Carolina QuotesI always believed that if I was willing to defend the veracity of my work and if I was willing to hold that work up for evaluation — for critique and judgment — then who I was when I was doing the work would eventually matter less. And that took time. And I took hits. But I do think that that is ultimately what happened.
Tressie McMillan Cottom Connected to the Carolinas
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“I always believed that if I was willing to defend the veraci…” Tressie McMillan Cottom. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-254EFF24B5. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/254eff24b5
More from Tressie McMillan Cottom
It depends on your power and status in the professional community. The reality is, it is going to be more difficult for you to turn down requests earlier in your career. The sooner you accept that you are at a disadvantage in negotiating those requests, the better it is for you — if only because you can be kind with yourself and give yourself grace because you understand why it’s happening, and that it won’t stay that way forever.
Oh yeah. Ontological categories are all about domination, so that’s the whole point. I think at its highest level of abstraction, it’s impossible to divorce the rules of language, or the language math as I call it, from the normative structure of white supremacy as a domination regime. Absolutely. And then having said that, I do accept that if I’m writing into a tradition, I have to learn enough of the rules to consider myself part of that discursive community.
We don’t even have the power to build a bubble, right? That’s the ultimate story of being who we are and writing about ourselves. We don’t even have the authority to create that bubble.