Sublime

The consumer culture encourages individuals to want more—cars, larger homes, television sets, cell phones, gadgets of all kinds—and positive thinking is ready at hand to tell them they deserve more and can have it if they really want it and are willing to make the effort to get it.

This “new contract,” alongside other missing forms of government protection, closes the margin for refusal and leads to a life lived in economic fear.

It was all part of a way of doing things in the United States that, as I would gradually realize, forced you to be constantly on guard, constantly worried that whatever amount of money you had or earned would never be enough,

For the first time in U.S. history, more poor people live in suburbs than in cities.2

life expectancy alone is not enough. There has to be a suppression of degenerative diseases that currently turn the older cohort into massive consumers of resources rather than producers. Diseases that kill quickly are economically sustainable. Keeping people alive who can’t produce is economically debilitating.

As a Black girl, I quickly learned from others that there were many things about myself that needed to shrink. Not just my body—my laugh, my ambitions, my imagination, my will, and eventually my anger—everything I was would need to be less.