13. Cooper hails the discursive politics of respectability in black women’s lived experiences of political economy: Brittney C. Cooper, Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (Champagne, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2017). Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “Beyond The Sound of Silence: Afro-American Women in History,” Gender & History 1, no. 1 (1989): 50–67.
14. Jia Tolentino, “The Personal-Essay Boom Is Over,” New Yorker, September 18, 2017.
15. Michelle Barrow, “It Happened to Me: My Gynecologist Found a Ball of Cat Hair in My Vagina,” xoJane, March 27, 2017, https://www.xojane.com/it-happened-to-me/my-gynecologist-found-a-ball-of-cat-hair-in-my-vagina.
16. For an excellent, far-reaching primer of how money is a social relationship that shapes our understanding of what is good or moral, start with sociologist Viviana Zelizer’s Economic Lives: How Culture Shapes the Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).
17. Stacia L. Brown, “The Personal Essay Economy Offers Fewer Rewards for Black Women,” The New Republic, September 18, 2015.
In the Name of Beauty
1. bell hooks, Art on My Mind: Visual Politics (New York: The New Press, 1995). hooks is interested in the aesthetics of art and culture in this lovely meditation on beauty. I extrapolate from her work here to the idea of embodied and structural beauty. For more on that, see Heather Widdows, Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018).
2. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990).
3. Tressie McMillan Cottom, “When Your (Brown) Body Is a (White) Wonderland,” Tressiemc, August 27, 2013, http://tressiemc.com/uncategorized/when-your-brown-body-is-a-white-wonderland.
4. McMillan Cottom, “When Your (Brown) Body Is a (White) Wonderland.” No less than the great modern essayist Ta-Nehisi Coates has called his HBCU, Howard University, a “mecca.” His is an allusion to the history of black colleges as safe spaces for African Americans in a hostile white society. It is also symbolic of the way many African Americans understand the history of HBCUs: beacons on a hill that promise meritocracy for black people shut out, by definition, from the very idea of being meritorious in white institutions. I responded to Coates’s ode to his mecca with my own meditation on historically black college life as a heterosexual, femme black woman. HBCUs are safe spaces for developing one’s racial self, for actualizing an identity not predicated on racial hierarchy, and for building capacity for black knowledge production. But I am not only black. I am a black woman of working-class origins and enslaved genealogy. Meccas are complicated for people like me. At my HBCU I navigated black enlightenment and sexual violence; classism and community organizing; colorism and favorable mate markets. There remain other versions of mecca—being queer, being undocumented, being trans, being conservative, being a socialist, being a number of other things that we are in various configurations while also being black. I always speak of black institutions like I speak of black people: the highest faith in our humanity is not to imagine us as idyllic gods but beautifully flawed humans. Tressie McMillan Cottom, “‘Between the World and Me’ Book Club: The Stories Untold,” The Atlantic, August 3, 2015. Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Letter to My Son,” The Atlantic, July 4, 2015.
5. Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014).
6. Kate M. Miltner, “‘There’s No Place for Lulz on LOLCats”: The Role of Genre, Gender, and Group Identity in the Interpretation and Enjoyment of an Internet Meme,” First Monday 19, no. 8 (2014).
7. Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women (New York: Random House, 2013).
8. Barbara Trepagnier, “The Politics of White and Black Bodies,” Feminism & Psychology 4, no. 1 (1994): 199–205. Trepagnier calls it “the unspoken whiteness of the beauty myth.” Margaret Hunter brings some empirical heft to how white beauty ideals operate through colorism, or the hierarchical status of skin color, from light to dark. Hunter argues that nonwhite women’s socioeconomic well-being is stratified in part through their ability to legitimately claim proximity to white beauty standards. Margaret L. Hunter, “Colorstruck: Skin Color Stratification in the Lives of African American Women,” Sociological Inquiry 68, no. 4 (1998): 517–35; and Margaret L. Hunter, “‘If You’re Light You’re Alright’: Light Skin Color as Social Capital for Women of Color,” Gender & Society 16, no. 2 (2002): 175–93.
Meeta Jha gives a global perspective on this, demonstrating how ideas of whiteness and beauty stratify the life chances of women across the globe. Meeta Jha, The Global Beauty Industry: Colorism, Racism, and the National Body (New York: Routledge, 2015). The gist is this: the beauty myth is hell on white women’s sovereignty and it makes white women’s lives empirically better than those of nonwhite women in the United States and across the globe. The latter is true because the former is made true through the U.S. military and economic and cultural domination.
9. Sidestepping many of Wolf’s blind spots are a book by Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity Is Hurting Young Women (Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2009); and this essay, which I love: Lili Loofbourow, “The Female Price of Male Pleasure,” The Week, January 25, 2018, http://theweek.com/articles/749978/female-price-male-pleasure.
10. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism (New York: Routledge, 2004).
11. You could do worse than to spend some time reading more recent scholarship from black feminist thought that tackles post-deindustrialization culture. To start:
Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, vol. 6 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1994).
Joan Morgan, When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks It Down (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017).
Gwendolyn D. Pough, Check It While I Wreck It: Black Womanhood, Hip-Hop Culture, and the Public Sphere (Lebanon, NH: Northeastern University Press, 2015).
Imani Perry, Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
Brittney Cooper, Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018).
T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Pimps Up, Ho’s Down: Hip Hop’s Hold on Young Black Women (New York: New York University Press, 2008).
12. “SNL Under Fire After Slavery Skit,” MSNBC, http://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/snl-under-fire-after-slavery-skit-247630403748. Tressie McMillan Cottom, “Here, a Hypocrite Lives: I Probably Get It Wrong on Leslie Jones but I Tried,” Tressiemc, May 6, 2014, https://tressiemc.com/uncategorized/here-a-hypocrite-lives-i-probably-get-it-wrong-on-leslie-jones-but-i-tried.
13. An important and notable exception is Joan Morgan’s recent turn in theorizing a black feminist politics of pleasure. See more at Joan Morgan, “Why We Get Off: Moving Towards a Black Feminist Politics of Pleasure,” The Black Scholar 45, no. 4 (2015): 36–46.
14. Beauty has an attendant religious doctrine, perfected through white western women who are its ideal consumers and site of what we sociologists call prosumption, the new-economy exchange where market actors simultaneously produce and consume monetized cultural forms. We are consumers when we buy a smartphone. We become prosumers when the data we transact through our smartphones produces a new product or idea or consumer good. We co-create goods with those who own its value at our expense. That is prosumption. The elegance of our appified, digitally mediated, late-stage capitalism is that producing beauty feels empowering and obscures how we are also consuming beauty produced by others. When I said that I was unattractive, I violated a prime directive of gender that, if I were allowed to do without penalty, undermines the ideology of beauty. Challengers pushed me on the value of my “inner beauty,” which is the kind that can be achieved through the conspicuous consumption of the right books, right media, and right makeup.
15. It fell outside the scope of my bi
ography-structure argument in this book, but it is important to note that the idea of beauty, especially presentation as femme and nonwhite, has a particular set of politics for trans women of color and black trans women. For more on that, see Michael Lovelock: “Problematically, I argue, this process has worked to demarcate ideals of ‘acceptable’ transgender subjectivity: self-sufficient, normatively feminine, and eager to embrace the possibilities for happiness and social integration provided by the commercial domain.” “Call Me Caitlyn: Making and Making over the ‘Authentic’ Transgender Body in Anglo-American Popular Culture,” Journal of Gender Studies 26, no. 6 (2017): 675–87.
And, in her essay on “pretty” as a privilege, Janet Mock issues several provocations that I hope are taken further by other writers. Namely, what does femme beauty politics mean when colorism and ethnocentric beauty hierarchies delimit one’s presentation of a socially acceptable “real” woman, to borrow from Mock’s social media hashtag? For more on that provocation, read Sarah Beauchamp, “Janet Mock Breaks Down the Uncomfortable Truth of Pretty Girl Privilege,” Nylon, June 28, 2017, https://nylon.com/articles/janet-mock-pretty-privilege.
16. In general, black people are more likely to interact with the criminal justice system, and to receive harsher sentences when they do so. See United States Sentencing Commission, “Demographic Differences in Federal Sentencing Practices: An Update of the Booker Report’s Multivariate Regression Analysis” (2010). Black students are more likely to be disciplined in schools and more punitively than nonblack students. Nathan Barrett, Andrew McEachin, Jonathan Mills, and Jon Valant, “Discipline Disparities and Discrimination in Schools,” Brookings, January 9, 2018; and Tom Loveless, “Racial Disparities in School Suspensions,” Brookings, April 6, 2018.
Black women are the least likely group to marry someone of another race, one oft-cited sign of racial “acceptance.” See Kristen Bialik, “Key Facts About Race and Marriage, 50 Years After Loving v. Virginia,” Pew Research Center, June 12, 2017, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/06/12/key-facts-about-race-and-marriage-50-years-after-loving-v-virginia. Richard V. Reeves and Katherine Guyot, “Black Women Are Earning More College Degrees, but That Alone Won’t Close Race Gaps,” Brookings, December 8, 2017, http://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2017/12/04/black-women-are-earning-more-college-degrees-but-that-alone-wont-close-race-gaps.
Yet even these statistical trends are not equally true for all black men and women. Research shows that skin color also mediates the severity of social stigma and exclusion. Darker-complexioned black people are more likely to be members of lower social status and experience higher rates of housing segregation, and are less likely to be employed in high-status work than their lighter black counterparts. And recent research shows that darker-skinned black women are less likely to marry and when they do so are less likely to marry an economic peer than are lighter-skinned black women. Even in criminal justice, the multiple marginality of skin tone, race, gender, and social class shows up: darker-skinned black women convicted of criminal offenses receive harsher sentences than do lighter black women. Skin color matters. See Jill Viglione, Lance Hannon, and Robert DeFina, “The Impact of Light Skin on Prison Time for Black Female Offenders,” Social Science Journal 48, no. 1 (2011): 250–58; Ellis P. Monk Jr, “Skin Tone Stratification Among Black Americans, 2001–2003,” Social Forces 92, no. 4 (2014): 1313–37; and Zhenchao Qian, “Breaking the Last Taboo: Interracial Marriage in America,” Contexts 4, no. 4 (2005): 33–37.
Dying to Be Competent
1. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003).
2. Speaking with a business writer, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman intimated that many people use the platform wrong when they automatically accept any request. See more at http://www.businessinsider.com/reid-hoffman-how-to-use-linkedin-2017-4.
3. World Health Organization, “World Health Statistics 2014: A Wealth of Information on Global Public Health” (2014).
4. “Pregnancy Related Mortality,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, May 9, 2018, http://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/maternalinfanthealth/pregnancy-relatedmortality.htm.
5. “Infant Mortality,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, August 3, 2018, www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/maternalinfanthealth/infantmortality.htm.
6. More than just stereotypes, controlling images are racialized, gendered, and classed ideologies produced by and through social institutions such as the media but also through political bodies, educational institutions, and courts.
7. Because I refuse to believe in the concept as anything other than a political designation, I use it here the way it is used loosely in popular culture—amorphous, apolitical, and ambivalent about the project of ending anti-blackness. Tamara K. Nopper has great work on how the idea of “people of color” as a category marshals important resources to the detriment of black small business owners: “Minority, Black, and Non-Black People of Color: ‘New’ Color-Blind Racism and the US Small Business Administration’s Approach to Minority Business Lending in the Post-Civil Rights Era,” Critical Sociology 37, no. 5 (2011): 651–71. And sociologist Jared Sexton calls the erasure of anti-blackness that can be embedded in the elisions of “people of color” endemic to the political construct of the term: “People-of-Color-Blindness Notes on the Afterlife of Slavery,” Social Text 28, no. 2 (2010): 31–56.
8. Patricia Hill Collins, “Black Feminist Thought in the Matrix of Domination,” Social Theory: The Multicultural and Classic Readings (1993): 615–25.
Know Your Whites
1. Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review (1993): 1707–91.
2. Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016).
3. This should tell you everything you need to know about the neighborhood. Thinking sociologically, if you know an urban, suburban, or exurban rate of housing price change, foreclosure rates post–Great Recession, and type of neighborhood infrastructure, you should be able to intuit the community’s racial and economic makeup. A stable community like this one correlates with wealth, which correlates with race in the United States. That is how we experience structural wealth inequality in our everyday lives.
4. R. L’Heureux Lewis-McCoy, Inequality in the Promised Land: Race, Resources, and Suburban Schooling (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014). Amanda E. Lewis and John B. Diamond, Despite the Best Intentions: How Racial Inequality Thrives in Good Schools (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
5. Nonwhite voters went heavily for Barack Obama in both 2008 and 2012, but there were some differences within those groups. Black voters overwhelmingly voted for Obama across class, immigrant status, education, and income level. There were minor variations among Asian Americans of different national origins. For example, South Asian American voters were more solidly Obama voters than other ethnic groups. See the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund report, “The Asian American Vote 2012.” There are similar differences among Hispanics by national origin and generational status. See Mark Hugo Lopez and Paul Taylor, “Dissecting the 2008 Electorate: Most Diverse in U.S. History,” Pew Research Center’s Hispanic Trends Project, April 30, 2009, http://www.pewhispanic.org/2009/04/30/dissecting-the-2008-electorate-most-diverse-in-us-history.
6. Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (New York: One World/Ballantine, 2017).
7. “Obama’s Legacy: Diss-ent or Diss-respect?” Codeswitch podcast, NPR, http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/02/23/51681/8239/obamas-legacy-diss-ent-or-diss-respect.
8. Ta-Nehisi Coates, “My President Was Black,” The Atlantic, January, 2017.
9. I have discussed how euphemisms for racism, like racial, discursively obscure actors that enact racism. For more, see http://progressivenetwork.wordpress.com/tag/tressie-mcmillan-cottom.
10. Robin DiAngelo’s “Wh
ite Fragility” framing looms large in our current discourse. It is a useful analytical framework to help us think through how white racial identity emerges as something that must always be protected, even, or especially, at the expense of nonwhites. Still, naming white innocence “fragile” belies its fundamental nature, which is domination. The performance of fragility can only be done to great effect because whiteness necessarily dominates and oppresses. Whiteness isn’t then fragile, but blunt; not vulnerable, but resilient.
11. I remember the Katt Williams version of this joke, but Chris Rock did a version of it four years before. You could do worse than to watch both: Katt Williams, “It’s Pimpin’ Pimpin,” 2008, http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5wd5w0, at 32:40. Chris Rock, “Never Scared,” 2004, http://scrapsfromtheloft.com/2018/01/19/chris-rock-never-scared-2004-full-transcript, at 23:16.
Black Is Over (Or, Special Black)
1. If U.S.-ians had ever reckoned with enslavement and apartheid we might have become sophisticated enough by now to have a public discourse that could talk about both race and ethnicity. Alas, here we are. For a working schema, race is socially constructed and also biologically marked. Race refers to those biological characteristics—hair, skin tone, features—that have been socially constructed as distinct and cohesive. Ethnicity refers to the shared cultural symbols, rituals, and beliefs that a group primarily self-selects into. One often inherits their culture from their families much like one inherits their biological race markers. But, because we are social beings all implicated in how race is made, one can generally exercise more agency in selecting their cultural identity than they can their racial identity. Black people have both a racial and an ethnic identity. It is only because blackness is so totalizing as a racial ideology (to legitimize the existence of whiteness) that we rarely think of black people as an ethnic group. For more, see this accessible video by sociologist Tanya Golash-Boza, “What Is Race? What Is Ethnicity? What Is the Difference?,” http://vimeo.com/286520524.
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