“What I know now is that I used to not just tolerate but submit to and ...” — Thomas Chatterton Williams Quote

What I know now is that I used to not just tolerate but submit to and even on some deep level need our society's web of problems called race, its received and dangerous habits of thinking about and organizing people along a binary of white and black, free and unfree, even once I suspected them to be irredeemably flawed.

The idea that a person can be both black and white - and at the same time neither - is novel in America.

What has changed immensely in America since 2017, the first year of the Trump administration, is the relentless demonization of nonwhite immigrants, economic migrants and asylum seekers from the highest levels of institutional authority.

Yet exactly what constitutes privilege and disadvantage can be counterintuitive: There is no metric to take into account the casual racism that I had to navigate in my neighborhood, a difficulty I was keenly aware friends of mine on the more socially cohesive and nurturing black side of town were often able to avoid.

At its most fundamental, information is a binary choice. In other words, a single bit of information is one yes-or-no choice.

I think our society has sort of built this gender binary, and the way we've said it exists does not really exist in nature.

Sex and gender are such befuddling mysteries even for those of us who are in the mainstream that you'd think we'd be wary of being judgmental. Yet much of society clings to a view that gender is completely binary, when, in fact, there's overwhelming evidence of a continuum.

I think that there's so many versions of femininity, and in terms of gender as a binary construct, that seems to be being dismantled.