Before I met Sierra Mannie, I met one of her sentences: “What I do know is that I don’t care how well you can quote Madea, who told you that your booty was getting bigger than hers, how cute you think it is to call yourself a strong black woman, who taught you to twerk, how funny you think it is to call yourself Quita or Keisha or for which black male you’ve been bottoming—you are not a black woman, and you do not get to claim either blackness or womanhood.”

That sentence—and really the entire piece published on Time.com—felt rooted in a familiar Southern, heady, soulfulness. It was loving and protective of the cultural spaces created by generations of southern black women. When I read the piece, I had no idea it was written by a third-year student at the University of Mississippi.

When Sierra heard I’d been offered a fellowship this year at Ole Miss, she was one of the first people to reach out to me and talk about Oxford. I didn’t immediately make the connection between her Twitter message and the essay. But when I did, even more than feeling like an old ass fanboy, I felt so proud to be from Mississippi. Few American writers, regardless of age, can consistently craft sturdy, efficient prose that leaves black southern readers cared for, tied to a tradition, and wondering narratively what the fuck is about to happen next. Sierra Mannie does this in nearly every piece she’s written. Like the most daring black Southern writers, Sierra deploys sentences as nuanced weapons and shields of imaginative resistance. She writes for us—which a number of black writers do—while writing to us, which is increasingly rare in a nation and publishing industry hungry for titillating native informants.

I asked Sierra to close out the Times Six series. Two of the questions focus on memory, love, misogyny, and blackness. Two of the questions place us at 12 years old, the same age Tamir Rice was when he was gunned down by police in Cleveland Ohio; and the same age Davia Garth was when she was killed by her stepfather in the same city. One of the questions asks us imagine two incredibly needed national policy proposals. The final question ponders how black lives can actually matter in 2015.

Kiese Laymon: Tell me about the first time you remember your love for black folks being threatened?

Sierra Mannie: Once, my dad strapped me in the front seat of his Avalanche and drove us into the pits of Jackson, Mississippi. He stops in the parking lot of some seedy night club, and I believe that I’m 8 at the time, so I’m 13 years too young to be anywhere near this spot at all, and the air tastes dangerous. He hops out of the truck in the parking lot, and tells me to sit still, like I have any fucking choice, right? The truck’s still running. Some men in the parking lot wander up to the truck and look at me through the window, and words I can apply to the situation now but couldn’t then made me squeeze my legs closed and look down. What feels like an eternity of looking at my flower-patterned thighs later, my dad wanders back to the truck and I hated everything about him in that moment and everything he had in common with the people milling about in the parking lot, which was their blackness in that spot, which felt harmful to me, and separate from me. By the time I got back to my own home after that weekend with him, the feeling had washed away, but that was the first time blackness had ever clogged up my throat with misery.

When you were twelve years old, can you describe for me what a perfect day would look like?

Twelve-year-old Sierra’s perfect day was a day full of reading and demolishing all of her classmates in English class, and, honestly, probably masturbating. I grew up in an area where my family was less-than-interested in hauling me outside to play, either from wariness about the neighborhood in which we lived or weariness after working an insane amount of hours during the day. So, when I quickly learned that the backyard mostly represented chores, since I was very small, I tended to be an inside kind of child—inside my own thoughts, inside my own bedroom, deep inside the internet. I was extremely social and productive outside of home, but inside I just wanted the freedom to relax and absorb things. I was a weird kid. I have no idea how I had friends.

If twelve-year-old you could describe the most exciting thing you did last night, what would she say?

I finished Prisoner of Azkaban in, like, two hours.

Can you describe your first memory of misogyny and anti-blackness colliding?

At the risk of removing any doubt about any suspicion that I was once an internet-dwelling, mouth-breathing, racially insecure prick of a child, my first memory of misogynoir was at a Game Stop. Also, it was my own ugly fault. I was maybe 14. My mom and auntie and grandma were with me as I purchased a game, and after getting it but refusing the three cents of change back, my mom, loudly, goes, “We ain’t rich! You better take back your change. I don’t know what you think you’re doing,” or something tacky and mom-like in the store. I wanted to die inside. I was so embarrassed. I was wearing my My Chemical Romance t-shirt. I was cool and calm and collected and a gamer, and I wanted to just take my Harvest Moon and get the fuck out of there, but here were all of the women I loved the most in my life squawking about my financial choices in front of these gamer white people, and trying to save my faker face, I wail, “God, I wish I weren’t black right now.” The hot shame in my mouth after saying that was much worse than the shame of my mom admonishing me in the store. The embarrassment flickering in my mama’s and auntie’s and grandmama’s eyes kicked me in intellectual and emotional spots I didn’t have vocabulary for yet.

If you could concretely propose any two new national policies, what would they be?

Mathematics has been a completely useless subject to me since I was in the sixth grade. I do not think that I’m speaking in hyperbole. I remember nothing of spending my entire scholastic career in advanced math classes except the scrape of grades way lower than my history and English ones against my GPA. I tended to feel in high school, as I do now, that part of the push of students toward STEM in public education systems comes less from a place of academic passion than it does this whole quagmire of feelings of competition against countries in Asia. I didn’t give a damn that kids across the globe had better math scores than I did, but I did give a damn about having a C in math or As in everything else when I knew I would enter college to study Latin. I elected not to take AP Calculus my senior year, but you know what would have been way more useful to me than knowing derivatives, anyway? Knowing how to write a check. Knowing about credit scores. Knowing about things like loans. Public schools should stop making math courses required for students after ninth grade. Students who would prefer not to take math classes should be able to use financial literacy courses to fulfill their math credits.

In true millennial fashion, though, my approach toward societal change tends to involve the political system less and less. I’ve been trying to get #TellAManADayHesDumb off the ground on Twitter, and the only tongue-in-cheek thing about it is maybe the rudeness of the hashtag. I think that our society allows men so much emotional space for their mistakes, so much room to maneuver without accountability mistreating women, and that when women speak out about being mistreated by men, physically, emotionally, mentally, the accountability for that rests squarely on the shoulders of the victim rather than the perpetrator. When’s the last time someone told a man he was wrong? Challenged his opinion about his social interactions? Wasn’t nice or sweet or polite about it? A little shock of self doubt and challenge is healthy. Learning moments don’t have to be thinkpieces. A kid tweeted a few days ago that he thought women who wore revealing clothing were “just asking” to be touched. I quickly and instantly told him he was dumb. Bam. Men must be challenged, and if the gauntlet for that has to fall on women, then I’m willing to use my hands to punch instead of mold.

How can black lives really matter in these United States of America?

Black lives already really matter in the United States, and I am tired of discussing semantics with those whose words attempt to derail. I don’t communicate well with the anti-black. I tune out “All Lives Matter” and the type of white person bloated enough to try to moan to black people about the white man’s fictional burdens. My personal goal, when the altruism Mississippi demands of those who love it eventually calls too loudly for me to ignore, is to come back here and do the work it takes to dismantle poverty, which inordinately affects black people, and intersects in the worst way with racism. To me, poverty’s most insidious purpose is to limit people’s use of space. And racists really have strange—and by that, I mean incorrect—perceptions of space, and to whom it belongs, and for whom it is meant, whether that space be physical, mental, or emotional. I do not have any interest in honoring the privileges of whiteness. I do not have any interest in making white people feel good about themselves, or comfortable about change. This, I think, is the attitude that those interested in the value of black lives must adopt, and with it, go forward fearlessly. With the eradication of poverty comes the freeing up of a lot of power for those who suffer the pain of financial distress, and, hopefully, more freedom to maneuver whatever spaces they wish.

Sierra Mannie is a writer and student of Classics at the University of Mississippi. Originally from Canton, Mississippi, you can follow her on Twitter @SKEEerra.