Home > Author > Tressie McMillan Cottom
61 " Here is where anyone who does not look white or black will find me ridiculous. Such people are asked all the time where they are from. People ask the question of persons whose physical or cultural presentation disrupts the questioner’s intuitive understanding of race. Black people do not have blue eyes—where are you from? Asians are from China and Japan, but you are brown—where are you from? You are blond but you are speaking Spanish, which is what Mexicans speak—where are you from? The question is not strange for its being asked, but for its being asked of me. My entire life I have had absolutely no gap between how I perceive myself and how the world perceives me. I identify as exactly what I look like I am. It is a kind of privilege in a world where conforming to somatic expectations of race, gender, and sexuality minimizes invasions of your privacy and property. But it is a complicated privilege "
― Tressie McMillan Cottom , Thick: And Other Essays
62 " Such is the foolishness of wanting to be competent in a political economy that can only sell you ways to feel competent, but does not offer sufficient ways to enact competency. "
63 " Smart is only a construct of correspondence between one's abilities, one's environment, and one's moment in history. I am smart in the right way, in the right time, on the right end of globalization. "
64 " 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. "
65 " The easiest answer is that racism and sexism and class warfare are resilient and necessary for global capitalism. "
66 " Patricia Hill Collins once called on the idea of controlling images, those stereotypes that are so powerful they flatten all empirical status differences among a group of people to reduce them to the most docile, incompetent subjects in a social structure. "
67 " When you are vulnerable and on the losing end of a power dynamic, all you can hear of that kind of direct, unsolicited feedback is how —despite all of your hard work— /you are still doing everything wrong./ "
68 " What I remember most about the whole ordeal, groggy from trauma and pain and narcotics, is how nothing about who I was in any other context mattered to the assumptions of my incompetence. I was highly educated. I spoke in the way one might expect of someone with a lot of formal education. I had health insurance. I was married. All of my status characteristics screamed “competent,” but nothing could shut down what my blackness screams when I walk into the room. I could use my status to serve others, but not myself. "
69 " I want nice people with nice enough politics to looks at me, reason for themselves that I am worthy, and feel convicted when the world does not agree. "
70 " black women are 243 percent more likely to die from pregnancy- or childbirth-related causes that are white women. "
71 " In one sense, it seems obvious why credentials matter. Median weekly earnings for full-time workers with a master’s degree are $1,380, while someone with only a high school diploma can expect to earn just under $700/week. "
― Tressie McMillan Cottom , Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy
72 " What is beautiful is whatever will keep weekend lake parties safe from strange darker people. "
73 " The joke was not on enslaved black women of yesteryear but on the idea that it would take a totalizing system of enslavement to counter the structural violence that beauty does to Jones in her life today. "
74 " Life, inexhaustible, goes on. And we do too. Carrying our wounds and our medicines as we go. Ours is an amazing, a spectacular, journey in the Americas. It is so remarkable one can only be thankful for it, bizarre as that may sound. Perhaps our planet is for learning to appreciate the extraordinary wonder of life that surrounds even our suffering, and to say Yes, if through the thickest of tears. —Alice Walker, from the foreword to Zora NealeHurston’s Barracoon "
75 " my book Lower Ed is fundamentally about.4 It is what all of my work is about. "
76 " Repeatedly people have said to me in their own way, from within their own stratified statuses, that I need to believe I am beautiful or can become beautiful -- not for my own benefit, but because it serves so many others. "
77 " 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 and kept to a minimum. "
78 " If I believe that I can become beautiful, I become an economic subject. My desire becomes a market. "
79 " With the privilege to read and to think comes great responsibility. "
80 " Those spaces to read are a privilege. "