Thick: And Other Essays

by Tressie McMillan Cottom

people made sure that I knew I had erred.

thought I was not a real person—one worthy of consideration and engagement

had come so far that I could be considered a problem. It is an honor of sorts.

In a modern capitalist society, what is moral is often determined by what has economic value.

the right to speak authoritatively on something.

public discourse and persuasion. We do not have enough authority, as judged by the audiences and gatekeepers who decide to whom we should listen, to speak on much of anything.

Fixing my feet is so deeply ingrained in my psyche that to dislodge it I would have to fundamentally change who I am and how I interact with the world.

I am claiming the ethos, or moral authority, to influence public discourse.

I am hopelessly tethered to reality,

I am an exception to many rules. I

With the privilege to read and to think comes great responsibility.

body politic so thick with contradictions and nuance

That is because beauty isn’t actually what you look like; beauty is the preferences that reproduce the existing social order.

Whiteness exists as a response to blackness.

beauty’s ultimate function is to exclude blackness.

any system of oppression must allow exceptions to validate itself as meritorious.

beauty is the only legitimate capital allowed women without legal, political, and economic challenge.

Beauty is not good capital. It compounds the oppression of gender.

all preferences in imperial, industrialized societies are shaped by the economic system.

To coerce, beauty must exclude.

I am not internalizing the dominant culture’s assessment of me. I am naming what has been done to me. And signaling

conditions that decide what is and is not acceptable across time and space.

their need for me to consume what is produced for them.

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. I refuse them.

Women’s desire for beauty is a powerful weapon for exploitation.

The constant destabilization of self is part and parcel of beauty’s effectiveness as a social construct.

For black women, racism, sexism, and classism have always made us structurally incompetent.

churned through a healthcare machine that neglected and ignored me until I was incompetent.

The easiest answer is that racism and sexism and class warfare are resilient and necessary for global capitalism.

Black women are superheroes when we conform to others’ expectations of us.

As objectified superhumans, we are valuable. As humans, we are incompetent.

to anticipate white people’s emotions and fears and grievances, because their issues are singularly our problem.

But I have come to believe that 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.

my first black president doesn’t appear to know his whites.

Those of us who know our whites know one thing above all else: whiteness defends itself. Against change, against progress, against hope, against black dignity, against black lives, against reason, against truth, against facts, against native claims, against its own laws and customs.

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

U.S. universities are a part of a post-colonial game of western credentialism where those with the means in nations beset by extreme income inequality purchase a pathway into the global labor market.

In such spaces, you have to build buffers for your emotional and mental health.

Talk should be meaningful or kept to a minimum.

where they are from. People ask the question of persons whose physical or cultural presentation disrupts the questioner’s intuitive understanding of race.

I have had absolutely no gap between how I perceive myself and how the world perceives me.

Dolezal did not need to convince black people that she was black. She only had to convince white people.

turn a girl into a woman and a woman into a ho has never left

home is both refuge and where your most intimate betrayals happen.

hair augmentation is as old as recorded human history, transcends national origin and culture and surely race.

Ain’t nobody got time for facts

That is not about black people being black but about people being American.