Alex’s Reviews > Thick: And Other Essays > Status Update

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.

Whiteness, the idea, the identity tethered to no nation of origin, no place, no God, exists only if it can expand enough to defend its position over every group that challenges the throne.

When we perform some existential service to men, to capital, to political power, to white women, and even to other, quote-unquote, people of color, who are marginally closer to white than they are to Black, then we are superwomen...When instead Black women are strong in service of themselves, that same strength, wisdom, and wit becomes evidence of our incompetence.

White women need me to believe I can earn beauty, because when I want what I cannot have, what they have becomes all the more valuable.
I refuse them.

When I say that I am unattractive or ugly, I am not internalizing the dominant culture's assessment of me. I am naming what has been done to me and signaling who did it.

I am talking about a kind of capital. It is not just the preferences of a too-tall boy, but the way authority validates his preferences as normal...beauty isn't actually what you look like. Beauty is the preferences that reproduce the existing social order.