Tressie McMillan Cottom

In eight highly praised treatises on beauty, media, money, and more, Tressie McMillan Cottom transforms narrative moments into analyses of whiteness, black misogyny, and statussignaling as means of survival for black women

And Other Essays

Thick

Helen 

People of color are similarly hypervigilant when we navi- white social world. We screen our jokes, our laugh- ter, our emotions, and our baggage. We constantly anage complex social interactions so we are not fired, isolated misunderstood, miscast, or murdered. We can come ome, if we're lucky enough to have a home, and turn off that setting. We often do, as I once did, look for versions of our- gate a selves in literature and pop culture. 

But for black girls, home is both refuge and where your most intimate betrayals happen. You cannot turn off that setting. It is the dining room at your family's house, served with a side of your uncle's famous ribs. Home is where they love you until you're a ho.

When adults say that black girls, not yet adults, are more peers, they are saying that a girl child is responsible for all the desires that adults project onto her. She does not need the protection of childhood, for she has never been a child. 

If you truly know your whites, disappointment rarely darkens your door. 

 What so many black women know is what I learned as I sat at the end of a hallway with a dead baby in my arms. The networks of capital, be they polities or organizations, work most efficiently when your lowest status characteristic is assumed. And once these gears are in motion, you can never be competent enough to save your own life. That is how black feminism knows the future.

But I had also parsed ths there was something powerful about blondness, thinness flatness, and gaps between thighs. And that power was the context against which all others defined themselves. That was beauty. And while few young women in high school could say they felt like they lived up to beauty, only the non- white girls could never be beautiful. That is because beauty isn't actually what you look like; beauty is the preferences that reproduce the existing social order. 

women who a are not white must contend with beauty through the gaze of white men and nonwhite men. This is perhaps the hardest of all these situations for me to describe. How do I distill something that is so diffuse across my life? That is what the relationship between my agency, the constraints of beauty, and the structure of race feels likeit has always been a part of the threads that are stitching me.

Beauty is not good capital. It compounds the oppression of gender. It constrains those who identify as women against their will. It costs money and demands money. It colonizes. It hurts. It is painful. It can never be fully satisfied. It is not useful for human flourishing. Beauty is, like all capital, merely valuable. 

In eight highly praised treatises on beauty, media, money, and more, Tressie McMillan Cottom - award-winning professor and acclaimed author of Lower Ed - is unapologetically 'thick': deemed 'thick where I should have been thin, more where I should have been less,' McMillan Cottom refuses to shy away from blending the personal with the political, from bringing her full self and voice to the fore of her analytical work.In eight highly praised treatises on beauty, media, money, and more, Tressie McMillan Cottom - award-winning professor and acclaimed author of Lower Ed - is unapologetically 'thick': deemed 'thick where I should have been thin, more where I should have been less,' McMillan Cottom refuses to shy away from blending the personal with the political, from bringing her full self and voice to the fore of her analytical work. Collected in an indispensable volume that speaks to the everywoman and the erudite alike, these unforgettable essays never fail to be 'painfully honest and

Liyah 🤎

This book was so good I read it in 24hrs. Amazing insightful notes on so many topics. Her chapter on beauty is my favorite I think. It blows the “preferences” argument out of the water and even challenges black women to rethink how we approach beauty. Her writing style is like butter but her point cut like a knife. Also her voice and story is very affirming to budding baby academic who’s also a black woman from the south. Everyone should read Thick and take notes!

Hannah Yoon

This was such a fun read and also perfect for the times we are living in. I felt like I was in one of my sociology classes but it didn't feel like work. Her commentary on whiteness, Black women's bodies, beauty standards, classism and all the other topics she addresses is what we need at this time. I wanted to highlight every other sentence. Rarely do I laugh out loud for nonfiction, but she's able to tackle tough, nuanced and messy topics with humor.

Jesse Morley

Thick
I was, like many young women, expected to be small so that boys could expand and white girls could shine. p6

Fixing my feet became a way of life for me, an undercurrent of thousands of messages that form the subconscious playlist of our identity. It plays alongside other whispers like, "work twice as hard" and "keep your legs closed" and "don't talk to strangers" and "don't be a stranger" and "remember who you are and where you came from." p11

The personal essay was an economic problem and a social problem dressed up as a cultural taste problem. p13

Speech becomes rhetoric, or a persuasive form of speech, only when the one speaking can make a legitimate claim to some form of authority. It can be moral authority or legal authority or rational authority. At every turn, black women have been categorically excluded from being expert performers of persuasive speech acts in the public that adjudicates our humanity. p14

In the Name of Beauty
... beauty isn't actually what you look like; beauty is the preferences that reproduce the existing social order. p26

As long as the beautiful people are white, what is beautiful at any given time can be renogotiated without redistributing capital from white to nonwhite people. p26

That Nyong'o was atop a list of the world's most beautiful people does not invalidate the reality for many dark-skinned black women any more than Mark Zuckerburg making a billion dollars as a college drop-out invalidates the value of college for millions. Indeed, any system of oppression must allow exceptions to validate itself as meritorious. How else will those who are oppressed by the stem internalize their own oppression? p31

"I just like what I like" is always a capitalist lie. Beauty would be a useless concept for capital if it were only a preference int he purest sense. Capital demands that beauty be coercive. p34

Whatever power decides that beauty is, it must always be more than reducible to a single thing. Beauty is a wonderful form of capital in a world that organizes everything around gender and then requires a performance of gender that makes some of its members more equal than others. p36

But if I believe that I can become beautiful, I become an economic subject. My desire becomes a market. And my faith becomes a salve for the white women who want to have the right politics while keeping the privilege of never having to live them. White women need me to believe I can earn beauty, because when I want what I cannot have, what they have becomes all the more valuable. p38

Dying to Be Competent
Professional legitimacy/prestige. Not being believed due to a perceived lack of "competency" - perceived even as an unreliable source of information on one's own body (miscarriage).

Know Your Whites
I found the central argument of this essay difficult to grasp: the necessity of blackness to define and stabilise whiteness.

Myers Park people donate, their money and their time, to good causes. And these perfectly civil people live in intentionally cultivated, nominally diverse, in-town panopticons that need no guard in the central watchtower but whiteness. p57

Whiteness, the idea, the identity tethered to no nation of origin, no place, no gods, exists only if it can expand enough to defend its position over every group that challenges the throne. ... For that situational dominance to reproduce itself, there must be a steady pole. That pole is blackness. And so the paradox of how we could elect Obama and Trump is not in how black Obama is or is not. It is, instead, in how white he is (or, is not). The Obama-Trump dialectic is not progress/backlash but do-si-do; one dance, the same steps, mirroring each other, and each existing only in tandem. Like whiteness itself, Obama was because Trump is. White voters allowed Barack Obama to become an idea and a president because he was a fundamental projection of the paradox that defines them as white. p60

... it did not matter that Obama had faith in white people. They needed only to have faith in him: in his willingness to reflect their ideal selves back at them, to change the world without changing them, to change blackness for them without being black to them. p61

... naming white innocence "fragile" belies its fundamental nature, which is domination. The performance of fragility can only be done to great effect because whiteness necessarily dominates and oppress. Whiteness isn't then fragile, but blunt; not vulnerable, but resilient.

Black Is Over (Or, Special Black)
Prestige/perception differences between "ethnic-black" and "black-black" students/academics.
Post-race references misguided as they "[pose] that ending blackness was the goal of anti-racist work when the real goal has always been and should always be ending whiteness." p80

The Price of Fabulousness
Much like we interrogate what a woman was wearing when she was raped, we look for ways to assign personal responsibility for structural injustices to bodies we collectively do not value. p83

Of course, the trick is you can never know the counterfactual of your life. There is no evidence of access denied. Who knows what I was not granted for not enacting the right status behaviours or symbols at the right time for an agreeable authority? p84

Black Girlhood, Interrupted
It was over a plate of ribs at my aunt's dining room table that I learned that being a woman is about what men are allowed to do to you. p89
When adults say that black girls, not yet adults, are more knowledgeable about sex than their white female peers, they are saying that a girl child is responsible for all the desires that adults project onto her. p94

Girl 6
For many black people, buying hair in the local beauty supply store is how we experienced immigration—Korean, Chinese, and Vietnamese shopkeepers selling us colonized beauty from the heads of poor women in nations that the West has deliberately kept poor. We wear globalism on our heads. p103

Mallory Foutch

Cindy

Kelsey Holtaway

Daryl Houston

I was privileged to attend a work event recently in which a colleague facilitated an online reading and discussion with Roxane Gay and Tressie McMillan Cottom. I knew of and had read Gay, but Cottom was new to me. Both were marvelous to listen to, and I immediately ordered Cottom's essay collection. Cottom is a good writer, by turns serious and funny, anecdotal and well-researched. The essays are easy to read (meaning that she writes accessibly; the content is tough stuff), and a few of them really resonated with me, making me angry, indignant, ashamed, and so on. The short collection is definitely worthwhile, and I'm glad to've been introduced to Cottom's work, which I'll follow with interest.

 Bruna Acioly Leão

This is an incredible collection of essays on issues of systematic racism, capitalism, feminism and other social issues, and I learned so much from it, and it is definitely one I will be wanting to revisit sometime.

Thick And Other Essays

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