Sublime

W. E. B. Du Bois taught us this, and we teach it to our students. Whiteness was offered as a promise. Precarity makes it less sturdy. There are White people who work hard all of their lives and Whiteness gives them little materially. On the other hand, there are White people who come from powerful edifices, who can point to paintings on Vanderbilt’

electronic text that is volatile and ephemeral by design, which nonetheless turns out to be one of the most persistent and available literary artifacts on the Web.

I was talking to a younger friend about this a while back—your Internet presence is increasingly more valuable than your real-life presence. Which is weird and dystopian and I don’t really know how to think about it. But it’s true, and I think people who are like,  I don’t need the Internet , don’t understand the extent to which much of the p

Pressures for women to position themselves as “normal” and “nice” are almost always a constraint, no matter who’s listening. “None of us is ever free of the need to keep up some sort of front,” Coates says.

The question we face now is whether we can imagine a world in which social acceptance does not rest on these kinds of judgments. You belong without having to show proof of your fitness or superiority.

A woman navigating the world with the confidence of a man is a beautiful, magnetic, and periodically unnerving sight to behold.