Thick: And Other Essays

by Tressie McMillan Cottom

Overview

FINALIST FOR THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

Named a notable book of 2019 by the New York Times Book Review, Chicago Tribune, Time, and The Guardian

As featured by The Daily Show, NPR, PBS, CBC, Time, VIBE, Entertainment Weekly, Well-Read Black Girl, and Chris Hayes, "incisive, witty, and provocative essays" (Publishers Weekly) by one of the "most bracing thinkers on race, gender, and capitalism of our time" (Rebecca Traister)

“Thick is sure to become a classic.” —The New York Times Book Review

In eight highly praised treatises on beauty, media, money, and more, Tressie McMillan Cottom—award-winning professor and acclaimed author of Lower Ed—is unapologetically "thick": deemed "thick where I should have been thin, more where I should have been less," McMillan Cottom refuses to shy away from blending the personal with the political, from bringing her full self and voice to the fore of her analytical work. Thick "transforms narrative moments into analyses of whiteness, black misogyny, and status-signaling as means of survival for black women" (Los Angeles Review of Books) with "writing that is as deft as it is amusing" (Darnell L. Moore).

This "transgressive, provocative, and brilliant" (Roxane Gay) collection cements McMillan Cottom's position as a public thinker capable of shedding new light on what the "personal essay" can do. She turns her chosen form into a showcase for her critical dexterity, investigating everything from Saturday Night Live, LinkedIn, and BBQ Becky to sexual violence, infant mortality, and Trump rallies.

Collected in an indispensable volume that speaks to the everywoman and the erudite alike, these unforgettable essays never fail to be "painfully honest and gloriously affirming" and hold "a mirror to your soul and to that of America" (Dorothy Roberts).

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781620975879
Publisher:	New Press, The
Publication date:	10/01/2019
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	145,060
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Tressie McMillan Cottom is an associate professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth Universityand the author of Lower Ed. Her work has been featured by The Daily Show, the New York Times, the Washington Post, PBS, NPR, Fresh Air, and The Atlantic, among others. In 2020, McMillan Cottom was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. She lives in Richmond, Virginia.

Table of Contents

Thick 1

In the Name of Beauty 33

Dying to Be Competent 73

Know Your Whites 99

Black Is Over (Or, Special Black) 127

The Price of Fabulousness 153

Black Girlhood, Interrupted 171

Girl 6 195

Acknowledgments 225

Notes 229

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Thick:
Shortlisted for the Museum of African American History Stone Book Award

"Thick is sure to become a classic of black intellectualism, one that ought to be read not only in African-American and gender studies departments across the country, although its lens is irrefutably and irresistibly black and feminist. It should be required reading for anyone interested in making 'trust black women' more than a hollow social media mantra."
—The New York Times Book Review

"Cottom's intersectionality is merely the work of a writer seeing the world clearly and deeply, and connecting the dots in fresh and revealing ways."
—Chicago Tribune

"Thick confirms McMillan Cottom as one of our most fearless public intellectuals and one of the most vital."
—Literary Hub, "The 10 Best Essay Collections of the Decade"

"Thick gets into the messiness of US culture, exposing what Americans want to say but are sometimes too afraid or too unaware to say. . . . In essence, this book is about the compromises we make for the sake of control."
—Christian Century

"Incisive, witty, and provocative essays. . . . The collection showcases McMillan Cottom's wisdom and originality and amply fulfills her aim of telling powerful stories that become a problem for power."
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"The meshing of the personal and political and the author's take-no-prisoners attitude make these essays sizzle. A provocative volume bound to stir argument and discussion."
—Kirkus Reviews

"This book is essential for anyone who wants to think deeply about race, feminism, and culture."
—BookRiot

"To say this collection is transgressive, provocative, and brilliant is simply to tell you the truth. Thick is a necessary work and a reminder that Tressie McMillan Cottom is one of the finest public intellectuals writing today."
—Roxane Gay, author of Hunger and Bad Feminist

"Thick is gorgeous, incisive, and hard. Tressie McMillan Cottom is among America's most bracing thinkers on race, gender, and capitalism of our time and she is at her very best here. These essays enlighten and complicate and push conversations further. They are blisteringly smart and beautifully written. They are also, simply, a pleasure to read."
—Rebecca Traister, author of Good and Mad and All the Single Ladies

"Black women are uniquely attuned to the hydra that bell hooks names the imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Publics should trust black women. Thick proves why readers should trust Tressie McMillan Cottom's black-people-loving writing that is as deft as it is amusing. Her words are a sword. She comes out swinging her blade at the hydra's head with unmatched courage."
—Darnell L. Moore, author of No Ashes in the Fire

"These essays show us the potency of actually existing black feminist analysis and expose the deep structures of racism and inequality that shape most black women's lives. With biting humor and razor-sharp political clarity, Thick is a crucial contribution to contemporary black thought."
—Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation

"Reading Thick is like holding a mirror to your soul and to that of America. [S]earingly intimate and astute . . . at once painfully honest and gloriously affirming."
—Dorothy Roberts, author of Killing the Black Body

"Rich with layers of meaning . . . blaaaaaack and southern and country and wise [and] pulsates with wit, self-awareness, and unabashed expertise. For Professional Smart People with sense, her writing is #goals."
—Soraya McDonald, culture critic at The Undefeated

"Thick is aptly named, for McMillan Cottom is no intellectual lightweight—she walks heavy, bringing together her singular sociological insights with compelling and relatable storytelling."
—Brittney Cooper, author of Eloquent Rage

Praise for Tressie McMillan Cottom's Lower Ed:
"The best book yet on the complex lives and choices of for-profit students."
—The New York Times Book Review

From the Publisher

…offers profound and expansive cultural commentary, in essays epigraphed by figures ranging from Foucault to Malcolm X to the rapper Migos—reflecting [McMillan Cottom's] skillful interweaving of the academic with the popular, all informed by blackness…Thick is sure to become a classic of black intellectualism, one that ought to be read not only in African-American and gender studies departments across the country, although its lens is irrefutably and irresistibly black and feminist. It should be required reading for anyone interested in making "trust black women" more than a hollow social media mantra.

The New York Times Book Review - Camille Acker

★ 11/26/2018
In eight incisive, witty, and provocative essays, debut author Cottom (Lower Ed), a Virginia Commonwealth University assistant sociology professor, highlights structural inequalities and explores the black female experience in contemporary America. She lucidly reflects on her personal story, as the daughter of parents who moved north to Harlem, where she was born, then back to the South. To this, she adds data and research, showing, for instance, that regardless of education level, black women are commonly treated as “incompetent” in the health care system, where they are “243% more likely to die from pregnancy or childbirth-related causes than white women.” Cottom goes on to observe that black women and girls fear speaking up about sexual abuse, due to the extra “burden of protecting the reputations of black boys and men” and that, despite “generations of earned and inherited moral philosophy that has sustained families, communities and institutions,” aren’t seen as authorities on much of anything. Other topics include LinkedIn as an emblem of neoliberalism’s failure, tensions between African-Americans and black people from other countries, and how beauty and self-esteem are treated as commodities. The collection showcases Cottom’s wisdom and originality and amply fulfills her aim of telling “powerful stories that become a problem for power.” (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

Winter 2018

Cottom, (sociology, Virginia Commonwealth Univ.; Lower Ed) presents her first collection of essays, chronicling her life as a black woman in America. In eight timely and direct pieces, Cottom discusses everything from the importance of seeing oneself reflected in literature and the meaning of beauty to the Trump administration, #MeToo, and other events of the modern day. Common threads involving the black experience, current events, and moments from Cottom's own life run through each essay. With such broad themes, the work sometimes feels disjointed, but Cottom writes with great clarity and familiarity, which makes her essays a pleasure to engage with despite their wide breadth. Highly accessible and to the point, this is a great sketchlike anthology for fans of authors such as Roxane Gay. VERDICT Cottom offers a skimming discussion on the challenges of being black and a woman in America while making excellent points. Readers interested in social justice will find a number of quotable passages, whether for casual or academic use.—Abby Hargreaves, Dist. of Columbia P.L.

Library Journal

2018-11-13

Sociology and personal experience blend in a concise collection of essays about contemporary black American women.

These essays are distinguished by the fact that McMillan Cottom (Sociology/Virginia Commonwealth Univ.; Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy, 2017, etc.) is clearly dedicated to including the whole range of her being, from the detached academic who rigorously footnotes each of the essays to the emotional first-person narrator of the experiences of sexual abuse and societal exclusion. As a "black woman who thinks for a living," the author describes herself as caught in the middle of some invisible battle, accused by one editor of being "too readable to be academic, too deep to be popular, too country black to be literary, and too naïve to show the rigor of my thinking in the complexity of my prose." From this position—uncomfortable for her but stimulating for readers—McMillan Cottom takes aim at a range of targets. "In the Name of Beauty" makes the controversial case that a black woman cannot by definition be beautiful, because "beauty isn't actually what you look like; beauty is the preferences that reproduce the existing social order. What is beautiful is whatever will keep weekend lake parties safe from strange darker people." In "Dying to Be Competent," the author takes the horrifying story of the death of her premature baby and extrapolates to discuss the consequences of assuming that even the most educated and wealthy black women are unable to manage their lives properly. "Black Is Over (Or, Special Black)" dissects with sardonic zeal the tendency of colleges to choose students from Africa or the Caribbean over black students from the United States. "When there is only room for a few blacks there is a competition for which black should prevail," she writes. Throughout, the meshing of the personal and political and the author's take-no-prisoners attitude make these essays sizzle.

A provocative volume bound to stir argument and discussion.

Kirkus Reviews