Thick: And Other Essays

by Tressie McMillan Cottom

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.

I have not a room of my own, but a whole house.

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

It would stand to reason that beauty’s ultimate function is to exclude blackness.

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.

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.

But if I believe that I can become beautiful, I become an economic subject. My desire becomes a market.

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.

The high mortality rate of black women in the United States has been documented by the CDC, which says that black women are 243 percent more likely to die from pregnancy- or childbirth-related causes than are white women.4

whiteness defends itself.

Whether at a dinner table or in grand theories, the false choice between black-black and worthy black is a trap. It poses that ending blackness was the goal of anti-racist work when the real goal has always been and should always be ending whiteness.

Much as 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.

There is empirical evidence that women and people of color are judged by their appearances differently and more harshly than are white men.

Writing is democratic. Writing well is not.