Focusing on the contemporary issues of the day, Cottom reveals how the stories that Black women tell about themselves can never get old (and perhaps never should get old considering how often whiteness refers to itself, even if predictably) considering the myriad of experiences we have and the various ways, as Cottom puts it, our social locations impact how we are able to navigate society.

Cottom’s work means to grant Black women permission to “do what they are already doing but for better rewards.” Her collection resembles the non-fictional narrative work of Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider (1984) for how it catalogs various themes of the Black experience. Without being pompous, Cottom is unapologetic in a way that frees both her and the reader to accept what it means for Black women to both be a problem and cause problems. A social scientist herself, Tressie McMillan Cottom turns her theoretical lens inward to discuss the interiority of American life as a ‘thick’ Black woman. We donate 10% of this book’s sales to The Night School of Durham.More than a double entendre, Thick: And Other Essays is a rigorous analysis of Black womanhood that utilizes the auto-ethnographic technique well-practiced by women of color long before Clifford Geertz (1973) endorsed in-depth, descriptive writing. She turns her chosen form into a showcase for her critical dexterity, investigating everything from Saturday Night Live, LinkedIn, and BBQ Becky to sexual violence, infant mortality, and Trump rallies.Ĭollected in an indispensable volume that speaks to the everywoman and the erudite alike, these unforgettable essays never fail to be “painfully honest and gloriously affirming” and hold “a mirror to your soul and to that of America” (Dorothy Roberts). This “transgressive, provocative, and brilliant” (Roxane Gay) collection cements McMillan Cottom’s position as a public thinker capable of shedding new light on what the “personal essay” can do. Thick “transforms narrative moments into analyses of whiteness, black misogyny, and status-signaling as means of survival for black women” ( Los Angeles Review of Books) with “writing that is as deft as it is amusing” (Darnell L. In eight highly praised treatises on beauty, media, money, and more, Tressie McMillan Cottom-award-winning professor and acclaimed author of Lower Ed-is unapologetically “thick”: deemed “thick where I should have been thin, more where I should have been less,” McMillan Cottom refuses to shy away from blending the personal with the political, from bringing her full self and voice to the fore of her analytical work.

Thick tressie cottom