Thick: And Other Essays

by Tressie McMillan Cottom

It was true if not artfully stated. Being too much of one thing and not enough of another had been a recurring theme in my life.

the dreaded “first-person essay.” Dreaded because the genre has become identified with so many people and things that our culture loves to hate: women, people of color, queer people, young people, and the internet.

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.

What, more simply, does my social location say about our society?

I am also more forgiving of pettiness these days even as I become intolerant of willful ignorance.

Still, I am high-earning. I may work five jobs to afford it, but I can, on occasion, pay a student to edit a paper or an on-demand worker to deliver my groceries. With the privilege to read and to think comes great responsibility.

In fact, I want that for all of us; job guarantees and universal basic incomes are part of my core political beliefs.

We need to theorize the meaning of beauty in our lives so that we can educate for critical consciousness, talking through the issues: how we acquire and spend money, how we feel about beauty, what the place of beauty is in our lives when we lack material privilege and even basic resources for living, the meaning and significance of luxury, and the politics of envy. —bell hooks1

It is not just the preferences of a too-tall boy, but the way authority validates his preferences as normal.

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

Memes are just born-digital nuggets of cultural norms.

That was not Wolf’s argument, but the absence of such a critique rather proves the point: beauty is for white women.

Indeed, any system of oppression must allow exceptions to validate itself as meritorious. How else will those who are oppressed by the system internalize their own oppression?

Don’t get me wrong, the standard is complicated. It has the same economic costs to perform it as the ones white feminists argue that the massive global beauty industry exacts from white women. The costs may be even higher, because black women have fewer resources to purchase the accoutrements of thin waists, thick hips, tattooed brows, elegant contouring, red-heeled shoes, and femme styling that contemporary black beauty standards require.

Again, the idea of my body’s value in social contexts was the a priori issue. These students were saying, in as many ways as they could, that I could not be ugly because white people find me desirable.

Black women have worked hard to write a counternarrative of our worth in a global system where beauty is the only legitimate capital allowed women without legal, political, and economic challenge. That last bit is important. 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.

Key part

We try to construct something that feels like liberation in an inherently oppressive regime, balancing peace with our marginally more privileged lighter-skinned black women while refuting the global caste status of darker-skinned black women.

Symbolic violence only makes sense if we accept its priors: all preferences in imperial, industrialized societies are shaped by the economic system. There aren’t any “good” preferences. There are only preferences that are validated by others, differently, based on social contexts.

That’s why beauty can never be about preference. “I just like what I like” is always a capitalist lie.

If beauty matters at all to how people perceive you, how institutions treat you, which rules are applied to you, and what choices you can make, then beauty must also be a structure of patterns, institutions, and exchanges that eats your preferences for lunch.

the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing us that he does not exist. That is why naming is political. Our so-called counternarratives about beauty and what they demand of us cannot be divorced from the fact that beauty is contingent upon capitalism.

They offered me neoliberal self-help nonsense that borders on the religious. They need me to believe beauty is both achievable and individual, because the alternative makes them vulnerable. If you did not earn beauty, never had the real power to reject it, then you are as much a vulnerable subject as I am in your own way. Deal with that rather than dealing with me.

it may seem to privileged people that it is easier to fix me than it is to fix the world. I live to disabuse people of that notion.

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.

Because it can be an idea and a good and a body, beauty serves many useful functions for our economic system. Even better, beauty can be political. It can exclude and include, one of the basic conditions of any politics.

Our dominant story of beauty is that it is simultaneously a blessing, of genetics or gods, and a site of conversion. You can become beautiful if you accept the right prophets and their wisdoms with a side of products thrown in for good measure. Forget that these two ideas—unique blessing and earned reward—are antithetical to each other. That makes beauty all the more perfect for our (social and political) time, itself anchored in paradoxes like freedom and property, opportunity and equality.

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.

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. A good man need only then to come along and capitalize on the moment of negging, exploit the value of negged women, and consume the beauty that negs. It is really quite neat, if you think about it.

want nice people with nice-enough politics to look at me, reason for themselves that I am worthy, and feel convicted when the world does not agree. God willing they may one day extrapolate my specific case to the general rule, seeing the way oppression marginalizes others to their personal benefit.

But none of these things negates the structural apparatus that controls access to resources and ad hoc designates those with capital as beauty’s gatekeepers.

… the most murderous states are also the most racist. —Michel Foucault1

people are strangely defensive about LinkedIn. I made a joke about it on Twitter once and five years later people are still responding to that tweet, angry that I would even mildly disparage it. I made myself a promise that I would never again publicly make light of LinkedIn, once I realized why people were so defensive.

Despite our shared anxiety not all of us believe in a collective response to what is fundamentally a collective problem. The only thing we mostly agree on is that we are individuals with the “freedom” to be anxious as we please. What pleases us is any technocratic fairytale of how we can network enough to offset unstable employment.

After a week of labor pains that no one ever diagnosed, because the pain was in my butt and not my back, I could not hold off labor anymore. I was wheeled into a delivery operating room, where I slipped in and out of consciousness. At one point I awoke and screamed, “motherfucker.” The nurse told me to watch my language.

When the medical profession systematically denies the existence of black women’s pain, underdiagnoses our pain, refuses to alleviate or treat our pain, healthcare marks us as incompetent bureaucratic subjects. Then it serves us accordingly.

The World Health Organization estimates that black expectant and new mothers in the United States die at about the same rate as women in countries such as Mexico and Uzbekistan.

Patricia Hill Collins’s matrix of domination, the intersecting planes of privilege and domination, still matters.

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.

Barack Obama’s election was a catalyst for a level of voter suppression activities that had not been seen so clearly or disturbingly in decades. —Carol A. Anderson, White Rage

To know our whites is to understand the psychology of white people and the elasticity of whiteness. It is to be intimate with some white persons but to critically withhold faith in white people categorically. It is to anticipate white people’s emotions and fears and grievances, because their issues are singularly our problem. To know our whites is to survive without letting bitterness rot your soul.

Those are the eight years that writer Ta-Nehisi Coates calls the “Good Negro Government period.”6 Like the eight years of Black Reconstruction some 130 years prior to his first presidential contest—one that he would win handily—Obama’s Good Negro Government period was marked by black political competence and white fear. 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.

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. White is being European until it needs to also be Irish because of the Polish who can eventually be white if it means that Koreans cannot.

Duality can breed insight, but it can also breed delusion. Holding two sets of social selves, two ways of being and understanding the world at one time, may soften the edges so much that for the liminal, the edges no longer exist.

My first black president seems to think he can have black cool without black burden. For all his intimacies with his white mother and white grandparents, 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.

maintain the internal tension that defines it is for superiority to coexist with fragility.

“Yeah, you seen Katt Williams? That one about the tiger? That tiger bit your ass because he remembered he was a tiger.”

Trump coalition is not a historical anomaly. Viewed through the lens of historical struggle, Trump’s election could be seen as white voters reclaiming this nation as theirs.

the act of being conservative necessitates an undesirable progress against which it can rebel.

It is provoking and reactive because without progress there is no reason to prefer the lack of progress. Similarly, what is a white republic for white citizens and in defense of white property if there is not a dark threat? To the extent that white racial identity matters at all to how white voters vote, white Obama voters and white Trump voters are not necessarily expressing different views of whiteness. They are expressing the same one,