Thick

by Tressie McMillan Cottom

  Sexual violence against black girls and women has, until very recently, been hidden in the statistics about “women” writ large. In many ways, those stores are similar. We are most vulnerable to the men in our homes. We are taught to blame ourselves. We fear reprisal for speaking up. But black women and girls face additional burdens of protecting the reputations of black boys and men. As black feminists have argued, that burden has trapped us in cultural silences that a focus on gender violence alone cannot capture.

  People of color are similarly hypervigilant when we navigate a white social world. We screen our jokes, our laughter, our emotions, and our baggage. We constantly manage complex social interactions so we are not fired, isolated, misunderstood, miscast, or murdered. We can come home, if we’re lucky enough to have a home, and turn off that setting. We often do, as I once did, look for versions of ourselves in literature and pop culture.

  But for black girls, home is both refuge and where your most intimate betrayals happen. You cannot turn off that setting. It is the dining room at your family’s house, served with a side of your uncle’s famous ribs. Home is where they love you until you’re a ho.

  Girl 6

  It would be silly to suggest that people do not understand the importance of good ethos. However, it is not unwise to ask how individuals come to have good ethos. Do speakers have good ethos, because they speak well? Write well? Is there a general assumption that some racial groups have a supposed better ethos than others do? Regrettably, the answer to the latter question is yes. Unfortunately, in the history of race relations in America, black Americans’ ethos ranks low among other racial and ethnic groups in the United States. More often than not, their moral characters have been associated with a criminalized and sexualized ethos in visual and print culture. Consequently, assigning black women characteristics associated with good ethos in a slave and post-slavery society has been problematic.

  —Coretta Pittman1

  Sometime in the winter of 2017 I started making a fuss on Twitter. They call that being on-brand. Regardless, I wanted a black woman to have a job as an opinion writer at a prestige publication. It is a silly wish. In the grand scheme of things a black woman op-ed writer at the New York Times or the Washington Post does not mean much of anything. It will not stop ICE from locking babies in cages. It will not house a family priced out of the community where they have grown up. It isn’t a civil rights victory or about Negro Firsts. It will not bring back the Voting Rights Act or impeach Trump or free Palestine or eradicate student loan debt or any of those really important things. Like many things, I wanted it because I wanted it.

  Also like many things that I want simply because I want, I had a reason that seemed good enough to me, but one I did not feel compelled to share. This happens when I have kept my own counsel and can anticipate that my reasons will not find a curious audience. I had been keeping my counsel on this particular issue ever since David Brooks wrote 865 words about how gourmet sandwiches are ruining America in the New York effing Times.2 That was 593 words more than the Gettysburg Address and about 365 words more than we allow poor students to write about their neediness on many scholarship applications. These are unfair comparisons, of course. The genre of opinion writing is precisely about this—750 to 1,000 words on something mundane that is secretly profound. If I wanted to be excessively fair, I have foisted upon you an entire volume loosely in that genre. If there is any difference, it is that I try really hard not to write dumb things. I cannot speak for Mr. Brooks.

  And the point is about that: I cannot speak for Mr. Brooks and Mr. Brooks cannot speak for me. He is absolutely within his right to wax poetic about how soppressata is synecdoche for growing class divides in the United States. That is presumably what he was doing in that essay, by the way. His job is to go to lunch at a local fancy sandwich shop with a woman from the office who only has a high school degree that did not cover the pronunciation of pomodoro. After which time he is tasked with making such a mundane exchange meaningful to the rest of us, whether we eat take-out chicken pomodoros or make our own basic sandwiches.

  The op-ed writer’s job is to make their take work for me even if I do not share their cultural milieu. Failing that, that writer should make me aspire to their cultural milieu. I did not much care for a sandwich at the end of Brooks’s essay. Nor was I intrigued by what the sandwich shop metaphor was meant to convey: that upper-middle-class Americans had left everyone else behind. That is a real feat, as I am professionally honor bound to care about class inequality. It is in my job description. Yet I was so bored by the metaphor, and its assumptions about those with high school diplomas being intimidated by deli meat, that by the end I could only think of eating the rich. By that measure the essay failed.

  It did not matter that the essay failed. Many of Mr. Brooks’s essays fail, if public mocking is a measure of such things. At least once a month “the latest Brooks” makes the rounds of my admittedly self-satisfied peers. We marvel that the man has a job that qualifies him to be introduced at some fancy dinner as a “public intellectual.” And, yet, he will have a job. This week and the week after that and the weeks after every bad essay that misses some notable point or reading or data. Mr. Brooks will be back because his job is not to be right but to be there, on the page of your New York Times.

  For many reasons, well-educated opinion writers like to critique the system of elite higher education that produced their social class. The rest of us in higher education are merely put-upon to live with the stereotypes that feel as foreign to us as David Brooks imagines fancy deli sandwiches feel to most working-class Americans. And that is the rub. I do not get much value from the intellectual class at prestige publications, but as a thinker in public I have to respond to them. That is the power of those pages. My friends and I may be smarty pants, but David Brooks is the legitimate intellectual. That is how legitimacy works. After that deli meat flummoxed David Brooks and he saw fit to tell us all about it, I started wondering about what I would tell the world about how I experience its most mundane machinations.

  A few months ago I could not get the City of Richmond to give me a trash can. They call them “supercans,” which sounds like it has a lot of cool powers but just means it can hold three Amazon Prime boxes. That is good because I am really working on being a socialist black feminist. It would help if my comrades did not see my Amazon Prime boxes in my trash can. As it is, I am careful never to link to my book page on Amazon or take a selfie where you can see the traitorous blue tag in the background. I made that book link mistake once on social media and I am still apologizing for not linking to the unionized Powell’s bookstore. I wonder if the county that surrounds my city has the same problem getting supercans. The county is white-ish. The city is blackish. Something tells me that the level of municipal efficiency I am getting in the city versus the county has something to do with that demographic reality. Anyway, I ended up sending an email to the mayor, typed in my white voice, appended with my professional title that also has links to my Powell’s book page in my bio. They brought me a can and one for my neighbor to boot. That’s the kind of thing I might talk about.

  Or there is the whole thing I am having about hair weaves lately. For years black women’s consumption of “fake” hair has been used to mock our inability to meet femme beauty standards, themselves judged by whatever is natural for white women femmes. Forget that hair augmentation is as old as recorded human history, transcends national origin and culture and surely race. Ain’t nobody got time for facts when there is a black woman waiting to be a punchline. Anyway, I have been thinking about the political economy of hair weaves. For years East Asian communities dominated in the production and distribution of hair weave across the world. The hair could be had for cheap, but you paid a hefty price with your time. There was driving to the one good store in your town or maybe the town over. There was waiting for weeks for a special delivery or a friend of a coworker’s cousin who was driving down to Atlanta and could pick it up for yo
u. For many black people, buying hair in the local beauty supply store is how we experienced immigration—Korean, Chinese, and Vietnamese shopkeepers selling us colonized beauty from the heads of poor women in nations that the West has deliberately kept poor. We wear globalism on our heads.

  I thought about that when I found an Amazon link for hair weave. The global middleman that has gobbled up almost every supply chain in the world, from food to shipping containers, was officially in the weave business. Did this mean that Chinese manufacturers were being edged out, or were they leveraging technology? It seemed to me that you could not talk about a hair weave, really talk about it, if you were not also talking about supply chains, currencies, gender, and geopolitics. One man’s Italian meat is another woman’s Afro-curl 1-B bundles.

  You know, those kinds of things. That is what I thought I might talk about if I had carte blanche to talk about any mundane thing for a national readership, with no repercussions for failing to find either accuracy or an audience.

  That is, I suppose, what I wanted when I wanted what I want: a black woman somewhere in this world to have the freedom to be banal as a matter of course for her job. I wanted her to be well compensated, protected, and free to fail. I wanted one woman who might touch a comb I use or walk a block I travel to talk about anything her heart desired for a publication where whatever is said matters, by default.

  As has been mentioned, this thing I wanted was not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. That is why I took to Twitter to complain. That is where one goes to complain about things that are officially Not a Big Deal. People responded because, again, it is Not a Big Deal and in the age of social media the rate of opinions is inversely proportional to importance. People threw out names of black women who write for prestige publications: Roxane Gay, Melissa Harris-Perry, Brittney Cooper, and a handful of others. All wonderful women … who have day jobs. They are professors and researchers and teachers and authors. They run research centers and media companies and nonprofits. They write for the Times or the Post as their fourth- or fifth-shift job. I love black women too much to ever wish for us another part-time job. I had been clear. I wanted a full-time, flat-out sinecure with a black woman in it.

  More opinions rolled in. The women at The Undefeated and Cosmo and Shondaland.com and Teen Vogue are doing amazing things, they said. We outchea. Well, yeah, I know we outchea. That was my point. I could name three dozen black women off the top of my head who have the talent for such a position at a prestige publication.3 That last bit mattered. Saying why it matters is one of those sticky things about my work. We do not share much in the U.S. culture of individualism except our delusions about meritocracy. God help my people, but I can talk to hundreds of black folks who have been systematically separated from their money, citizenship, and personhood and hear at least eighty stories about how no one is to blame but themselves. That is not about black people being black but about people being American. That is what we do. 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. That is what my book Lower Ed is fundamentally about.4 It is what all of my work is about.

  In media as in higher education, we need to believe that all publications matter. And they do, to someone somewhere. But, for good or for ill, elite publications are still a thing. I am very amenable to the idea that perhaps they should not be a thing. But wishing don’t make it so. Reality matters.

  The reality is that for writers, there are few gigs as good as those at publications where they have the freedom and protection to write well. Writing well takes research assistance, editorial expertise, copyeditors, lunch breaks, fresh air, desk space, peers, and LexisNexis subscriptions. Writing is democratic. Writing well is not.

  You know who knows this is true? Writers at nonprestige publications. They love their freedom. They may love their publication’s mission. But I know a lot of writers, and few of them would agree that their work would not benefit from the kind of wealth that accompanies the prestige of the publications that we all complain about.

  If your job does not afford you that stability, you are lucky if your family can make up the slack. There are a lot of media people who are so lucky. That is why the first, best criteria for most entry-level jobs in media—especially at prestige media companies—is a family wealthy enough to afford you the unpaid internship you will have to take to get your foot in the door. You know who is statistically, systematically unlikely to have that kind of family wealth? Let’s just say it isn’t David Brooks.

  It is poor people from nonurban centers and first-generation college students and immigrants and the children of some kinds of immigrants and it is black people. That is why the black women’s names on the tip of so many tongues were those who had jobs elsewhere. How else could a typical black woman afford to write for free or for cheap?

  Sure, I wanted what I wanted for the sister in question, but I also wanted it for the rest of us. While the op-ed pages do not matter to a great deal of important things, that is not the same as them not mattering at all. What happens when David Brooks writes about deli meat as class warfare? In my world, made up of a lot of academics and college graduates and creative types, the link pierces our awareness on social media. Or, because we are by and large those kinds of people, we read it in our New York Times home delivery or the app on our phone. Someone sends it to us on one of our listservs. Or, if you work in media, you have to know about it and so you do somehow. It is in the ether. A David Brooks utterance is the ether.

  That week, let’s say you want to talk about voter suppression or Shonda Rhimes or something other than deli meat. But now the ether has come for your air. You have to contend with the ridiculousness of a David Brooks utterance to get to the thing you want to talk about. You can ignore it, but you risk opting out of the backchannel chatter where status is negotiated. You can be the academic with the book on Iberian ham who gets the call from the writer who was assigned the thankless job of following up on David Brooks’s deli meat sandwich. Now you can talk about boutique labor in food processing to no one, which is what your book is really about, or you can talk to lots of people about why poor people are scared of sliced Italian meatstuffs.

  None of it matters, but it starts to take on the weight of something that matters, if only for the day or two of the news cycle. You, the serious person, cannot be serious unless or until you engage or affirmatively choose to ignore David Brooks on sandwich meat. That is where we are.

  My Twitter rant was a thought experiment. What if one could not be a public intellectual unless or until he or she had engaged or affirmatively chosen to ignore some black woman’s thoughts on edge control? What if David Brooks or some of his class compatriots like Jonathan Chait had to entertain a dozen questions about the political economy of wet and wavy before they could move on to their latest thoughts about the death of liberalism? It would not matter to a starving child, but I would find it entertaining.

  More than that, it would say who you have to engage to be taken seriously. As being taken seriously becomes a form of reputational capital in a culture where reputation is like the Bitcoin of status cultures, being taken seriously is real work. The royal “we” take our cues about what ideas matter from whom we must recognize before we ourselves can matter. Historically these kinds of fine-grained status distinctions were hard to parse. You sense that there was some monoculture your own culture brushed up against as you tried to extract what you needed from those around you for your survival and flourishing. The datafication of our reputational currency, how we derive the status we need to maintain the status we have or desire, becomes a bit less opaque.

  Take, for instance, who we follow on something like Twitter. Now listen, nothing about Twitter is a stand-in for someone’s soul. I follow a porn anime account because sometimes they tweet really neat pictures of black cartoon characters. Only god can judge me. But I am not really an institution. I wor
k for an institution, yet my engagement with the public is not one of my core professional responsibilities. Put another way, I can be a professor with a public, but I do not need a public to be a professor.

  On the other hand, media people are people, but they are also institutions. It is a very hard line to draw, but that does not mean that the line is not there or that it should not be drawn. In the same way it matters that Donald Trump cannot now legally block people on Twitter because he occupies the office of the presidency, a reporter at an influential newspaper cannot be entirely separated from their role in the Fourth Estate.5 A reporter needs a public to be a reporter and as such, who said reporter is in public is relevant to their job. My anime account issue is more personal than professional. The same is not true of journalists and writers affiliated with major publications.

  Who you follow on Twitter in the course of being in public as part of your profession—again, a profession that requires a public—might say a little something about who you must engage to be taken seriously as a professional. If you check out who, say, Melissa Harris-Perry follows on social media you will see an expected mix of people: journalists, academics, writers, public intellectuals, publications’ official accounts, and so on. What you will also see is a glimpse into who Melissa Harris-Perry considers a peer or culturally congruent.

  Because I am beating up on David Brooks here, I went from Melissa’s Twitter follows to his. At first glance it looked like any conclusion I might draw would be dicey. That was a sign that I had better quantify it. And that is what I did. I extracted the name of every one of the 322 accounts that David Brooks followed on a given day. Then I went through and verified that all of those accounts were real, as opposed to parody accounts. Using an algorithm called my brain, I manually cross-referenced the name of every noninstitutional account on the list. Because almost all (except two) of those accounts were of people who are at least marginally public, it was fairly straightforward to determine their racial and gender self-identification.