Thick Read online
THICK
Also by Tressie McMillan Cottom
Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy
For-Profit Universities: The Shifting Landscape of Marketized Higher Education
(co-editor with William A. Darity Jr.)
THICK
And Other Essays
TRESSIE McMILLAN COTTOM
© 2019 by Tressie McMillan Cottom
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher.
Requests for permission to reproduce selections from this book should be mailed to: Permissions Department, The New Press, 120 Wall Street, 31st floor, New York, NY 10005.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to:
The Atlantic for permission to reprint “The Problem with Obama’s Faith in White People,” © 2016 by Tressie McMillan Cottom; the New York Times for permission to reprint “How
We Make Black Girls Grow Up Too Fast,” © 2017 by Tressie McMillan Cottom; Warner Chappell Music, Inc. for permission to use lyrics from the song “Thick & Pretty” performed by Migos; Sony Music for permission to use lyrics from the song “Mix’d Girl” performed by T-Pain; HarperCollins for permission to use lines from “Those Who Love Us Never Leave Us Alone with Our Grief” by Alice Walker, the foreword to Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” by Zora Neale Hurston (New York: Amistad, 2018), © 2018 by Alice Walker; Curtis Brown, Ltd. for permission to use lines from the poem “homage to my hips,” copyright © 1980 by Lucille Clifton. Now appears in The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965–2010 by Lucille Clifton, published by BOA Editions. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.
Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2019
Distributed by Two Rivers Distribution
ISBN 978-1-62097-436-0 (hc)
ISBN 978-1-62097-437-7 (ebook)
CIP data is available
The New Press publishes books that promote and enrich public discussion and understanding of the issues vital to our democracy and to a more equitable world. These books are made possible by the enthusiasm of our readers; the support of a committed group of donors, large and small; the collaboration of our many partners in the independent media and the not-for-profit sector; booksellers, who often hand-sell New Press books; librarians; and above all by our authors.
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Book design and composition by Bookbright Media
This book was set in Goudy Oldstyle and Futura
Printed in the United States of America
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
For Gabrielle, always.
Life, inexhaustible, goes on. And we do too. Carrying our wounds and our medicines as we go. Ours is an amazing, a spectacular, journey in the Americas. It is so remarkable one can only be thankful for it, bizarre as that may sound.
Perhaps our planet is for learning to appreciate the extraordinary wonder of life that surrounds even our suffering, and to say Yes, if through the thickest of tears.
—Alice Walker, from the foreword to Zora Neale
Hurston’s Barracoon
CONTENTS
Author’s Note
Thick
In the Name of Beauty
Dying to Be Competent
Know Your Whites
Black Is Over (Or, Special Black)
The Price of Fabulousness
Black Girlhood, Interrupted
Girl 6
Notes
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This collection represents conversations I have had with many wonderful communities, some that intersect and others that do not. I have been fortunate. My interlocutors include social theorists, historians, sociologists, anthropologists, writers, researchers, academics, politicians, activists, and readers from all walks of life. They have pushed me to refine my analytical concepts without sacrificing my prose. And they have inspired me to aim for a cohesive framework of thought in our complicated days.
I owe my editor, Tara Grove of The New Press, an immeasurable debt for engaging me seriously, critically, and always in good faith. As a writer and a thinker it is difficult to find people willing to wade into your thought process to throw you a line out of it, which is what one must eventually do to write anything for a public. It is even more rare for a black woman thinker and writer to garner that kind of serious engagement with her intellectual production. I have, quite honestly, spent my entire life trying to find anyone who valued me enough as a thinker to engage me enough that I might become a better one. Tara does that.
Writing is always a brutally social process that is rude enough to masquerade as a solitary one. My name is on the cover. All mistakes in this volume are my own. But the best parts of my thinking are owed to the brilliant people who I can call friends: Jade Davis, Patricia A. Matthew, Melissa Creary, Roxane Gay, and Dorothy Brown push me to my highest self. They also make sure I leave enough of myself for myself. Lauren Garcia has provided me unparalleled research and support for this project. Hire her. My colleagues at Virginia Commonwealth University, where I teach and research as an assistant professor of sociology, provide me an intellectual space devoid of the petty politics that mar so many of our academic enclaves. Because they treat intellectual work as human labor, deserving of humane investment, I am able to do what I do.
And I do what I do because it is what I was put here to do. I am only sure about that and three other things in my entire life. Another of those things is that this work benefited greatly from the amazing scholarship of people like Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Patricia Hill Collins, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Joan Morgan, Brittney Cooper, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Desiree Melton, Adrian Piper, Christina Greer, and many, many others. That you hear more from these women’s male counterparts in popular media than you do from them is a large part of why I do what I do. It has become in vogue to say “trust black women.” One of the other things I know is that the time for choosing to do so has long passed. There is not a single global, national, or local condition to which black women’s intellectual, spiritual, and emotional intelligences cannot be trusted to bring greater clarity. The 2016 election of Donald Trump joins the rise of nationalist, xenophobic, racist, sexist, and classist demagogues ascending to and consolidating power across the world. If not now, when?
Thick
“Thick” ethnography provides readers with a proxy experience for living in another culture such that they engage with its richness, pick up the threads, and do what members do—which is to generate new meanings from the same cultural repertoire.
—Roger Gomm and Martyn Hammersley1
Like my women (like what?)
Thick and pretty (pretty and thick)
—Migos, “Thick & Pretty”
these hips are big hips
they need space to
move around in.
they don’t fit into little
petty places. these hips
are free hips.
—Lucille Clifton
I was pregnant at thirty. Divorced at thirty-one. Lost at thirty-two. How else would I have ended up in a place called Rudean’s? Rudean’s was an institution. It sat in a strip mall on a street, Beatties Ford Road, that had once been the heart of the new black middle class in Charlotte, North Carolina. As went the fortunes of black homeownership, entrepreneurship, wealth creation, citizenship, and health, so went Beatties Ford Road.
Rudean’s held on. So did Rudean. The establishment was named for its owner even though it perhaps would have sounded better were it not. But I do not tell old black people nothing. It is rude. What wasn’t rude was Rudean’s reputation. You grew up on jokes about the old players and aging fly girls living out their glory days at Rudean’s, the nightcl
ub that also sold fried fish plates and chicken wings. You had to get there early because parking was slim pickings. And there were only maybe a dozen or so tables pressed up against a long wall on the empty side of the room. The other wall had the bar, wrapped in tufted pleather and papered with liquor ads featuring smiling, glorious black people living the high life.
You ordered your fish at the bar. If you were early enough you could eat it at a table as bodies pressed by you, inching in beat together. After you ate, if you were feeling extra festive, you slid through those bodies and an oddly narrow doorway into a second room in the back. Narrow like the front room but in the different direction, horizontal to the front room’s vertical, this was the dancefloor.
Going to Rudean’s your first time was a rite of passage. In your teens you laughed at Rudean’s. In your twenties you joked about sugar daddies at Rudean’s. When you hit thirty, you busted your Rudean’s cherry. On my first of only two visits to Rudean’s, I sat alone at the bar waiting for friends as a man sidled up next to me. He talked, I mostly demurred and waited on my croaker plate, fried hard. Just before he asked me for my phone number he said, “Your hair thick, your nose thick, your lips thick, all of you just thick.”
It was true if not artfully stated. Being too much of one thing and not enough of another had been a recurring theme in my life. I was, like many young women, expected to be small so that boys could expand and white girls could shine. When I would not or could not shrink, people made sure that I knew I had erred. I was, like many black children, too much for white teachers and white classrooms and white study groups and white Girl Scout troops and so on. Thick where I should have been thin, more when I should have been less, a high school teacher nicknamed me “Ms. Personality,” and it did not feel like a superlative.
I had tried in different ways over the years to fit. I thought I could discipline my body and later my manners to take up less room. I was fine with that, but I learned that even I had limits when—in my pursuit of the life of the mind—my thinking was deemed too thick.
On one of my first forays into publishing anything, an editor told me that I was too readable to be academic, too deep to be popular, too country black to be literary, and too naive to show the rigor of my thinking in the complexity of my prose. I had wanted to create something meaningful that sounded not only like me, but like all of me. It was too thick.
Once I was at an academic conference. Well, I am at many academic conferences because I am an academic. But this conference stands out for the moment when a senior academic, a black woman, marched over to me and said without preamble, “You need to stop writing so much. They’re just using you.”
At the time, I was just a graduate student. I was finishing my dissertation, but that was not exactly the point of contention. The real point of contention was that I was also one of the most published working sociologists in print and digital media. It was and still is a strange juxtaposition.
Graduate students are not people. In the academic hierarchy, graduate students are units of labor. They can be students, but not just students. They are academics in the making. They do not have any claim to authority among scholars. In fact, the most surefire way to get a real, minted academic to speak to you when you are just a graduate student is to introduce yourself by proxy: “Hi I am Tressie, student of Richard Rubinson and Sandy Darity, and I know five other people who you recognize as people.” It is hard to get that out in the three seconds humans generally give each other to establish “small talk” during routine social interactions. That is why you can, at almost any gathering of academics, find graduate students milling about in small packs, finishing sentences after someone who did this dance decades ago has already walked away.
The point that the very well-meaning senior academic was making that day was a fair one. I was not a real person. The problem was that the rest of the world did not quite know that. Or, rather, if they thought I was not a real person—one worthy of consideration and engagement—they did not think that it was because I was just a graduate student.
The first time anything I wrote went “viral” I was in the middle of taking exams in non-parametric statistics. It was a horrible time. The leading publication of my profession had published a hit article about a group of young scholars, almost all women of color, and all identifying as black. I wrote an essay about the article on my blog.2 In the span of twenty-four hours the essay had become a petition that became a social media firestorm that became a series of essays on websites and blogs that became a white woman getting fired for writing the hit piece. That is as much impact as some academics have their entire lives, much less in twenty-four hours.
But the more incredible story is that I was just a black girl, a little long in the tooth, but still in my mind just a black girl writing. Black girls do not cause problems for powerful white women or august professional publications or public discourse.3 Black girls have not, for most of my understanding of our history in this nation, had the power to cause those kinds of problems.
Black girls and black women are problems. That is not the same thing as causing problems. We are social issues to be solved, economic problems to be balanced, and emotional baggage to be overcome. We work. Lord do black girls and black women work.4 We start work early before it is paid work. Then we start paid work and most of us never stop, are unable to ever stop. We work to keep churches financially viable,5 black colleges in business,6 black families functioning,7 black politics respectable,8 and black men alive.9 In all of our working we can sometimes work the wrong way. That is what I was doing. I was working the wrong way … for a black woman who did not want to become a problem.
At the time, I was far too hurt to understand what the sister in the academic conference hall was telling me. When you are vulnerable and on the losing end of a power dynamic, all you can hear of that kind of direct, unsolicited feedback is how—despite all of your hard work—you are still doing everything wrong. But I have thought a lot about that moment and all the moments that have shaped what kind of thinker I have become. That is what this book is about.
Before I was a real academic, I was a black woman and before I was a black woman I was a black girl. I was a certain kind of black girl. I am the only child of an only child who was the child of a woman whose grandparents had been touched by slavery. We are southern, almost pedestrianly so. We are the people who went north to Harlem but not west to St. Louis or California during the Great Migration when millions of black people traveled their own nation as refugees.10 That is important to know because there is not just one black woman experience, no matter how thick one black woman may be.
My people were escaping poor white trash who made it hard to pay taxes to keep the bits of worthless land that meant the world to us to own.11 We were escaping black men who drank too much and sometimes touched little girls too long in ways that were both wrong and acceptable. We were escaping a racial hierarchy where “injuns” could pass as biracial blacks in the shadows of Native lands that had been stolen but then cohabitated in ways that made determining who was black and who was red a game with high stakes for survival.12 We were respectable.13 We went to church and paid tithes and wore slips and we drank but had the good sense to be ashamed that we did. We whispered when we said bad words and we valued hard work and education as evidence of our true worth. We did not want to be problems.
Much to my chagrin I was actually born in Harlem Hospital and not a decent southern maternity ward. We were in Harlem because that is where jobs were. Shortly after I was born it became clear that my newborn chicken wings were not straightening out as nature usually demands. You know that stage when newborns are still folded up like adorable wing dings. Over time, they stretch out and develop the straight spines and legs that let us walk normal. I would not walk normally. One leg, the right one, is still clawing its way back to its in-utero comfort zone. There is a medical term for it, but we called it being pigeon-toed and bow-legged. You can be one or the other and be cute.
I am both. That is not cute.
It is a kind of birth defect, really. The doctors at Harlem Hospital told my mother that it could be fixed, really should be fixed. As she tells it, the surgery would involve breaking both of my legs, resetting them, wearing hard casts and then soft, followed by however many years of braces necessary. When she tells the story, she gets a little teary-eyed. “I couldn’t let them do that to my baby.” And, so, I would live broken.
My mother could not fathom the cost of fixing me. But she could count the cost of teaching me to fix myself. I have several mantras committed to memory, but the one that I remember first and most is my mother’s voice shouting, “fix your feet.” Every time I stood up the voice said, “fix your feet.” Every time I got tired and lazy, reverting to bowed-back legs and crooked toes, it whispered, “fix your feet.” When I started walking and then later started strutting, I would hear it, “fix your feet.” It meant straighten your toes, adjust your hips, lock your knees, and walk like a normal person. Fixing my feet became a way of life for me, an undercurrent of thousands of messages that form the subconscious playlist of our identity. It plays alongside other whispers like, “work twice as hard” and “keep your legs closed” and “don’t talk to strangers” and “don’t be a stranger” and “remember who you are and where you came from.”
I fixed my feet my whole life. I never walked normally, but I do not walk like I am deformed. By the time I was twelve years old the first adult man of my life told me I was sexy. “Look at her walk!” he said. The first month of my brand-new job as a professor many decades later a colleague shouted, “We knew that was you from that walk!” I had fixed my feet and they had fixed me.
Now my right hip bothers me. I have recently acquired the health insurance of the solidly middle class. To celebrate I made appointments with every kind of doctor listed in the manual. A new physical therapist brought all her colleagues around to see the extent of what they kindly call my extreme maladaptation. She tells me I should sympathize with my mother. “The science used to be so cruel, especially for children,” she says. She tells me that I made it work and it is okay that after years of fixing my feet I may have worn out parts of my hip and spine. “But look how far you’ve come!”