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Tressie McMillan Cottom QUOTES

Tressie McMillan Cottom QUOTES

1 " I fix myself, even when it causes great pain to do so, because I know that I cannot fix the way the world sees me. "

― Tressie McMillan Cottom , Thick: And Other Essays

2 " I am living in the most opportune time in black history in the United States and that means, still, that I will die younger, live poorer, risk more exposure to police violence, and be punished by social policy for being a black woman in ways that aren’t true for almost any other group in this nation. That is the best it has ever been to be black in America and it is still that statistically bad at the macro level. "

― Tressie McMillan Cottom , Thick: And Other Essays

3 " We were writing personal essays because as far as authoritative voices go, the self was the only subject men and white people would cede to us. "

― Tressie McMillan Cottom , Thick: And Other Essays

4 " He means what kind of special negro are you? "

― Tressie McMillan Cottom , Thick: And Other Essays

5 " What we forget, if we ever knew, is that what we know now about status and wealth creation and sacrifice are predicated on who we are — that is, not poor.

If you change the conditions of your not-poor status, you change everything you know as a result of being a not-poor. You have no idea what you would do if you were poor until you are poor. And not intermittently poor or formerly not-poor, but born poor, expected to be poor, and treated by bureaucracies, gatekeepers, and well-meaning respectability authorities as inherently poor. Then, and only then, will you understand the relative value of a ridiculous status symbol to someone who intuits that they cannot afford to not have it. "

― Tressie McMillan Cottom , Thick: And Other Essays

6 " Beauty is not good capital. I 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. It is not useful for human flourishing. Beauty is, like all capital, merely valuable. "

― Tressie McMillan Cottom , Thick: And Other Essays

7 " They say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and that ugly is as ugly does. Both are lies. Ugly is everything done to you in the name of beauty. Knowing the difference is part of getting free. "

― Tressie McMillan Cottom , Thick: And Other Essays

8 " Smart is only a construct of correspondence, between one’s abilities, one’s environment, and one’s moment in history. "

― Tressie McMillan Cottom , Thick: And Other Essays

9 " I hate small talk. It is small. Small is for teacups and occasionally for tiny houses. Too much small talk is how a country is given to sociopaths who thrive on shallow chatter to distract their emotional sleight of hand. Talk should be meaningful or kept to a minimum. "

― Tressie McMillan Cottom , Thick: And Other Essays

10 " Decades before I valued myself enough to be careful for myself, I was careful so that my mother would not worry. "

― Tressie McMillan Cottom , Thick: And Other Essays

11 " Being too much of one thing and not enough of another had been a recurring theme in my life. I was, like many young women, expected to be small so that boys could expand and white girls could shine.

When I would not shrink, people made sure that I knew I had erred. "

― Tressie McMillan Cottom , Thick: And Other Essays

12 " [to know your whites] ... is to be intimate with some white persons but to critically withhold faith in white people categorically "

― Tressie McMillan Cottom , Thick: And Other Essays

13 " 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? "

― Tressie McMillan Cottom , Thick: And Other Essays

14 " 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. "

― Tressie McMillan Cottom , Thick: And Other Essays

15 " Black girlhood ends whenever a man says it ends. "

― Tressie McMillan Cottom , Thick: And Other Essays

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

― Tressie McMillan Cottom , Thick: And Other Essays

17 " Beauty isn't actually what you look like; beauty is the preferences that reproduce the existing social order. "

― Tressie McMillan Cottom , Thick: And Other Essays

18 " When people talk about for-profit colleges, they often do so with a lot of disdain. If traditional colleges that take in a fraction of willing students every year annoy you, then you might be disdainful of their "prestige cartel." If you are concerned about vulnerable people making expensive educational decisions with little education, then you might disdain the "predatory" for-profit schools. If you think that a strong work ethic can trump all manner of troubles, you might disdain the "weak" people who go to a "predatory" school. What is interesting to me is how much disdain is spread among students and schools and how little disdain there is for labor markets. "

― Tressie McMillan Cottom , Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy

19 " Trump’s election could be seen as white voters reclaiming this nation as theirs "

― Tressie McMillan Cottom , Thick: And Other Essays

20 " When we perform some existential service to men, to capital, to political power, to white women, and even to other “people of color” who are marginally closer to white than they are to black, then we are superwomen. 7 We are fulfilling our purpose in the natural order of things. When, instead, black women are strong in service of themselves, that same strength, wisdom, and wit become evidence of our incompetence. "

― Tressie McMillan Cottom , Thick: And Other Essays