Sublime

Crenshaw writes: We all can recognize the distinction between the claims “I am Black” and the claim “I am a person who happens to be Black.” “I am Black” takes the socially imposed identity and empowers it as an anchor of subjectivity. “I am Black” becomes not simply a statement of resistance but also a positive discourse of self-identification, in

ideas argue that racist policies are the cause

in focusing only on the material basis of harm—environmental hazards, brutal police officers, and discriminatory employment algorithms, to name a few—we may overlook the ideas and ideologies that continue to give rise to those harms again and again. If, as Kelley laments, “There are very few contemporary political spaces where the energies of love

I refuse to allow my career to be beholden to a group of people who historically have not respected people like me, have held women and people of color to a standard that they don’t hold themselves to, and who have withheld opportunities from women like me.

When a population is regarded as a joke or as something less than, their suffering becomes not a source of empathy but a source of amusement or even contempt. “I started losing faith in liberalism,” Goad recalls, “when I began noticing that every liberal who accused me of white privilege seemed to come from a more privileged socioeconomic backgroun

part of the difficult, essential work of unruliness is shaking the status quo so thoroughly, so persistently, so loudly that everyone—even the very women behind that agitation, many of whom have internalized the understandings they fight so tirelessly against—can see their value within it.

This was not a problem specific to my school or my childhood—it’s a problem