Thick: And Other Essays

by Tressie McMillan Cottom

We were writing personal essays because as far as authoritative voices go, the self was the only subject men and white people would cede to us.

Smart is only a construct of correspondence, between one’s abilities, one’s environment, and one’s moment in history. I am smart in the right way, in the right time, on the right end of globalization.

But I have never wanted to only tell powerfully evocative stories. I have wanted to tell evocative stories that become a problem for power. For that, I draw upon data and research.

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

When I say that I am unattractive or ugly, I am not internalizing the dominant culture’s assessment of me. I am naming what has been done to me. And signaling who did it.

You cannot separate what it means to be a “woman,” often used to mean a performance of acceptable femininity, from the conditions that decide what is and is not acceptable across time and space.

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.

Big Beauty is just negging without the slimy actor. The constant destabilization of self is part and parcel of beauty’s effectiveness as a social construct. When a woman must consume the tastes of her social position to keep it, but cannot control the tastes that define said position, she is suspended in a state of being negged.

LinkedIn is the dumbest of all the dumb websites created during our new digital age.

But when black women in the United States are dying trying to give birth and their babies are dying trying to get born, not simply because of poverty but because the grotesque accumulation of capital in the West is predicated on our structural incompetence, then we can see the ends of hypercapitalism in daily life.

Political analyst Jamelle Bouie once said, during a joint interview we recorded for a radio program, that in the twilight of Obama’s final term it occurred to him that if this safely competent black man was not good enough for white America, then he would never be.7 It was heart-wrenching listening to Jamelle discover this fundamental truth of being black in America.

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.

Obama’s “hybridity” and “two-ness” and “biracial” identity may have mattered. It did not matter because of how it shaped Obama, but because of how it made white voters feel about themselves.

In the modern university, a good liberal arts school believes in equal opportunity. It welcomes diversity.2 It promotes that diversity in all of its marketing materials. Some go so far as to have more nonwhite students in their marketing than they do in their classes.

Too much small talk is how a country is given to sociopaths who thrive on shallow chatter to distract their emotional sleight of hand. Talk should be meaningful or kept to a minimum.

I will not code switch on NPR or The Daily Show with Trevor Noah or at the White House. I do not do it in front of my students or with the young people in my life. I do not want to be unattainable for these people that I love.

The thing I remember most about reading for black girlhood was that the easiest way to locate the girl in a story about a woman was to search for the sexual trauma.