I’m Black before I’m anything else.

Jan Miles,
New Orleans, LA.

I’m not a woman–I’m a BLACK woman. I’m not a writer–I’m a BLACK writer. In law school, I was a BLACK law student. If I kill my brother, it’s BLACK-on-black crime. Just as white privilege is societally applied (rather than being internally rooted), blackness is also applied by society. I don’t get to just be me, the way white people exist–as the norm, as the default–I’m BLACK me.