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freedom dreams are personified by the ability to date and fuck white women with ease.
There is a real numbers problem that Black women confront, even though they are the least likely to marry someone who isn’t Black.
the choice of whom to love is political.
white men’s desires to regulate their sexual lives is predicated not just on controlling white women’s bodies, but also on criminalizing Black men and denigrating Black women.
these men seek to control reproduction itself because they want to control the life possibilities of all women.
insidious narrative about the danger of Black sexuality—it turned Black men into rapists and Black women into baby machines.
In this narrative, white women were everything Black women were not—socially responsible, well-behaved, marriageable.
The obsession with curtailing reproductive freedom in this country is about forcing white women to be hyperproductive in service of reproducing a white Republic.
willful or unwitting matters less than its harmful outcomes.
Toni Morrison named the problem one of white fear. “The sad plight of grown white men, crouching beneath their (better) selves, to slaughter the innocent during traffic stops, to push black women’s faces into the dirt, to handcuff black children. Only the frightened would do that. Right?”
childcare currently costs 8 percent of a family’s budget, that is, if they make enough to meet cost-of-living standards.
white fears rest on the presumption that they are rooted in fact; everyone who is nonwhite is treated as though their fears are the stuff of fantasy.
I refuse to spend my time trying to help these kinds of basic-ass white people.
Fear of Black people is one of the grandest delusions of white supremacy. It’s the reason why even police officers of color—Black, Asian, and Latino—are often quick on the trigger when they are policing Black men. In Charlotte, North Carolina, on September 20, 2016, a Black
White fear of Black people is not limited to white Americans. It is rooted in the ideology of white supremacy, a virus that infects us all.
was so obsessed with getting the right answer that often my natural skepticism took a back seat to my overachiever impulses.
Voting once or even twice for a Black man is not enough to undo years of anti-Black social conditioning.
Black folks know them far better than they know themselves? Our survival is predicated on our willingness to study you, your impulses, your hard expressions, your laughter (and whether it reaches your eyes), your gifts, and your lies. Black survival means being endlessly obsessed with figuring out the depths to which white folks will fall to maintain a position of dominance.
To be black is to know you are being watched—at all times—anyway.
the stakes of telling the truth are becoming higher and higher.
When they were left without anything of substance to say, they both did what men learn to do when they can’t dominate a woman intellectually—they berate her physically.
Only 49 percent of Black women with college degrees marry men with some post-secondary education. Fifty-eight percent of married Black women college graduates marry men with an overall lower level of education than they have. Moreover, more than 60 percent of Black women college graduates between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five, peak childbearing years, have never been married. Compare that number with a mere 38 percent of white women for whom this is true.
“51 employed Black men for every 100 young Black women.” Decades earlier, the numbers were far more equal: There were nearly 90 employed Black men for every 100 young Black women. Here’s the rub: “Among never-married white, Hispanic, and Asian American young adults, the ratio of employed men to women is roughly equal—100 men for every 100 women.”
stop blaming Black women for what is clearly a structural problem.
rates of incarceration, employment, and education shape partnering options.
White people have more access to marriage and partnership because they have more access to absolutely everything else: jobs, housing, safety, and wealth.
Even though you look in the mirror and see someone attractive staring back at you, the fact that no one else ever seems to notice fucks with your head.
So much of the discourse of the failure of Black intimacy is about the ways that Black women just need to love themselves. But when we look more closely, very often it is brothers who are oozing wounds of self-hatred and low self-esteem.
Any man who treats women as ornamental clearly believes that outward decoration will hide inner deficiency. They have therapists for that.
learned the pitfalls of using a respectability framework to explain the achievement gap in our communities.
an awareness of an injustice.
favor Black folks who are polished, articulate, and easily able to acclimate to white environments.
“hermeneutic of suspicion”—a healthy skepticism—of the institutions and opportunities that would make of us exceptions.
theology becomes a substitute for demanding that the system be more just.
complicit in the broader project of neoliberalism, which is marked by a social abdication of responsibility to create systems that help the vast majority of citizens achieve some notion of the good life. Instead, neoliberalism turns our attention to individual self-regulation, and notions of personal empowerment, as the pathway to having anything in life. And yet, again, what we teach and preach in churches allows “God” language to do the dirty work of the system, namely, pretending to empower us while ultimately blaming our lack of social options
When white people die, other white people gain wealth. When black folks die, they often leave debt behind.
structural hopelessness that attends concentrated poverty.
You can’t judge the effectiveness of a system by the success of its exceptional actors, from the president on down.
radicals with elite access valorizing their hoods, I recognize it as misapplied survivor’s guilt and a deep desire to retain one’s street cred and authenticity.
The ignobility of academe doesn’t make the hood noble.
American democracy is not interested in acknowledging that a Barack Obama can be found in every Black community.
Many of them were languishing in poor schools and even worse neighborhoods.
The only difference is structural levels of access, not levels of talent or intellect.
Joy arises from an internal clarity about our purpose. My purpose is justice. And the fight for justice
May your curiosity be unceasing.
