Home > Author > Tressie McMillan Cottom
81 " Black girls have not, for most of my understanding of our history in this nation, had the power to cause those kinds of problems. Black girls and black women are problems. That is not the same thing as causing problems. We are social issues to be solved, economic problems to be balanced, and emotional baggage to be overcome. "
― Tressie McMillan Cottom , Thick: And Other Essays
82 " Much as we interrogate what a woman was wearing when she was raped, we look for ways to assign personal responsibility for structural injustices to bodies we collectively do not value. "
83 " What so many black women know is what I learned as I sat at the end of a hallway with a dead baby in my arms. The networks of capital, be they polities or organizations, work most efficiently when your lowest status characteristic is assumed. And once these gears are in motion, you can never be competent enough to save your own life. That is how black feminism knows the future. "
84 " We work. Lord do black girls and black women work. 4 We start work early before it is paid work. Then we start paid work and most of us never stop, are unable to ever stop. We work to keep churches financially viable, 5 black colleges in business, 6 black families functioning, 7 black politics respectable, 8 and black men alive. 9 "
85 " Originating as it does not from nation or kin but from the primordial ooze of capitalism, whiteness can only be defined by state power. It requires a legal system that can formalize irrational biological expressions, making them rational. It needs a justice system that will adjudicate the arbitrary inclusion and exclusion of people across time. And, most of all, whiteness requires a police state that can use violent force to defend its sovereignty. "
86 " I was just a black girl, a little long in the tooth, but still in my mind just a black girl writing. Black girls do not cause problems for powerful white women or august professional publications or public discourse. 3 Black girls have not, for most of my understanding of our history in this nation, had the power to cause those kinds of problems. Black girls and black women are problems. That is not the same thing as causing problems. We are social issues to be solved, economic problems to be balanced, and emotional baggage to be overcome. "
87 " Ain’t nobody got time for facts when there is a black woman waiting to be a punchline. "
88 " 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 "
89 " 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. "
90 " Beauty is not good capital. It 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. "
91 " When oppressed people become complicit in their oppression, joining the dominant class in their ideas about what we are, it is symbolic violence. Like all concepts, symbolic violence has a context that is important for using it to mean what we intend to mean. It is not just that internalizing the values of the dominant class violently stigmatizes us. Symbolic violence only makes sense if we accept its priors: all preferences in imperial, industrialized societies are shaped by the economic system. There aren’t any “good” preferences. There are only preferences that are validated by others, differently, based on social contexts. "
92 " When the privilege to read and to think comes great responsibility. When you have that privilege precisely because so many others like you—black women—are systematically filtered out of every level of social status, then the responsibility is especially great. "
93 " 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. "
94 " 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. "
95 " And sometimes, when we are trapped in the race not to be complicit in our own oppression, self-definition masquerades as a notion of loving our black selves in white terms. More than that, critique that hides the power being played out in the theater of our everyday lives only serves that power. It doesn't actually challenge it. 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. "
96 " The constant destabilization of self is part and parcel if beauty's effectiveness as a social construct. "
― Tressie McMillan Cottom
97 " In the wealthiest nation in the world, black women are dying in childbirth at rates comparable to those in poorer, colonized nations. The World Health Organization estimates that black expectant and new mothers in the United States die at about the same rate as women in countries such as Mexico and Uzbekistan. The high mortality rate of black women in the United States has been documented by the CDC, which says that black women are 243 percent more likely to die from pregnancy- or childbirth-related causes than are white women. "
98 " Whiteness exists as a response to blackness. Whiteness is a violent sociocultural regime legitimized by property to always make clear who is black by fastidiously delineating who is officially white. It 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. "
99 " Black women have worked hard to write a counternarrative of our worth in a global system where beauty is the only legitimate capital allowed women without legal, political, and economic challenge. That last bit is important. Beauty is not good capital. It 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.13 "
100 " To get the "healthcare" promised by the healthcare bureaucracy, it helps tremendously if the bureaucracy assumes that you are competent. When I called the nurse and said that I was bleeding and in pain, the nurse needed to hear that a competent person was on the phone in order to process my problem for the crisis that it was. Instead, something about me and the interaction did not read as competent. That is why I was left in a general waiting room when I arrived, rather than being rushed to a private room with the equipment necessary to treat a pregnancy crisis. "