Thick: And Other Essays

by Tressie McMillan Cottom

Graduate students are not people. In the academic hierarchy, graduate students are units of labor. They can be students, but not just students. They are academics in the making. They do not have any claim to authority among scholars. In fact, the most surefire way to get a real, minted academic to speak to you when you are just a graduate student is to introduce yourself by proxy: “Hi I am Tressie, student of Richard Rubinson and Sandy Darity, and I know five other people who you recognize as people.”

I did not learn early enough to be cautious of white women. The first time a white woman teacher told me that my breasts were distracting was in the sixth grade. Over the years, white women with authority over me have told me how wrong or dangerous or deviant my body is.

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.

Just as is true of international students from China, Japan, and India who find their way to the United States, our universities are generally cherry-picking the winners of extreme social stratification in other countries through our admissions processes. The black ethnic students in that room were no more representative of their home nations than I am of the United States. But

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.

One man’s Italian meat is another woman’s Afro-curl 1-B bundles.

That is, I suppose, what I wanted when I wanted what I want: a black woman somewhere in this world to have the freedom to be banal as a matter of course for her job.