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The weight of the nation is not ours to carry.
The regulation of sexuality by white Christians in the United States has always been about the propagation of a socially acceptable and pristine nuclear family worthy of having the American dream, a family that was heterosexual, middle class, and white.
White privilege works by making the advantages white people have invisible while making the supposedly “poor” choices of people of color hypervisible.
on the surface, it simply looks like white people have better access to education, jobs, and housing because they make better choices or because they work harder. And, conversely, it looks like Black people have less access to these same things because they are lazy.
Black women had the right to dissent from theologies that didn’t serve them well.
How did she know, in her sanctified country-ness, that sexual pleasure and the freedom to pursue it would be critical to a healthy sense of self?
white male theologians who created the systematic theology of evangelical Christianity were trying to make sense of a theology that fit their own lives and their own worldview.
This is why so many white Christians can read the Bible and still vote Republican.
Grandmama taught me that all the sacrifices I was making for middle-class aspirations weren’t entirely worth it. That if I made it but I was lonely and miserable, then that was a failure, not a win.
Freedom is my theological compass, and it never steers me wrong.
Bible not as a rule book, but perhaps as a cultural library of texts that recount the journeys of a series of ancient human beings with God, an approach I learned from reading theologian and writer Brian McLaren.
“Repentance to me means ‘re-think.’ That’s literally what it means. To think again and to think in a different direction.”
all the ways that church and culture told Black women “no.”
your fashion choices are subject to great scrutiny. Black people are taught to care how they look and how their children look.
Respectability politics are at their core a rage-management project. Learning to manage one’s rage by daily tamping down that rage is a response to routine assaults on one’s dignity in a world where rage might get you killed or cause you to lose your job.
refusal of the lie that Black women’s anger in the face of routine, everyday injustice is not legitimate.
hates our very existence outside of its service.
But it doesn’t acknowledge that when you are twice as good, white folks will resent you for being better.
Black social life in the nineteenth century was marked for Black women by a lack of access to the protections of ladyhood, and by a steadfast refusal among white people to even make gender distinctions among Black people.
It also bears noting that white people’s regulation of Black women’s bodies in the public sphere is one reason that Black people have been obsessed with outward appearance.
the most symbolic evidence of the failure of the project of African American respectability.
One of the most unique things about Black women’s experiences in this country is that we are the only group of people whose bodies have ever been legally mandated as the place that reproduced noncitizens. Indigenous women were never striving for their children to have American citizenship, but rather sovereignty on their own
dissented from him openly, forthrightly, and unapologetically. This,
structural resources to ameliorate social problems, sermonic shaming and policy blaming is the opposite of help. It constitutes harm.
No one can cuss you out more eloquently than a Black woman can.
Shakara’s rage was quiet. But it was no less eloquent, no less clear.
Respectability tells us that staying alive matters more than protecting one’s dignity. Black rage says that living without dignity is no life at all.
It makes us emotionally dishonest.
be emotionally honest about how fucked up this world is.
conditions that tried to assert that Black lives didn’t matter, that they were disposable, and that Black communities didn’t deserve justice.
white women’s voting practices tell us that they vote with the party that supports their racial issues, even though this means voting with a party that hates women as a matter of public policy.
The comfort she felt in physically advancing on a stranger and expecting not to have any clapback for it is a comfort and a privilege that only white women have.
Watching white women take it to the streets to protest an election outcome that was a result of white women’s powerful voting bloc felt like an exercise in white-lady tears
The ability to take on and peel off the parts of Black culture that you like at will is exactly what is meant by the term “white privilege.”
decried the demands for sexual chastity, purity, and monogamy that American culture
Far too frequently, white women’s notions of antiracist solidarity is defined solely by their willingness to date Black men.
to do when the targets of his rage were Black. Black men’s disdain for Black women is so common
White women and Black men share a kind of narcissism that comes from being viewed as the most vulnerable entities within their respective races.
His copious alleged sexual assaults of women play out a troubling script of a Black man obsessed with dominating and subjugating white women.
racialized sexism
might emerge with a perverted notion of freedom.
white women became the target of his seething but sublimated Black male rage. The desire to dominate and humiliate white women is a logical extension of a racialized toxic masculinity, predicated on the idea that freedom is synonymous with white patriarchy.
he really wanted to be with one or because he simply despised what they had meant for the project of Black manhood.
He wrote, “The white man made the Black woman the symbol of slavery and the white woman the symbol of freedom. Every time I embrace a Black woman I’m embracing slavery, and when I put my arms around a white woman, well, I’m hugging freedom.… I will not be free until the day I can have a white woman in my bed and a white man minds his own business. Until that day comes, my entire existence is tainted, poisoned, and I will still be a slave—and so will the white woman.”
I was defiling his women—and this point, I believe, was the most satisfying to me because I was very resentful over the historical fact of how the white man has used the black woman.
The civil rights movement was not yet in full swing. The women’s liberation movement had not yet begun.
Rape is tied to questions of power and consent, but interracial dating is tied to questions of power and freedom.
I’m tired of the lie that desire is a pure social category, unhampered by the politics of race and gender.
Dr. Yaba Blay often says, “There is a thin line between preference and pathology.”
having our bodies cast as the unique and singular site for unfreedom.
