Home > Author > Tressie McMillan Cottom
21 " ...I had also parsed that there was something powerful about blondness, thinness, flatness, and gaps between thighs. And that power was the context against which all others defined themselves... beauty isn’t actually what you look like; beauty is the preference that reproduce the existing social order. "
― Tressie McMillan Cottom , Thick: And Other Essays
22 " When I write, I am fixing my feet. I am claiming the ethos, or moral authority, to influence public discourse. And I am defying every expectation when I do it. "
23 " In a modern society, who is allowed to speak with authority is a political act. "
24 " 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. "
25 " 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. "
26 " 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. "
27 " My first black president seems to think that he could raise his daughters to believe in systemic racism without legitimizing the idea of systemic reparations. He thinks that he can be his brother’s keeper without changing the policies, laws, and investments that keep his brothers in bad jobs, in poor neighborhoods, with bad educational options, and at the bottom of the social hierarchy. 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. "
28 " The things we touch and smell and see and experience through our senses are how stories become powerful. But I have never wanted to only tell powerfully evocative stories. I have wanted to tell evocative stories that become a problem for power. For that, I draw upon data and research. "
29 " 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. "
30 " would stand to reason that beauty’s ultimate function is to exclude blackness. That beauty also violently conditions white women and symbolically precludes the existence of gender nonconforming people is a bonus. "
31 " The real criticism was directed at her turn to slavery: “back in the slave days I would’ve never been single. I am six feet tall and I am strong! I’m just saying back in the slave days my love life would have been way better. Massa would’ve hooked me up with the best brother on the plantation.” It hurts to watch the video. "
32 " ... I try really hard not to write dumb things. I cannot speak for Mr. Brooks. "
33 " Political theorist Corey Robin understands the history of the conservative right in the United States as a search for a fight, because the act of being conservative necessitates an undesirable progress against which it can rebel. In a sort of manifestation politics, the “right” co-creates or at least abets social progress against which it can be juxtaposed. Staid conservatism is far from seeking stasis. It is provoking and reactive because without progress there is no reason to prefer the lack of progress. "
34 " Sisters weren’t really angry about my breakdown of just how dangerous Miley Cyrus’s performance on a televised award show actually was. They weren’t exactly angry that I pointed out the size and shape of the black woman dancers behind her. 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. "
35 " Symbolic violence only makes sense if we accept its priors: all preferences in imperial, industrialized societies are shaped by the economic system. "
36 " That is because beauty isn’t actually what you look like; beauty is the preferences that reproduce the existing social order. "
37 " Capital demands that beauty be coercive. 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. "
38 " The assumption of black women’s incompetence—we cannot know ourselves, express ourselves in a way that the context will render legible, or that prompts people with power to respond to us as agentic beings—supersedes even the most powerful status cultures in all of neoliberal capitalism: wealth and fame. In 2017 Serena Williams gave birth to her daughter. She celebrated with an interview, as is the ritual custom of celebrity cultures. In the interview, Serena describes how she had to bring to bear the full force of her authority as a global superstar to convince a nurse that she needed a treatment. The treatment likely saved Serena’s life. Many black women are not so lucky. "
39 " The structural incompetence of black women is how we were made into property makers without any rights to property during slavery; "
40 " Being structurally incompetent injects friction into every interaction, between people, and between people and organizations, and between organizations and ideologies. Frictionless living is the promise of neoliberal capital—that is, if you are on the winning side of power. But 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. "