I have read this book Thick, and other essays by Tressie McMillan Cottom for quite a while now. I’ve always wanted to blog about it, but haven’t been able to. Partly is that the book is a collection of essays so it’s difficult to summarize as a whole. Partly is also that the book is really, really, really good.
I’m a philosopher. I’m trained to talk about 100 ways an argument is deficient and how to fix it. I don’t know what to do with flawless things. I’ve been trying to be better at it (including organizing the positive feedback group a while ago; we’ve since met a couple more times but not super frequently since it is quite time-consuming). But I still don’t know what to say when something is just so good I’m completely convinced. (Also: it’s probably always a better choice to shut up and let the text speak for itself anyway, since it’s that good.)
All of this is to excuse why I haven’t blogged about this amazing book that completely changed my perspective until now. If you are someone like me — new to black feminism and new to sociology — you should read it. This book made me want to be a sociologist. It’s also on Audible.
I still don’t know how to best summarize/describe the content of this book, so I figured I’ll just talk about some themes in elementary school book report style.
Already in the preface, McMillan Cottom talks about “fixing [her] feet”, a literal reality because she had a condition that made her walk funny and her mother couldn’t afford surgical correction. This has led to physiological problems later in life. But it’s also a metaphor, as black women’s behaviours are extensively policed to the detriment of their own development.
She then talks about beauty standards. A lot has been written on unrealistic beauty standards as patriarchal and capitalist policing of women’s bodies, but McMillan Cottom’s analysis adds a racial dimension. She asks “can black women be beautiful the way white women are?” and answers in the negative, because beauty standards, however unrealistic they are, are used to keep (white) women commodities in line. Black women can never be such commodities. (I must admit I’m still having trouble grasping the nuances here so you should go read and decide for yourself.)
She recounts a heartbreaking retelling of a medical racism story — one among many that made black women 2 to 6 times more likely to die from pregnancy than white women in the US. McMillan Cottom then analyzes this situation as one about epistemic authority — black women are not seen as competent knowers, even when it comes to their own bodily sensations. There has been a lot of philosophical works on testimonial injustice and testimonial smothering recently. I’m not super familiar to that literature to draw the connections here, but McMillan Cottom’s analysis of medical racism is certainly a powerful and convincing case of epistemic injustice.
She talks about how, as she progresses along the academic ladder, people start to assume she is not American black. McMillan Cottom then observes a tendency for some DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) initiatives at college campuses to favour black international students over domestic ones. In a sense, this is reminiscent of the context in which Kimberly Crenshaw first introduced the term “intersectionalism”: companies can be “gender diverse” by employing white women and “racially diverse” by employing black men, overlooking black women. Here, DEI initiatives can “promote racial diversity” by recruiting international black students, overlooking domestic ones.
I will end here. There are many more chapters about topics like Obama’s election, rational choice in poverty, difficulty of finding books with black girl protagonists. You should all go read it.
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