thick and other essays tressie mcmillan cottom

I would not have had the language when I was growing up to consider myself a critical thinker, not with the weight I ascribe to “critical thinking” now. Your ability to articulate “ intersectionality” is admirable, growing up would you have considered yourself to be a critical thinker, or was this developed over time? It is important to talk about both sides of that dynamic.Ģ.

To take up space, for some people that is a very radical thing.Īt the same time, it would be really radical for some people who have inherited space that they have not earned to cede space to others would also be very political. We grant space based on what a person has inherited or how much money a person has to spend or how much the person conforms to our idea of who should be in charge of the world. We do not allocate space to people based on their gifts or their talents or their humanity. And we make these systems in this unequal way. There are a lot of structures, norms, behaviors, and people who coordinate belief systems that require some people to make themselves smaller to the benefit of other people having space to become larger. What does it mean to you to be “unapologetically ‘thick’”? McMillan Cottom has crafted a black woman’s cultural bible, as she mines for meaning in places many of us miss and reveals precisely how-when you’re in the thick of it-the political, the social, and the personal are almost always one and the same.1. Yet Thick will also fill a void on those very shelves: a modern black American female voice waxing poetic on self and society, serving up a healthy portion of clever prose and southern aphorisms in a style uniquely her own. This bold compendium, likely to find its place on shelves alongside Lindy West, Rebecca Solnit, and Maggie Nelson, dissects everything from beauty to Obama to pumpkin spice lattes. In the bestselling tradition of bell hooks and Roxane Gay, McMillan Cottom’s freshman collection illuminates a particular trait of her tribe: being thick. Tressie McMillan Cottom, the writer, professor, and acclaimed author of Lower Ed, now brilliantly shifts gears from running regression analyses on college data to unleashing another identity: a purveyor of wit, wisdom-and of course Black Twitter snark-about all that is right and much that is so very wrong about this thing we call society.

Thick and other essays tressie mcmillan cottom