Thick: And Other Essays

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.

whiteness defends itself. Against change, against progress, against hope, against black dignity, against black lives, against reason, against truth, against facts, against native claims, against its own laws and customs.

whiteness has the political power to be elastic. Originating as it does not from nation or kin but from the primordial ooze of capitalism, whiteness can only be defined by state power.

The things we touch and smell and see and experience through our senses are how stories become powerful. But I have never wanted to only tell powerfully evocative stories. I have wanted to tell evocative stories that become a problem for power. For that, I draw upon data and research.

Smart is only a construct of correspondence, between one’s abilities, one’s environment, and one’s moment in history. I am smart in the right way, in the right time, on the right end of globalization.

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

Whether at a dinner table or in grand theories, the false choice between black-black and worthy black is a trap. It poses that ending blackness was the goal of anti-racist work when the real goal has always been and should always be ending whiteness.

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.

White women, especially white feminists, need me to lean in to pseudoreligious consumerist teachings that beauty is democratic and achievable. Beauty must be democratic. If it is not, then beauty becomes a commodity, distributed unequally and, even worse, at random.