Racialized Credibility

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February 2022. Boston. The sidewalks had turned to glass.

I slipped hard walking around a pond and spent a week in the dark, nursing a concussion with a blanket over my head. I had moved to Boston a year earlier from the Bay Area and I was still adjusting. The cold felt personal. The smiles were tight. Everything seemed harder than it needed to be.

The first show I watched when I could finally look at a screen again was Inventing Anna. I don’t remember choosing it; I had never heard the name Anna Delvey, but there the icon was, glowing at the top of Netflix like a cultural assignment I’d missed. I was supposed to be limiting screen time, but I kept watching.

And then Googling.

And then muttering: She just said she had money, and people…believed her?

It wasn’t just the fashion or the fake wire transfers. It was the fact that this beautiful, young, white woman with a weird accent walked into Manhattan’s elite circles and convinced people she belonged. She stayed in luxury hotels for weeks—weeks—without paying and wasn’t immediately kicked out. She simply didn’t pay. And still, people waited, calmly, expectantly, for the money to materialize.

I couldn’t stop thinking: It must be nice to move through the world with that kind of default credibility.

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