Tressie McMillan Cottom

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

And Other Essays

Thick

Helen 

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. 

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.

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. 

 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.

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

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. 

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.

Thick quotes

Join the club