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“I’ll call her father and he can come down here. He’s an old white guy so I’m sure everyone will feel better.”
(In a weak champagne buzz, Alix caught herself thinking, If it didn’t happen in New York, honestly who cares?
Girl... what?
Would the Clinton campaign find out about this, and would they think her husband was sexist? Or even worse, racist?
It's all about how people perceive her
In between long, sad strokes, she told herself to wake the fuck up. To write this book. To live in Philadelphia. To get to know Emira Tucker.
“Jesus Christ, that would never happen in New York,”
Actually, it can and does happen everywhere
I feel like I’m gonna lose her because of some stupid fucking grocery store cop.”
It's still all about her
looked around to make sure no one had heard her say the F-word in front of her children.
All about how others perceive her
Even the one black woman there arrived with her hair teased, bobbed, and highlighted.
Why is it surprising to her that a Black woman looks put together?
Women with full faces of makeup,
Not very feminist of you, Alix
but still . . . shouldn’t he have said “the N-word” instead?
Family means no favorites.”
The car rolled along in the glittery snow, and for the first time since they’d been dating, Emira felt that Kelley was acting particularly white.
“You have a weirdly large amount of black friends, you saw Kendrick Lamar in concert, and now you have a black girlfriend . . . great. But I need you to get that like . . . being angry and yelling in a store means something different for me than it would for you, even though I was in the right.
“Well, yeah, but, that’s the point. You think it’s comfortable because it’s always been that way for you.”
Or that when white people compliment her (“She’s so professional. She’s always on time”), it doesn’t always feel good, because sometimes people are gonna be surprised by the fact that she showed up, rather than the fact that she had something to say when she did.
But I don’t need you to be mad that it happened. I need you to be mad that it just like . . . happens.
How could she hate someone so much and also want him to think she was sexy?
Emira was saying no to this accusation, but mostly she was saying no to the idea of having another conversation in which she had to examine who loved her least: Kelley or Mrs. Chamberlain.
“But you gotta stop looking at her like you’re just waiting for her to change, ’cause umm . . . It is what it is, you know? You’re her mom.”
Because even though Kelley been right about her, Alix had been right about him too.
Some days she carried the sweet relief that Briar would learn to become a self-sufficient person. And some days, Emira would carry the dread that if Briar ever struggled to find herself, she’d probably just hire someone to do it for her.
