Thick

by Tressie McMillan Cottom

  My first night as a college freshman at my HBCU, I ordered a pizza. The man-boy who delivered it stared too long before he handed it over. I snapped and grabbed my pizza. As I did, he muttered something about my phone number. I would date him off and on for a decade. As I walked back into the lobby of Eagleson Hall, I turned just as the pizza man-boy caught the eye of our dorm supervisor, an older black man. The man gave him a look like the one the teacher had once given the too-tall boy overtaken by Olivia Newton John’s spandexed thighs. I was Sandy!

  At this institution I could be a kind of beautiful: normal, normative, taken for granted as desirable. It is one of many reasons that I loved my HBCU. Not because I got a few phone numbers or had a few boyfriends, but because I wasn’t being defined by a standard of beauty that, by definition, could not include someone who looked like me. Don’t get me wrong, the standard is complicated. It has the same economic costs to perform it as the ones white feminists argue that the massive global beauty industry exacts from white women. The costs may be even higher, because black women have fewer resources to purchase the accoutrements of thin waists, thick hips, tattooed brows, elegant contouring, red-heeled shoes, and femme styling that contemporary black beauty standards require. Black women experience negative consequences for not performing it sufficiently, especially if they are not straight, cisgender, and otherwise normative. But, feeling desired opened up avenues of inclusion that shaped my sense of self.

  That inclusion is what I was coming home to the day I delivered a lecture at my dear ol’ NCC. After sixty minutes or so of talking about the things my hosts had asked me to discuss, I opened the floor to questions. The first one was from a young sister about halfway back and to my left. The lighting shadowed her face, but I could make out her body language. I speak black woman fluently. My body recognized hers and I stood up straighter as she took the microphone and said, “We read your thing in class and Miley Cyrus ain’t even do all that. Just because you ugly don’t mean all black women are ugly.” The room lit up. It seems all the English professors in attendance had assigned that essay as an example of what I do. And everyone in attendance had thoughts and feelings about it.

  I did a little verbal dancing, trying to explain how we critique popular culture, and then moved on to the next question. Another young woman, another comment on how black and white people are friends now, unlike back in the day. Those black women are Miley’s friends—and the white women I have written about who touch me in public are apparently doing so because they want to be my friend. Again, the idea of my body’s value in social contexts was the a priori issue. These students were saying, in as many ways as they could, that I could not be ugly because white people find me desirable.

  They were also saying, in their insistence and with their bodies, what more seasoned black women were saying to me in response to my essay. They were saying we had fought too long, worked too hard, come too far to concede that what white people have said about us is true. White people, as a collective system of cultural and economic production that has colonized nonwhite people across the globe through military and ideological warfare, have said that black people are animalistic. But, as sister bell hooks and many others have pointed out, animals with dicks can be useful. They can be “tall, dark, and handsome” if not also dangerous. There is no ideological exception to anti-blackness for black women but through colorism. Mulatto, “mixed,” high yellow, light—all euphemisms for black people whose phenotype signals that they may have some genetic proximity to whiteness. But, by definition, black women are not beautiful except for any whiteness that may be in them.

  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

  Because it is valuable, black women have said that we are beautiful too. We have traveled the cultural imaginations of the world’s nonwhite people assembling a beauty construct that does not exclude us. We create culture about our beauty. We negotiate with black men to legitimize our beauty. We try to construct something that feels like liberation in an inherently oppressive regime, balancing peace with our marginally more privileged lighter-skinned black women while refuting the global caste status of darker-skinned black women. Some of us try to include multiple genders and politics in our definition of beauty. This kind of work requires discursive loyalty. We must name it and claim it, because naming is about the only unilateral power we have.

  When I say that I am unattractive, concede that I am ugly, the antithesis of beauty, I sound like I am internalizing a white standard of beauty that black women fight hard to rise above. But my truth is quite the opposite. 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.

  These contexts should not just be reduced to race, class, and gender, as important as those are. Institutions that legitimize the “right” ideas and behaviors also matter. That’s why beauty can never be about preference. “I just like what I like” is always a capitalist lie. Beauty would be a useless concept for capital if it were only a preference in the purest sense. Capital demands that beauty be coercive. If beauty matters at all to how people perceive you, how institutions treat you, which rules are applied to you, and what choices you can make, then beauty must also be a structure of patterns, institutions, and exchanges that eats your preferences for lunch.

  Internalizing your inferiority is violent. Psychologically it cleaves you in two, what W.E.B. DuBois famously called the double veil. As our science becomes more advanced, we find that the violence may even show up in our bodies as stress. Structurally, that violence becomes coded in the social norms around respectability that we black people use to do the dominant culture’s work of disciplining other black people’s identities, behaviors, and bodies. It is rational to check me if I am doing this kind of work for the devil.

  But lest we forget, the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing us that he does not exist. That is why naming is political. Our so-called counternarratives about beauty and what they demand of us cannot be divorced from the fact that beauty is contingent upon capitalism. Even our resistance becomes a means to commodify, and what is commodified is always, always stratified. There is simply no other way. To coerce, beauty must exclude. Exclusion can be part of a certain kind of liberation, where one dominant regime is overthrown for another, but it cannot be universal.

  I love us loving ourselves under the most difficult conditions, but I must also write into my idea of truth and freedom. From my perch, trying to fillet the thinnest sections of popular culture, history, sociology, and my own biography, there isn’t any room for error. I have to call a thing a thing. 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.


  I am glad that doing so unsettles folks, including the many white women who wrote to me with impassioned cases for how beautiful I am. They offered me neoliberal self-help nonsense that borders on the religious. They need me to believe beauty is both achievable and individual, because the alternative makes them vulnerable. If you did not earn beauty, never had the real power to reject it, then you are as much a vulnerable subject as I am in your own way. Deal with that rather than dealing with me. Compared with the forms of oppression they can now see via their proximity to me, it may seem to privileged people that it is easier to fix me than it is to fix the world. I live to disabuse people of that notion.

  But it is interesting to think about why many white women, a handful of white men, and a few black men rejected my claim. Their interests cannot be the same as those of black women, whose stake in my claim that beauty excludes me is deeply intimate.

  White women, especially white feminists, need me to lean in to pseudoreligious consumerist teachings that beauty is democratic and achievable. Beauty must be democratic. If it is not, then beauty becomes a commodity, distributed unequally and, even worse, at random. This is a notion often ascribed to a type of feminism, be it neoliberal feminism, marketplace feminism, or consumption feminism. But well-meaning white women also need me to believe because accessing beauty is about the totalizing construct of gender, in this case femininity, in a world where other forms of lifestyle consumption are splintering.

  You can use an app to buy the foods of the rich, the music of the cool, the art of the revolutionary, and the look of the aspirational. But femininity is resistant to appification and frictionless consumption. Femininity is not about biological sex, but about the traits that have become ascribed to biological sex. And this set of traits carries a set of ideas and histories contingent upon the economics and politics of any given time. You cannot separate what it means to be a “woman,” often used to mean a performance of acceptable femininity, from the conditions that decide what is and is not acceptable across time and space. We all do this kind of performance of ourselves, be it our gender or race or social class or national identity or culture. As we are doing it, we are always negotiating with powerful ideas about what constitutes a woman.

  Beauty has an aesthetic, but it is not the same as aesthetics, not when it can be embodied, controlled by powerful interests, and when it can be commodified. Beauty can be manners, also a socially contingent set of traits. Whatever power decides that beauty is, it must always be more than reducible to a single thing. Beauty is a wonderful form of capital in a world that organizes everything around gender and then requires a performance of gender that makes some of its members more equal than others.

  Beauty would not be such a useful distinction were it not for the economic and political conditions. It is trite at this point to point out capitalism, which is precisely why it must be pointed out. Systems of exchange tend to generate the kind of ideas that work well as exchanges. Because it can be an idea and a good and a body, beauty serves many useful functions for our economic system. Even better, beauty can be political. It can exclude and include, one of the basic conditions of any politics. Beauty has it all. It can be political, economic, external, individualized, generalizing, exclusionary, and perhaps best of all a story that can be told. Our dominant story of beauty is that it is simultaneously a blessing, of genetics or gods, and a site of conversion. You can become beautiful if you accept the right prophets and their wisdoms with a side of products thrown in for good measure. Forget that these two ideas—unique blessing and earned reward—are antithetical to each other. That makes beauty all the more perfect for our (social and political) time, itself anchored in paradoxes like freedom and property, opportunity and equality.14

  There is now an entire shelf among the periodicals at my nearby chain bookstore filled with magazines that will give me five meditations or three coloring book pages or nine yoga retreats or fourteen farmhouse ideas or nineteen paper-crafting inspirations that, if purchased, will acculturate me to achievable “inner beauty.” Mind you, the consumption is always external and public. These are quite literally called “lifestyle” magazines, which begs the question “Whose lifestyle?” These are ways of expressing a kind of femininity, a kind of woman, for whom beauty is defined to selectively include or exclude. These are consumption goods made for a lifestyle associated with white western women of a certain status, class, profession, and disposition. These are for women who can be beautiful, if only conditionally, and contingent upon the needs of markets and states—and the men whom states and markets serve most and best. All of the admonishments that I should “love myself” and am “as cute as a button” from well-intentioned white women stem from their need for me to consume what is produced for them.

  What those white women did not know or could not admit to knowing is that I cannot, by definition, ever be that kind of beautiful. In the way that gender has so structured how we move through the intersecting planes of class and status and income and wealth that shape our world and our selves, so does race. Rather, I should say, so does blackness, because everyone—including white women—have “race.” It is actually blackness, as it has been created through the history of colonization, imperialism, and domination, that excludes me from the forces of beauty. For beauty to function as it should, it must exclude me. Big Beauty—the structure of who can be beautiful, the stories we tell about beauty, the value we assign beauty, the power given to those with beauty, the disciplining effect of the fear of losing beauty you might possess—definitionally excludes the kind of blackness I carry in my history and my bones. Beauty is for white women, if not for all white women. If beauty is to matter at all for capital, it can never be for black women.

  But if I believe that I can become beautiful, I become an economic subject. My desire becomes a market. And my faith becomes a salve for the white women who want to have the right politics while keeping the privilege of never having to live them. White women need me to believe I can earn beauty, because when I want what I cannot have, what they have becomes all the more valuable.

  I refuse them.

  I also refuse the men. Oh, the men. I wish I could save this for another essay that I would promise to write but never do. Women’s desire for beauty is a powerful weapon for exploitation. Even if the desire is natural, in that it is rational and also subconsciously coercive, open wanting against a backdrop of predatory constructs of cross-gender interactions is dangerous for women. There is an entire industry of men, self-proclaimed pickup artists, who sell their strategies for landing women. One of the most common techniques involves negging. This is when a man approaches a woman whose embodied beauty exceeds his own status. She is “out of his league.” His league is typically determined by height, penis size, sexual experience, body type, and money, but also can take into account tastes and preferences. Some men say they turn to pickup artistry when the preferences so well suited to their social position—say, voting for a reviled political candidate or playing certain types of video games—are devalued in mate markets. Once a woman is identified, the pickup artist might compliment her style, but mention that her teeth are imperfect. This is supposed to destabilize the woman, make her question what power she holds in the exchange, and eventually mold her into a more docile subject for sexual conquest.

  Good men love to mock pickup artists and negging as evidence of their goodness. But good men also consume beauty, contributing much to its value. Without good men, the socio-cultural institution of Big Beauty could not be as powerful as it is. Big Beauty encompasses the norms that shape desirable traits in a romantic partner but also acceptable presentations of women in work, at play, and in public. It is the industrial complex of cosmetics, enhancements and services that promise individual women beauty. The idea that Big Beauty is evil but good men are nice is part of Big Beauty’s systematic charm.

  Big Beauty is just negging without the slimy actor. The constant destabilization of self is part and parcel of beauty
’s effectiveness as a social construct. When a woman must consume the tastes of her social position to keep it, but cannot control the tastes that define said position, she is suspended in a state of being negged. A good man need only then to come along and capitalize on the moment of negging, exploit the value of negged women, and consume the beauty that negs. It is really quite neat, if you think about it.

  For black women who are engaging black men with the assumption that sexual engagement is within the realm of possibility, negging develops a new depth. I suspect this is true of all nonwhite male-female interactions shaped by sexual potential. They may be moderated by their proximity to whiteness—a fair-skinned Latina might have a different depth of this experience than a darker-skinned Afro-Latina—but the relations still hold: women who are not white must contend with beauty through the gaze of white men and nonwhite men.15 This is perhaps the hardest of all these situations for me to describe. How do I distill something that is so diffuse across my life? That is what the relationship between my agency, the constraints of beauty, and the structure of race feels like—it has always been a part of the threads that are stitching me.