Mark Zuckerburg making a billion dollars as a college drop-out invalidates the value of college for millions. 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?
Black women have worked hard to write a counternarrative of our worth in a global system where beauty is the only legitimate capital allowed women without legal, political, and economic challenge. That last bit is important. Beauty is not good capital. It compounds the oppression of gender. It constrains those who identify as women against their will. It costs money and demands money. It colonizes. It hurts. It is painful. It can never be fully satisfied. It is not useful for human flourishing. Beauty is, like all capital, merely valuable.
sometimes, when we are trapped in the race not to be complicit in our own oppression, self-definition masquerades as a notion of loving our black selves in white terms.
When I say that I am unattractive or ugly, I am not internalizing the dominant culture’s assessment of me. I am naming what has been done to me. And signaling who did it.
Beauty has an aesthetic, but it is not the same as aesthetics, not when it can be embodied, controlled by powerful interests, and when it can be commodified. Beauty can be manners, also a socially contingent set of traits. Whatever power decides that beauty is, it must always be more than reducible to a single thing. Beauty is a wonderful form of capital in a world that organizes everything around gender and then requires a performance of gender that makes some of its members more equal than others.
There is now an entire shelf among the periodicals at my nearby chain bookstore filled with magazines that will give me five meditations or three coloring book pages or nine yoga retreats or fourteen farmhouse ideas or nineteen paper-crafting inspirations that, if purchased, will acculturate me to achievable “inner beauty.” Mind you, the consumption is always external and public. These are quite literally called “lifestyle” magazines, which begs the question “Whose lifestyle?” These are ways of expressing a kind of femininity, a kind of woman, for whom beauty is defined to selectively include
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But if I believe that I can become beautiful, I become an economic subject. My desire becomes a market. And my faith becomes a salve for the white women who want to have the right politics while keeping the privilege of never having to live them. 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. I refuse them.
You know a website is bad when its founder proclaims that “people use the website wrong!”
LinkedIn is an exemplar of the promises technology makes but that neoliberalism can never fulfill. By all accounts, all workers feel increasingly anxious about their job security, income mobility, and quality of life. Poor workers and middle-class workers and even highly paid elite workers in western economies are anxious because of the demands that our accelerated digital society makes of us. We know that we could be outsourced, downsized, and eased out of a job or a career or an entire industry at a moment’s notice.
What pleases us is any technocratic fairytale of how we can network enough to offset unstable employment.
Pain short-circuits rational thought. It can change all of your perceptions of reality. If you are in enough physical pain, your brain can see what isn’t there. Pain, like pregnancy, is inconvenient for bureaucratic efficiency and has little use in a capitalist regime. When the medical profession systematically denies the existence of black women’s pain, underdiagnoses our pain, refuses to alleviate or treat our pain, healthcare marks us as incompetent bureaucratic subjects. Then it serves us accordingly.
What I remember most about the whole ordeal, groggy from trauma and pain and narcotics, is how nothing about who I was in any other context mattered to the assumptions of my incompetence. I was highly educated. I spoke in the way one might expect of someone with a lot of formal education. I had health insurance. I was married. All of my status characteristics screamed “competent,” but nothing could shut down what my blackness screams when I walk into the room.
The image of black women as physically strong without any emotions vulnerable enough to warrant consideration is one of the greatest cultural exports from the racist, sexist U.S. hierarchy.
In this milieu we, as a friend once described it, know our whites. To know our whites is to understand the psychology of white people and the elasticity of whiteness. It is to be intimate with some white persons but to critically withhold faith in white people categorically.
There is a black norm only because there is a white norm, and vice versa. Some would argue that people like Obama exist in both spaces simultaneously and thus someone like Obama has special insight into both cultures. That insight supposedly breeds empathy. That kind of empathy may be why Obama could look at years of pictures of his wife and children drawn as apes and decades of white suppression of perceived black socioeconomic gains as racial, albeit not racist: “I’m careful not to attribute any particular resistance or slight or opposition to race.”9 That is catnip to millions of white
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U.S. universities are a part of a post-colonial game of western credentialism where those with the means in nations beset by extreme income inequality purchase a pathway into the global labor market. Just as is true of international students from China, Japan, and India who find their way to the United States, our universities are generally cherry-picking the winners of extreme social stratification in other countries through our admissions processes.
There is a bit of condescension in assuming that I must be something other than black American if I am also intelligent and high-achieving. But I rarely take these as insults.
If you think that I am intelligent and ambitious and reasoned and formidable, if you think one good thing about me at all, then I insist that you reconcile that with me just being regular black-black. My mother once paid for a coach to help me lose my southern accent. I can still do it, if I think about it hard enough. You basically wake up your tongue; by nature southern tongues are lazy, like our summers. You get the tongue to stand up straight and you flatten the back of the mouth just a bit. That will take out about 60 to 70 percent of your southernness. The rest is about syntax and meter.
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Black people deserve to consume in peace, but also, black people consume wrong. Compounding the complexity is the assumption that most black people are poor. Not only are black people wasteful, but they are poor and wasteful. Indeed, our poor consumption patterns are often offered up as the reason why we are more likely to be poor.
That is how generational wealth happens where I am from: lose a leg, a part of your spine, die right, and maybe you can lease-to-own a modular home.
We were big readers and we encouraged the girl children, especially, to go to some kind of college. Consequently, my grandmother and mother had a particular set of social resources that helped us navigate mostly white bureaucracies to our benefit. We could, as my grandfather would say, talk like white folks. We loaned that privilege out a lot.
I learned, watching my mother, that there was a price we had to pay to signal to gatekeepers that we were worthy of engaging. It meant dressing well and speaking well. It might not work. It likely wouldn’t work, but on the off chance that it would, you had to try. It was unfair, but, as The Vivian always said, “Life isn’t fair, little girl.”
Respectability rewards are a crapshoot, but we do what we can within the limits of the constraints imposed by a complex set of structural and social interactions designed to limit access to status, wealth, and power. I do not know how much my mother spent on her camel-colored cape or knee-high boots, but I know that whatever she paid was returned in hard-to-measure dividends. How do you put a price on the double-take of a clerk at the welfare office who decides you might not be like those other trifling women in the waiting room and provides an extra bit of information about completing a form
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Why do poor people make stupid, illogical decisions to buy status symbols? For the same reason all but only the most wealthy buy status symbols, I suppose. We want to belong. And not just for the psychic rewards, but belonging to one group at the right time can mean the difference between unemployment and employment, a good job as opposed to a bad job, housing or a shelter, and so on.
There is empirical evidence that women and people of color are judged by their appearances differently and more harshly than are white men. What is remarkable is that these gatekeepers, in one way or another, actually told me why I was deemed acceptable. They wanted me to know how I had properly signaled that I was not a typical black or a typical woman, two identities that in combination are almost always conflated with being poor.
At the heart of incredulous statements about the poor decisions poor people make is a belief that we, the hard working, sensible not-poor, would never be like them. We would know better. We would know to save our money, eschew status symbols, cut coupons, practice puritanical sacrifice to amass a million dollars.
What we forget, if we ever knew, is that what we know now about status and wealth creation and sacrifice are predicated on who we are—that is, not poor. If you change the conditions of your not-poor status, you change everything you know as a result of being a not-poor. You have no idea what you would do if you were poor until you are poor. And not intermittently poor or formerly not-poor, but born poor, expected to be poor, and treated by bureaucracies, gatekeepers, and well-meaning respectability authorities as inherently poor. Then, and only then, will you understand the relative value of a
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By the 2000s, R. Kelly was an unlikely crossover artist, mostly based on a horrible song in which he believed he could fly. It is just the kind of inspirational, soulless black music that corporations love. It made R. Kelly a safe negro for millions of white consumers. At the same time that R. Kelly was becoming Steve Harvey–fied for mass audiences, his reputation as a sexual predator was solidifying in black communities.
my dad turned to me and said, “Just so you know, if he ever beats you, I won’t just take your word for it. There are two sides to every story.” To my mind, husband beating and husband raping are right next to each other on the Richter scale of fucked-up things men you trust can do to you. I took it to mean what my cousin once meant—black girlhood ends whenever a man says it ends. Two sides to every story. Almost ready. She a ho. Those are the kind of comments I have heard hundreds, if not thousands, of times, from men and women, to excuse violence against black women and girls. If one is
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people across gender and race see black girls as more adultlike than their white peers.
Women have the burden of proving not only their assault, but that they did not deserve to be assaulted. The former is bad enough. How do you prove the penetration was forced in the hours after you are emotionally traumatized? Or that you weren’t drunk or high? Or that you said no before he started but not while he was “finishing”?5
There are many what-ifs for women to prove that they have been sexually assaulted. And each of them fails most women, but they fail black women as if by design.
People of color are similarly hypervigilant when we navigate a white social world. We screen our jokes, our laughter, our emotions, and our baggage. We constantly manage complex social interactions so we are not fired, isolated, misunderstood, miscast, or murdered. We can come home, if we’re lucky enough to have a home, and turn off that setting. We often do, as I once did, look for versions of ourselves in literature and pop culture. But for black girls, home is both refuge and where your most intimate betrayals happen.
For many black people, buying hair in the local beauty supply store is how we experienced immigration—Korean, Chinese, and Vietnamese shopkeepers selling us colonized beauty from the heads of poor women in nations that the West has deliberately kept poor. We wear globalism on our heads.
We do not share much in the U.S. culture of individualism except our delusions about meritocracy. God help my people, but I can talk to hundreds of black folks who have been systematically separated from their money, citizenship, and personhood and hear at least eighty stories about how no one is to blame but themselves. That is not about black people being black but about people being American.
It is not that all or any black woman is beyond reproach, but that she cannot be reproached merely for being a black woman.
Writing is always a brutally social process that is rude enough to masquerade as a solitary one. My name is on the cover. All mistakes in this volume are my own. But the best parts of my thinking are owed to the brilliant people who I can call friends: