Life & Wisdom Quote by Thylias Moss

Moss’s line refuses the two laziest stories America tells about identity: that race is either everything, or nothing. Calling it “a layer of being” grants race real texture and consequence, something that touches the skin and the social world at once. A layer can protect, chafe, be read by strangers, be added to, be peeled back; it’s intimate and imposed. Moss is honest about how race structures experience without letting it harden into destiny.

The pivot is “but not a culmination.” Culmination suggests a final form, the end of the sentence, the last word. Moss rejects the idea that racial identity is a finished product or a total explanation, the neat narrative arc that outsiders (and sometimes institutions) crave. There’s a quiet critique here of how Black artists in particular get conscripted into representing “the Black experience” as if it were singular, complete, and market-ready. Race becomes a hook, a brand, a syllabus, a limitation disguised as attention.

As a poet, Moss is also making a craft claim. Poetry depends on multiplicity: voice, history, gender, class, desire, geography, memory. If race is treated as culmination, the poem gets reduced to testimony; the speaker gets flattened into sociology. Moss’s phrasing opens a more uncomfortable, more accurate space: race matters profoundly, and it still isn’t the final key to a person. That tension is the point, and the power.