Review:
Thick, by Tressie McMillan Cottom
| Publisher: |
The New Press |
| Copyright: |
2019 |
| ISBN: |
1-62097-437-1 |
| Format: |
Kindle |
| Pages: |
247 |
Tressie McMillan Cottom is an associate professor of sociology at Virginia
Commonwealth University. I first became aware of her via retweets and
recommendations from other people I follow on Twitter, and she is indeed
one of the best writers on that site.
Thick: And Other Essays is
an essay collection focused primarily on how American culture treats black
women.
I will be honest here, in part because I think much of the regular
audience for my book reviews is similar to me (white, well-off from
working in tech, and leftist but privileged) and therefore may identify
with my experience. This is the sort of book that I always want to read
and then struggle to start because I find it intimidating. It received a
huge amount of praise on release, including being named as a finalist for
the National Book Award, and that praise focused on its incisiveness, its
truth-telling, and its depth and complexity. Complex and incisive books
about racism are often hard for me to read; they're painful, depressing,
and infuriating, and I have to fight my tendency to come away from them
feeling more cynical and despairing. (Despite loving his essays, I'm
still procrastinating reading Ta-Nehisi Coates's books.) I want to learn
and understand but am not good at doing anything with the information, so
this reading can feel like homework.
If that's also your reaction, read this book. I regret having waited as
long as I did.
Thick is still, at times, painful, depressing, and infuriating.
It's also brilliantly written in a way that makes the knowledge being
conveyed easier to absorb. Rather than a relentless onslaught of bearing
witness (for which, I should stress, there is an important place), it is a
scalpel. Each essay lays open the heart of a subject in a few deft
strokes, points out important features that the reader has previously
missed, and then steps aside, leaving you alone with your thoughts to come
to terms with what you've just learned. I needed this book to be an essay
collection, with each thought just long enough to have an impact and not
so long that I became numb. It's the type of collection that demands a
pause at the end of each essay, a moment of mental readjustment, and
perhaps a paging back through the essay again to remember the sharpest
points.
The essays often start with seeds of the personal, drawing directly on
McMillan Cottom's own life to wrap context around their point. In the
first essay, "Thick," she uses advice given her younger self against
writing too many first-person essays to talk about the writing form, its
critics, and how the backlash against it has become part of systematic
discrimination because black women are not allowed to write any other sort
of authoritative essay. She then draws a distinction between her own
writing and personal essays, not because she thinks less of that genre but
because that genre does not work for her as a writer. The essays in
Thick do this repeatedly. They appear to head in one direction,
then deepen and shift with the added context of precise sociological
analysis, defying predictability and reaching a more interesting
conclusion than the reader had expected. And, despite those shifts,
McMillan Cottom never lost me in a turn. This is a book that is not only
comfortable with complexity and nuance, but helps the reader become
comfortable with that complexity as well.
The second essay, "In the Name of Beauty," is perhaps my favorite of the
book. Its spark was backlash against an essay McMillan Cottom wrote about
Miley Cyrus, but the topic of the essay wasn't what sparked the backlash.
What many black women were angry about was how I located myself in
what I'd written. I said, blithely as a matter of observable fact,
that I am unattractive. Because I am unattractive, the argument went,
I have a particular kind of experience of beauty, race, racism, and
interacting with what we might call the white gaze. I thought nothing
of it at the time I was writing it, which is unusual. I can usually
pinpoint what I have said, written, or done that will piss people off
and which people will be pissed off. I missed this one entirely.
What follows is one of the best essays on the social construction of
beauty I've ever read. It barely pauses at the typical discussion of
unrealistic beauty standards as a feminist issue, instead diving directly
into beauty as whiteness, distinguishing between beauty standards that
change with generations and the more lasting rules that instead police the
bounds between white and not white. McMillan Cottom then goes on to
explain how beauty is a form of capital, a poor and problematic one but
nonetheless one of the few forms of capital women have access to, and
therefore why black women have fought to be included in beauty despite all
of the problems with judging people by beauty standards. And the essay
deepens from there into a trenchant critique of both capitalism and white
feminism that is both precise and illuminating.
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. I am glad that doing so unsettles
folks, including the many white women who wrote to me with impassioned
cases for how beautiful I am. 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.
I could go on. Every essay in this book deserves similar attention. I
want to quote from all of them. These essays are about racism, feminism,
capitalism, and economics, all at the same time. They're about power, and
how it functions in society, and what it does to people. There is an
essay about Obama that contains the most concise explanation for his
appeal to white voters that I've read. There is a fascinating essay about
the difference between ethnic black and black-black in U.S. culture.
There is so much more.
We do not share much in the U.S. culture of individualism except our
delusions about meritocracy. God help my people, but I can talk to
hundreds of black folks who have been systematically separated from
their money, citizenship, and personhood and hear at least eighty
stories about how no one is to blame but themselves. That is not
about black people being black but about people being American. That
is what we do. If my work is about anything it is about making plain
precisely how prestige, money, and power structure our so-called
democratic institutions so that most of us will always fail.
I, like many other people in my profession, was always more comfortable
with the technical and scientific classes in college. I liked math and
equations and rules, dreaded essay courses, and struggled to engage with
the mandatory humanities courses. Something that I'm still learning, two
decades later, is the extent to which this was because the humanities are
harder work than the sciences and I wasn't yet up to the challenge of
learning them properly. The problems are messier and more fluid. The
context required is broader. It's harder to be clear and precise. And
disciplines like sociology deal with our everyday lived experience, which
means that we all think we're entitled to an opinion.
Books like this, which can offer me a hand up and a grounding in the
intellectual rigor while simultaneously being engaging and easy to read,
are a treasure. They help me fill in the gaps in my education and help me
recognize and appreciate the depth of thought in disciplines that don't
come as naturally to me.
This book was homework, but the good kind, the kind that exposes gaps in
my understanding, introduces topics I hadn't considered, and makes the
time fly until I come up for air, awed and thinking hard. Highly
recommended.
Rating: 9 out of 10
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