Sublime

I’ve been thinking about restaurant reservations quite a bit in that they became a status symbol. Amanda Mull has done a great article for The Atlantic about this—why is a restaurant reservation a high status thing? It's because it is in a specific place. It is finite in supply. A lot of times you have to be somewhat connected to get it. It is the

Gatekeeping is a complex job of managing boundaries that do not just define others but also define ourselves. Status symbols—silk shells, designer shoes, luxury handbags—become keys to unlock these gates.

Before I was a real academic, I was a black woman and before I was a black woman I was a black girl. I was a certain kind of black girl. I am the only child of an only child who was the child of a woman whose grandparents had been touched by slavery. We are southern, almost pedestrianly so. We are the people who went north to Harlem but not west to