“You know, for me, I find the word cool difficult, because I’m often called cool, and it often feels like a way of framing me and limiting my thinking or my intentionality… It’s almost like a Black athlete having natural talent, if you know what I mean. And it’s something that he hasn’t had to work out, and hasn’t had to fail, and hasn’t had to make sacrifices for whatever it is…”
“The question is, if you took cool out of the picture, then what would you have left? And if you had if you took that out of the picture, then you’d have something like this self-control, this awareness, this determination to navigate your way around the world that you control, even though the rest of the world is out of control. And so to me, that’s why I have a difficulty with the idea of cool, because the way we kind of impose on people at the moment is like this innate thing. Coolness is not innate. It is made from a series of choices. And it is political.”