Thick

by Tressie McMillan Cottom

  I have come very far. I had come so far that I could be considered a problem. It is an honor of sorts. I was writing and I was doing so without express permission from gatekeepers. I had, by my third year in graduate school, published hundreds of essays in national and international newspapers and media outlets. I was called upon to weigh in on issues like technology in education, racism in higher education, social media in labor movements, and Barack Obama, period. I am now an academic, an official one. I have the job and the title and the letters after my name that black people are so fond of calling our educational credentials.

  Still, there is some tension about how I got here and what I do here. I feel the tension from colleagues who cannot process why I receive so much attention. I feel it from publics who cannot fathom why I do not get more attention or different kinds of attention. Editors want me to be a journalist. Journalists want me to stay as far away from their beat as possible. Publishers want a black woman on their pages without the expense of adding one to their mastheads. No one quite knows what to make of the work that represents the intellectual journey I took from little black girl to black woman who thinks for a living.

  I attribute a lot of that tension to a fundamental misunderstanding of what I do. The essays in this volume dance along the line of the dreaded “first-person essay.” Dreaded because the genre has become identified with so many people and things that our culture loves to hate: women, people of color, queer people, young people, and the internet.

  In 2017, Jia Tolentino wrote in the New Yorker that the “personal-essay boom is over.”14 Tolentino was responding to a series of public articles about first-person essays in mainstream and digital publications. The first-person essay often had a hook, what we jokingly call on Twitter a “Slate pitch,” named for the publication Slate (a Washington Post Company digital publication). A Slate pitch, or hook, is a counterintuitive headline designed to spark debate when shared on social media sites. It is often conflated with “clickbait.” Clickbait are articles, content really, written for the express purpose of making people click on a link for a website that earns money from advertisers for every click it generates. A Slate pitch or counterintuitive hook is not necessarily clickbait. Very good essays are often written and then marketed using the Slate pitch. The result is all kinds of mockable headlines like “My Gynecologist Found a Ball of Cat Hair in My Vagina” that actually link to a thoughtful first-person essay about navigating societal expectations of cleanliness as a woman.15

  Regardless, the rush for advertising dollars that had fueled the personal essay was over. The epilogues had been written. They went something like this: women writers had oversaturated a market with their self-indulgent essays about issues that cannot scale to a general audience. These women writers had done so mostly for pay but more so for attention, as there was very little good pay happening for the personal essay. Predatory publications used these women to drive their internet traffic, subjecting them to ridicule and even real violence when nefarious groups targeted these writers for harassment. The personal essay was dead and not a minute too soon.

  Except the personal essay dragnet may have been cast too wide and too deep to be of much use as a device for anything but systemic discrimination. Black women writers spoke up about the personal essay. For them, it was the only point of access for telling the creative stories of empirical realities. Latinas said the same. Queer women and trans women and all manner of women stepped forward to add dimensions to what the personal essay form is and what it is assumed to be.

  The personal essay was an economic problem and a social problem dressed up as a cultural taste problem. The woman with cat hair in her vagina is probably certifiably insane. Let’s just get that out of the way. I do not ever want to know about that much cat hair being in any bodily orifice. I am also anti-cat, generally speaking, and definitely when the issue is fur balls in one’s vaginal cavity. I do not want to read it. I also do not want to read about men’s fascination with guns or stock car racing or long walks in the woods. I do not want to read Infinite Jest or talk to people about reading Infinite Jest. I do not want to listen to stories about Lake Wobegon or the mild humor of white suburban interpersonal politics. None of those things appeal to me and yet all of these takes on the personal essay were excluded from the form’s obituary. We weren’t killing the personal essay so much as were killing those who used the personal essay to become a problem.

  The obituaries missed this because their authors do not know about fixing their feet. That is a black woman’s specialty. The personal essay had become the way that black women writers claim legitimacy in a public discourse that defines itself, in part, by how well it excludes black women. In a modern society, who is allowed to speak with authority is a political act. Of course, all U.S. citizens are allowed to speak. We have an entire amendment guaranteeing us this right with notable exclusions like hate speech and prisoners, who can be arbitrarily denied speech by the State. But not all of us are presumed by the publics to which we belong to have the right to speak authoritatively. Speech becomes rhetoric, or a persuasive form of speech, only when the one speaking can make a legitimate claim to some form of authority. It can be moral authority or legal authority or rational authority. At every turn, black women have been categorically excluded from being expert performers of persuasive speech acts in the public that adjudicates our humanity.

  As women, black women face challenges of appealing to rationality in public discourse because our culture has decided that women are irrational and emotional. Logic and reason are beyond our biological and cultural programming. Excluded from the discourse that is ruled by what I have called Professionally Smart People, or those who are institutionalized as the official rational voices in public rhetoric, black women could try to appeal to their moral authority. In a modern capitalist society, what is moral is often determined by what has economic value.16

  As social and economic subjects in this system, we ad hoc ascribe morality to all kinds of capital and status that reifies social categories that exclude black women by definition: wealth, high income, professional status, marriageability, religious leadership, beauty. The very moral goods that would suffice to make moral claims in public discourse are delimited by how efficiently they do not include black women. Empirically, black women have generations of earned and inherited moral philosophy that has sustained families, communities, and institutions. Despite this, black women find that the public discourse is not generally willing to accept that we are moral authorities on much at all.

  Where black women have excelled is in the pursuit of legal authority, or the technical qualifications of social status. We go to school. We will, on average, go to all the school that the constraints on our time and money will allow us. Black women have high educational aspirations and continue to outflank black men in educational attainment. Even outside that narrow purview of professionalization, though, black women strive for forms of professional status. We start businesses at surprisingly high rates given how little family wealth we have to draw on or social networks we have to support us. We perform phenomenally high rates of community service and lay leadership in churches, schools, and civic organizations. We are, it could be argued, professional professionals. In public discourse, our aspirations and achievements in professions should translate into the right to speak authoritatively on something. On anything. On politics. On economics. On sports. On education. On climate science. On urbanization. At the very least on our own lives.

  But, as Stacia L. Brown points out in her essay on how and why black women writers find themselves hewn to the personal essay genre, black women find that no amount of pathos, logos, or ethos includes them in the civic sphere of public discourse and persuasion. We do not have enough authority, as judged by the audiences and gatekeepers who decide to whom we should listen, to speak on much of anything.17 For us, the personal essay genre became a contested point of entry into a low-margin form of public discourse where we could at least appeal to
the politics of white feminist inclusion for nominal representation. 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.

  We had learned or have always known that we cannot change the public, and we cannot change the minds of those on whom we rely to grant us the audience that confers moral authority to speak in public. We could not fix the world but we could fix our own feet. And so, black women writers have fixed their feet. We have shoehorned political analysis and economic policy and social movements theory and queer ideologies into public discourse by bleeding our personal lives into the genre afforded us.

  Legacy media and majority-white-owned digital media platforms made more money from black women’s personal essays than any black woman I know of ever made from publishing them. That is what the senior academic meant when she said they were using me. She thought that the Washington Post and Slate (where I had a column for a while) and Dissent and Talking Points Memo and The Atlantic and the other twenty-plus outlets that had published my essays were using me to darken their web hits without darkening their staff. I was bleeding when I should have been thinking. Thinking was the job of a graduate student, not bleeding.

  The problem for me was not the second part of the sister’s proclamation, but the first: stop writing. I can no more stop writing than I can stop fixing my feet. It is killing my hip and it may look sexy to a subset of geriatric black men who like their women thicker than a snicker, but I cannot stop executing my extreme maladaptation. Fixing my feet is so deeply ingrained in my psyche that to dislodge it I would have to fundamentally change who I am and how I interact with the world. Fixing my feet is about accepting the complex reality of black life in the twenty-first century. 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.

  Fixing my feet means knowing that I am no one’s beauty queen and few people’s idea of an intellectual, public or otherwise, and showing up anyway. Fixing my feet means knowing how badly the outcomes are likely to be for persisting and pursuing, but doing it anyway. 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.

  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. What I am not doing is writing personal essays. Despite knowing how critical the genre is to black women’s participation in publics, I cannot in good faith say that I have ever thought of my essays as belonging to the genre. At the same time, I am not one of the literary writers of black experience. I do not paint ethereal black worlds where white people can slip into our narratives and leave unscathed by judgment for their unearned privilege. I am also not that kind of beautiful writer that I love—the ones who tell the stories that arrive in my issue of the Oxford American every quarter. Those glorious artists who win awards at programs where they wear flowy dresses and take pictures mid–sanguine smile.

  I am hopelessly tethered to reality, not fiction or even creative nonfiction. I may be a storyteller, but even that is more a claim of birthright than any legitimate claim that I can make to the craft of telling stories. I am not even, perhaps, a stodgy sociologist or cut-and-dried ethnographer. My ethnographies have too much structure and my sociology is a bit too loose with voice. A bit slutty it all is, really, jumping between forms and disciplines and audiences. My writing has a high body count, as the kids say.

  But sociology comes as close to the core of where my essays start as anything else I have explored. Drawing on what ethnographers have called thick description, I finally found a label as complex as my way of thinking. I take very seriously the idea of social locations. We are people, with free will, circumscribed to different degrees by histories that shape who we are allowed to become. I am, by most measures, pretty smart. My grandmother was smarter. She was do-the-Times-crossword-in-pen smart. She was teach-yourself-liberal-arts-with-a-library-card smart. She was, for most of her life, a domestic worker for rich Jewish people who sent me cards when I got good grades in school. The Edelmans. The Goldmans. The Finkelsteins. When she died, quickly, thank God, all of my grandmother’s possessions fit inside the one-bedroom senior living apartment in the small town where she had been born. She was far smarter than her Ph.D.-having granddaughter and she died poor. 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.

  That’s where my essays always begin, by interrogating why me and not my grandmother? Why now and not then? Why this U.S. and not some other U.S.? What, more simply, does my social location say about our society? That is quite different from trying to figure out how everything in our society is about me. My experience cannot speak to immigration, for example. It cannot speak to lesbian or gay or queer lives. A personal essay would not make the distinction. That is not a diss. It is a difference.

  By interrogating my social location with a careful eye on thick description that moves between empirics and narrative, I have—over the course of hundreds of essays and more than a decade of public writing for an audience who recognized me as a voice of some kind—tried to explore what our selves say about our society. Along the way, I have shared parts of myself, my history, and my identity to make social theory concrete. 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.

  In every essay in this collection there is a wealth of theory and data, some academic and some lived, some primary and some secondary, informing every detail of my argument. And these are arguments, in the philosophical sense. They are written to persuade, to change, to effect. That is why who I am matters all the more and not less. Excluded as I am from the ethos, logos, and pathos of academia, literary arts, humanities, and Professional Smart People, I have had to appeal to every form of authority simultaneously in every single thing that I have ever written. It is how I fix my feet.

  Unfortunately, I may have been too good at fixing my feet. Often the work of the argument has been challenged, gone unnoticed, or, at least, uncommented upon. That is why versions of some of my previous essays are included here, but this time I am showing my work to make clear the thinking that informed them. An essay about Miley Cyrus pantomiming sex acts on MTV is really about the libidinal economy that, ironically enough, shapes the personal essay economy that made that essay famous. Comedian Leslie Jones’s performance of vulnerability on Saturday Night Live is about colorism and colonialism. Few things shaped my essay on how and why poor people make certain purchases instead of saving money as much as thinking about Veblen, Bourdieu, and black literature from the mid-twentieth century.

  Longtime readers of my work may recognize some parts of these essays, but will find that each of them has been rewritten. My thinking is not fixed in time and hopefully it never will be. I become more radical about some things as I get older. I am also more forgiving of pettiness these days even as I become intolerant of willful ignorance. I have fourteen reading spots in my home and three in my university office. I read on a Kindle and the Kindle app on my Google phone and with library apps like Overdrive. I have twenty-nine alerts set up for online scholarly databases. Those alerts send me new research featuring my keywords whenever they are published. I buy more periodicals than I will ever fully consume. I read and think a lot. To the extent possible, my entire life is organized to find me fifteen more minutes every day in whic
h I can read slowly, often using my finger as I did as a child, across new words and new ideas. If any of my essays could be republished without rewriting them, I would have failed as the human I work diligently to be.

  Those spaces to read are a privilege. I have not a room of my own, but a whole house. Occasionally I am asked to hold forth on being a woman academic. Then, as now, I am always clear that I am an exception to many rules. I do not have children or a spouse. I am not yet a full-time caregiver for my parents. I do not come from money. I am, in many ways, the people I study. I have six-figure student loan debt, did not have a credit card that could buy an airline ticket until maybe three years ago, and I obsessively hoard loose change so that I can at least have more than the roughly $300 in the bank that the typical black woman in the United States does not have in savings. Still, I am high-earning. I may work five jobs to afford it, but I can, on occasion, pay a student to edit a paper or an on-demand worker to deliver my groceries. With 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.

  I hope these essays break open space for black women thinkers to do what we are already doing but for better rewards. As I have said to anyone who will listen to me, I want a black woman to have one damn job and not five or six. In fact, I want that for all of us; job guarantees and universal basic incomes are part of my core political beliefs. But I would be lying if I said that I did not want that kind of baseline economic security first and most of all for sisters. These essays are part of how I came to many of my core beliefs, complete with the privileges to think, the struggle of working multiple jobs to afford those privileges, and the moral philosophy derived from fixing my feet.