Thick

by Tressie McMillan Cottom

  If anyone ever reads me and finds it useful, as I hope that you do, may doing so spark a gold rush for black women writers at institutions and publications that will pay them and protect them. I hope we build a body politic so thick with contradictions and nuance and humanity and blackness (because blackness is humanity), that no black woman public intellectual has to fix her feet ever again to walk this world.

  In the Name of Beauty

  We need to theorize the meaning of beauty in our lives so that we can educate for critical consciousness, talking through the issues: how we acquire and spend money, how we feel about beauty, what the place of beauty is in our lives when we lack material privilege and even basic resources for living, the meaning and significance of luxury, and the politics of envy.

  —bell hooks1

  [T]he very lifestyle of the holders of power contributes to the power that makes it possible, because its true conditions of possibility remain unrecognized.

  —Pierre Bourdieu2

  Miley Cyrus was going through her dangerous phase. She had tattoos and piercings and dildos and so, of course, she also had to have some black affect to complete the package. It is all part of the pop star toolkit. I decided to write about it. Now, it is pretty common for people, sometimes lots of them, to respond to things I write. Sometimes they share heartbreaking stories of recognition. Other times, angry diatribes about what I get wrong while being black, a woman, and popular. But of all the things I have written, nothing has inspired more direct, intense emotional engagement than what I wrote about post-Disney pop star Miley Cyrus. What had me stuck—momentarily—wasn’t just the heightened emotions of those who took me to task, but rather who was leading the charge.

  I am accustomed to men and white people being angry with me. That is par for the course. But when black women are mad at me it is a special kind of contrition, and I take the time to figure out my responsibility. Something clearly wasn’t registering in this scenario, because black women were giving me the business.3

  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. I thought nothing of it at the time I was writing it, which is unusual. I can usually pinpoint what I have said, written, or done that will piss people off and which people will be pissed off. I missed this one entirely.

  The comments were brutal and feedback wasn’t confined to the internet. Things got personal. One black male colleague emailed me to say how a black woman friend told him she did not want to read some trash article about how ugly I am when my accompanying picture belied the claim. It was, she insinuated, an appeal for public validation of my physical attractiveness. I did not think that was true, but I was raised right. I told him that was fair and drank myself to sleep. Someone else sent me a link to a Facebook group where many women, but especially more than a few black women, took me to task for hating myself. The person who sent it did not know that I was already a member of the group and had been watching the carnage for days. I never mentioned it.

  A few months after the essay had been published, I was scheduled to deliver the Mason Sankora Lecture for the Department of English at my alma mater, a historically black college. It was a brutal experience because an HBCU is a special place. I am not the first to acknowledge that, of course.4 You can learn all about the legacy, the culture, the challenges, and the faults of black colleges in books, articles, movies, television shows, and documentaries. But few of those things have ever described the primary reason why HBCUs are so special to me.

  When I was eleven years old, my waist caved in and my breasts sprung out. I could not be left alone at the school bus stop anymore. It was dangerous because men can be dangerous. I had some preparation for that. My mother had been, I believe, sexually victimized as a child. She doesn’t speak of it except when her sentences fade out in retelling certain stories. But it was there in how protective she was of me, an only child of a single mother. There were no men allowed in our house except for family and even then only under her direct guidance. “I wanted your home to be safe, made for children and not adults,” she has told me. Only children learn to gauge their single parent’s emotional needs. It is vital for your survival and, you eventually learn, necessary if you are going to help your only adult protection in the world keep you both safe. I intuited from my mother’s caution that I should be cautious of men, defensive of whatever I was calling home at any given time—my heart, my mental health, my car, my bedroom, my checkbook, my dreams, my body. Decades before I valued myself enough to be careful for myself, I was careful so that my mother would not worry.

  If I knew to be cautious of men, I did not learn early enough to be cautious of white women. The first time a white woman teacher told me that my breasts were distracting was in the sixth grade. Over the years, white women with authority over me have told me how wrong or dangerous or deviant my body is. As with that teacher, many of their comments focus on my breasts as opposed to, say, my ass. The next year I entered middle school, where you learn the rules of sexual presentation. That is where I started to discover that while my breasts distracted some of the boys and men, all distractions were not created equally.

  As part of the last generation of Carolinians to attend the integrated schools that Brown v. Board of Education ushered into existence, I went to school with a lot of white people. Because of the racial composition of the districts drawn in my then-progressive school district, I also went to school with many South Asian and Latino kids. That racial and ethnic integration mattered to the rules I learned about being sexual, desirable, visible, and unseen.

  Unlike home, where much of my social world was filtered through my mother’s preference for African American history and culture, at school I learned that nothing was more beautiful than blond. The first time it happened was middle school. I heard a white boy, a bit of a loser with a crooked haircut who acted out because he couldn’t bear to be unseen, say “that’s a real blonde” about a girl in class, and I was confused. The only hair coloring I knew of at fourteen years old was the kind my grandmother used to “fix her edges,” where curly gray hairs did not blend in properly with her wig. I had no idea what a “real” or “fake” blonde was, but I could intuit, much like my mother’s fears, that the slacker boy was communicating some valuable social fact.

  Later, we watched the musical Grease in a high school English class. In the final scene, when Olivia Newton John’s Sandy shows up at the carnival in shiny skin-tight pants, all the black kids tittered. She looked funny! There was so much space between her legs! A white boy too tall to be in the tenth grade reared back and shouted, “My hot damn, Ms. Newton John!” I remember the scene so clearly, because that was when I got it. A whole other culture of desirability had been playing out just above and beyond my awareness, while my mostly black and Latino friends traded jokes at gapped thighs, flat behinds, and never trusting a big butt and a smile. And when the teacher, a middle-aged white woman not unlike the one who once told me my breasts were too distracting, looked at the too-tall boy, she smiled at him and rolled her eyes, acknowledging his sexual appreciation of Sandy as normal if unmannerly. He smiled back and kind of shrugged as if to say, “I just can’t help myself.” The teacher and the too-tall boy were in cahoots. Sandy, that strange creature, was beautiful.

  Middle school moments—school dances and lunchroom strategies and weekend sleepovers—start to shake out the racial segregation of even the most utopian integrated schools. The white kids were your school friends, never your home friends. You took the gifted math classes together but you would not be on th
e lake with them over the weekend. We took that as normal. When we were together, politely sociable in classrooms and hallways, I learned what was beautiful. By high school, I knew that I was not it.

  All girls in high school have self-esteem issues. And most girls compare themselves to unattainable, unrealistic physical ideals. That is not what I am talking about. That is the violence of gender that happens to all of us in slightly different ways. I am talking about a kind of capital. It is not just the preferences of a too-tall boy, but the way authority validates his preferences as normal. I had high school boyfriends. I had a social circle. I had evidence that I was valuable in certain contexts. But 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. That was beauty. And while few young women in high school could say they felt like they lived up to beauty, only the non-white girls could never be beautiful. That is because beauty isn’t actually what you look like; beauty is the preferences that reproduce the existing social order. What is beautiful is whatever will keep weekend lake parties safe from strange darker people.

  When white feminists catalogue how beauty standards over time have changed, from the “curvier” Marilyn Monroe to the skeletal Twiggy to the synthetic-athletic Pamela Anderson, their archetypes belie beauty’s true function: whiteness. 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. Some of the white girls I went to high school with may not have been beautiful. They may be thin when they should be fit or narrow of jaw when it should be strong. But, should power need them to be, social, economic, and political forces could make those girls beautiful by reshaping social norms. As long as the beautiful people are white, what is beautiful at any given time can be renegotiated without redistributing capital from white to nonwhite people.

  Feminists have chronicled the changing standards of female beauty over time. One of the more popular examples of this is reborn on the internet every couple of years. In the meme, readers are asked to guess what size dress Marilyn Monroe would wear today. One is supposed to gasp at the realization that the iconic popular culture beauty was a size twelve. Memes are just born-digital nuggets of cultural norms.5 Whether the LOLcat is funny or Marilyn is beautiful or a gif of a YouTube prank is gross all depends on the norms of the culture that produced the meme.6 In the case of Marilyn Monroe’s dress size, the meme assumes a western U.S. iconography. Marilyn is not just beautiful; she defines the beauty ideals of an entire era in U.S. popular culture. If you do not recognize that belief as your own, the meme will make no sense. The expectation that you should be shocked by Marilyn’s dress size also relies on an audience who will share an idea about who is fat. And the audience must share the notion that fat and beauty are antithetical. Of course, fat has not always been juxtaposed against beauty in white western culture. Artists point to the Rubenesque female bodies of the seventeenth century as an example of how fat bodies were once the beauty ideal. They are also an ideal meant to lionize a version of white western history.

  Naomi Wolf made the idea of examining beauty ideals across time a white third wave feminist cause du jour. In The Beauty Myth, Wolf excises the expectations of female beauty from the economic context that produces them, holding both up for feminist critique.7 As others have noted, Wolf does not do much work on how economic and political conditions produce a white hegemonic body as the ultimate expression of beauty.8 More precisely, Wolf demonstrates that as the sociopolitical context of whiteness—the political, state-sanctioned regime—tussles with historical forces like falling stock markets, mass media, suburbanization, and war, it will reshape an acceptable beauty standard for women that adjusts for body types, but never for body color. That was not Wolf’s argument, but the absence of such a critique rather proves the point: beauty is for white women.9 It is a white woman’s problem, if you are a feminist, or a white woman’s grace, if you are something else not feminist. Beauty, in a meme or in the beauty myth, only holds as a meaningful cultural artifact through which we can examine politics, economics, and laws, and identity if we all share the assumption that beauty is precisely because it excludes nonwhite women.

  Black women have examined where we are located in the beauty myth, examining the political economy through our bodies. If we could never be assumed beautiful in white culture’s memes, histories, and feminisms, we could create other standards. Like feminist critiques of Rubens’s renderings of white jiggling flesh, we have turned to cultural production for evidence of how we can ever be beautiful. Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Sexual Politics is the most notable shot across the bow.10 Collins does not exactly wade into the complicated depth of race, class, nationalism, culture, economics, and the politics of how black sexuality is refracted through the racial hierarchy that precludes black women from being beautiful. She is, however, critical to defining a school of intellectual thought that gives us tools to understand these dynamics. Some of her most strident critique is saved for the compromises inherent in hip-hop culture. Here is a cultural product where blackness can be a critical feedback loop to the white mass media images of black women as caricatures. What Collins finds instead is a space where black masculine ideas about black women create ever more hierarchies of desirability based on body type, for example. Those hierarchies rarely go so far as to challenge the supremacy of white female beauty.

  Black hip-hop feminists brought a deeper engagement with the complexities of hip-hop culture to bear on Collins’s critique. Joan Morgan’s When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks It Down locates a black feminist voice in hip-hop culture, however marginalized in mainstream media.11 Despite arguing that the generation I claim is “misguidedly over-protective, hopelessly male-identified, and all too often self-sacrificing,” hip-hop era feminists excavate a cultural history where we have tried to claim a space for black beauty. In 2014, comedian Leslie Jones performed a skit on Saturday Night Live about the complexities of claiming that space.12 In the skit, she turns the pain of racist beauty hierarchies that academics on the order of Marcus Hunter have studied into the kind of joke that made Richard Pryor so great. For approximately three minutes Jones bemoans her singleness. It is a frequent well from which she draws in her comedy. The topic is the designation of Lupita N’yongo as People’s Most Beautiful Woman. Jones says that she is “waiting for them to put out the Most Useful List because that’s where I’m gonna shine.” It is a painful comment but not unfathomable given what beauty means, even if it said to be embodied by dark-skinned Kenyan-Mexican actress Nyong’o.

  Jones is flatly saying that she is not beautiful and cannot be beautiful but that she is useful. She is locating her value not in beauty but in her use value. 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. It’s the kind of humor located in pain, not unlike that mined by Richard Pryor a generation ago. But we allowed Pryor his pain. He was an addict with self-esteem issues. He could set himself on fire and turn “nigga” into an incantation, often for white audiences. But Jones was not allowed to talk about the pain of being undesirable.

  Free but black in the white western beauty myth, Jones is laying bare how futile it can be to desire beauty as a black woman. Many people slammed Jones for making light of slavery, especially of the systematic rape of enslaved black women. The argument was that she was mining historical pain for white consumption on a program that its creator Lorne M
ichaels once intoned would never be an “urban” show. I recall watching the skit and the ensuing social media firestorm about it with dismay. Not a single black woman that I read or followed seemed to empathize with Jones’s obvious pain, whereas I had not been able to watch the video clip without pausing several times. Where others saw insult, I saw injury. 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. Perhaps I caught what others missed because I am something different than Patricia Hill Collins or Joan Morgan or other important black women scholars of black feminism.

  I am dark, physically and culturally. My complexion is not close to whiteness and my family roots reflect the economic realities of generations of dark-complexioned black people. We are rural, even when we move to cities. Our mobility is modest. Our out-marriage rates to nonblack men are negligible. Our social networks do not connect to elite black social institutions. When we move around in the world, we brush up against the criminal justice system. I am not located at the top of hip-hop’s attenuated beauty hierarchy. I am, at best, in the middle. As Michael Jackson once sang, when you’re too high to get over it and too low to get under it, you are stuck in the middle and the pain is thunder.

  We have yet to make strides toward fleshing out a theory of desirability, the desire to be desired, in black feminist theory or politics. There is indeed a philosophy in how Jones desires being desired. That Nyong’o was atop a list of the world’s most beautiful people does not invalidate the reality for many dark-skinned black women any more than Mark Zuckerburg making a billion dollars as a college drop-out invalidates the value of college for millions. Indeed, 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? This is what I did not yet understand that when I was watching Ms. Newton John: I was not beautiful and could never—no matter what was in fashion to serve the interests of capital and power—become beautiful. That was the theory trapped in my bones when I left for my mecca, my HBCU.