Thick

What if every story you’d been told about who gets to be smart, beautiful, or authoritative was wrong? What if the very idea of being “objective” hid centuries of exclusion and pain? In Thick: And Other Essays, Tressie McMillan Cottom invites you into that uncomfortable awareness, the realization that thick—both as a body and as a metaphor—is how she moves through a world designed to flatten her.

McMillan Cottom argues that Black women’s lives offer some of the sharpest tools we have for making sense of America’s contradictions—racism, capitalism, sexism, and the illusion of meritocracy. Her essays are not simply personal reflections or cultural criticism; they are acts of thick description. Through stories of her girlhood, higher education, public writing, and grief, she shows how Black women’s intellect, beauty, and survival have been exploited and misunderstood—and what it would mean if we truly learned to trust them.

Thick as a Way of Knowing

Thick, for McMillan Cottom, is more than a word—it’s a method. It means understanding the world in all its messy fullness, refusing to make complex truths neat for the comfort of those in power. Borrowing from anthropology’s “thick description,” she insists that real understanding comes from describing things in context, not reducing them to simple problems with simple causes. To talk about beauty, she must talk about capitalism. To talk about pain, she must talk about policy. To talk about herself, she must talk about history.

As she tells readers in the opening essay, she is “too readable to be academic, too deep to be popular.” The book occupies a deliberate in-betweenness: personal but intellectual, accessible but rigorous. Writing itself becomes a political act—an insistence that Black women’s truth-telling is not niche, but necessary. By making her experience public, she transforms biography into social critique.

The Personal Essay as Protest

McMillan Cottom challenges the literary world’s dismissal of the personal essay as indulgent. For Black women, she argues, the self is often the only subject white culture allows them to claim. When she tells her own story, she isn’t narcissistic—she’s forcing power to look back at itself. Every piece in Thick—whether about Black girlhood, beauty standards, or academic labor—smuggles a sociological argument inside memoir.

Her aim is not to be liked or to be simple, but to be true. To write thickly is to refuse stereotypes: not the angry Black woman or the perfect, polished academic, but a full and fallible person. The way she moves between personal pain and structural analysis models a kind of feminist thinking: one that insists the intimate and the institutional are never separate. (bell hooks, whose influence runs through these essays, calls this process “theorizing from the margin.”)

Trust Black Women: A Cultural Imperative

The recurring call across these essays is deceptively simple: trust Black women. But McMillan Cottom reveals how radical that demand still is. To trust Black women would mean treating their experiences as data, their pain as evidence, and their ideas as theory—not anecdotes. It would mean restructuring institutions, media, and intellectual life so that they no longer depend on Black women’s labor while denying them legitimacy.

This credo forms the thread through the book’s major themes: beauty as a form of capital that excludes nonwhite women; competence and how Black women are denied it even when they master every rule; the politics of representation in media and academia; and the myth of a “post-black” or “post-racial” world. By walking through the personal—a miscarriage, a childhood memory, a Twitter spat—she unpacks how systems of power reproduce themselves in everyday life.

Why It Matters Now

In an era obsessed with performance—wokeness, branding, visibility—Thick slows you down. It asks you to witness what’s usually invisible: the intellectual and emotional labor of Black women. McMillan Cottom’s “thick” essays refuse thin takes, those viral explanations that flatten lived experience for likes or outrage. Her call to think thickly is a call to resist easy answers and to see how inequality hides in common sense. Whether she’s discussing beauty myths, the politics of education, or the election of Donald Trump, she reminds you that every truth worth telling requires courage, context, and care.

In the title essay “Thick,” McMillan Cottom begins with a story about her bowed legs as a child. Her mother refused the surgery that would have “fixed” her, so she learned to correct her stance by sheer will. For decades, she told herself to “fix your feet”—to straighten, to adjust, to fit. That command becomes the essay’s central metaphor for how Black women navigate a world that constantly demands they contort themselves to survive.

Learning to Move Through Constraint

The act of fixing her feet becomes a code for adaptation—what she calls “extreme maladaptation.” It’s a practice of self-discipline that allows her to move forward, but not without pain. This mirrors the way Black women are taught to accommodate systems that were never designed for them: dominate in school but stay humble; be strong but never angry; show intellect but never arrogance. Every step toward legitimacy carries tension and cost.

In graduate school, another Black woman warns her to “stop writing so much—they’re using you.” Behind the advice is both care and realism: that academia celebrates diversity while exploiting it. Yet McMillan Cottom decides she cannot stop. Writing, for her, is how she fixes her feet—it’s how she stands, even when the ground shifts.

Making Black Women’s Voice Legitimate

Her “fixing” extends beyond her own survival. She interrogates who gets to be seen as rational, moral, or authoritative. Women, and especially Black women, are excluded from all three traditional forms of rhetorical authority. Their rationality is doubted (“too emotional”), their morality dismissed (tied to class respectability or beauty), and their professional credibility constantly questioned. So Black women carve out authority through the personal essay and the shared moral weight of truth-telling.

To fix one’s feet, in this world, means to make yourself legible without disappearing. It’s the everyday miracle of turning the friction of living into the art of endurance. McMillan Cottom transforms that conditioning into critique: she writes precisely from the space where she refuses to disappear.

What does it mean to be told you are not beautiful—not because of how you look, but because of who the world needs beauty to belong to? In “In the Name of Beauty,” McMillan Cottom explores how beauty operates as capital: a system that rewards proximity to whiteness and punishes Black femininity for being visible.

Beauty as a White Property

Drawing on bell hooks, Pierre Bourdieu, and Naomi Wolf, she argues that beauty isn’t preference—it’s a structure. Its purpose is to preserve social hierarchies by tying aesthetics to morality. White women are disciplined by beauty, but it also protects them. For Black women, beauty is a border they can’t cross. Even when exceptions like Lupita Nyong’o or Beyoncé are celebrated, those moments reinforce that inclusion is conditional, not transformative.

McMillan Cottom recounts the fallout after she publicly called herself “unattractive.” White readers rushed to reassure her; Black readers admonished her for “hating herself.” Both, she notes, missed the point. She wasn’t internalizing oppression—she was naming it. To declare herself ugly was to expose beauty as a political fiction that values whiteness. “Ugly,” in her framing, is not self-hate but resistance.

Big Beauty and the Exploitation of Desire

She coins “Big Beauty” as a parallel to Big Pharma: an industry and ideology that profits from women’s anxiety and commodifies self-acceptance. From makeup aisles to Instagram hashtags, beauty sells belonging. White feminists’ insistence that “all women are beautiful” only reinforces the system by pretending it is democratic. (Writer Heather Widdows calls this “beauty as an ethical ideal”—a moral duty to be beautiful.)

McMillan Cottom refuses that fraud. To love Black women truthfully, she says, is to stop insisting that beauty can save them. Real liberation would mean dismantling beauty as currency altogether. “Ugly,” then, becomes a kind of freedom—a way to step outside capitalism’s most intimate lie.

If you’ve ever been told you must be twice as good to get half as far, you already know the trap at the heart of “Dying to Be Competent.” McMillan Cottom explores how the idea of competency—being capable, efficient, professional—is weaponized against Black women in systems that refuse to see them as fully human.

The Cost of Structural Incompetence

She recounts her traumatic experience of losing her child after hospital staff ignored her symptoms. Despite being educated, insured, and articulate, she was dismissed as if she couldn’t understand her own pain. Her tragedy echoes national data: Black mothers in the U.S. die from childbirth at rates comparable to developing nations. Competence, she shows, doesn’t save you when institutions are designed to see you as incompetent.

This “structural incompetence” extends beyond medicine—to schools, workplaces, and welfare offices where Black women are perceived as problems to manage rather than persons to help. The deeper irony, she writes, is that society calls Black women “superwomen” but never treats them as experts on anything, even their own bodies.

Competence as a Neoliberal Fantasy

McMillan Cottom connects this to neoliberal culture’s obsession with self-improvement—LinkedIn profiles, productivity apps, and endless “hacks” for control. She calls it a “technological fairytale”: tools that promise security while ignoring inequality. Black women learn these rules perfectly and still lose. Their competence becomes both expected and devalued, proof that survival itself has been privatized. When systems degrade your humanity, she warns, no amount of personal excellence can save you. Competence, like beauty, is a myth sustained by pain.

One of her most daring essays, “Know Your Whites,” asks an uncomfortable question: what do you really know about the people whose comfort defines your daily life? McMillan Cottom interlaces the history of Charlotte’s white elite, her mother’s skepticism about Barack Obama, and her experiences attending a Trump rally to dissect whiteness not as identity, but as elastic power.

Whiteness as Elastic Dominance

She argues that whiteness survives by expansion. It can absorb new groups—once-Irish, Italian, or Asian immigrants—while keeping Blackness fixed as its opposite. Through this lens, electing Obama and then Trump wasn’t a contradiction but continuity. Whiteness allowed itself to admire Obama because he reflected its ideal of “goodness” without challenging its supremacy. When the illusion of redemption faltered, Trump became necessary to restore the cosmic balance. “Whiteness defends itself,” she writes, “against reason, against history, against itself.”

This is not cynicism—it’s survival knowledge. To “know your whites” is to move through American life clear-eyed, neither naïve nor bitter. Black southerners, she explains, have cultivated this realism for generations. It’s how they navigate neighborly politeness and systemic violence, dinner parties and injustice, all at once.

The Soul of Black Hope

Even as she dissects the pathology of whiteness, McMillan Cottom locates her enduring faith elsewhere: “My hope resides in the soul of Black America.” Knowing whiteness doesn’t mean surrendering to it—it means refusing to be surprised. In an era of racial amnesia, this essay is a manual for seeing clearly without despairing, a call to replace disappointment with strategy and memory.

What happens when institutions celebrate diversity but quietly erase Blackness? In “Black Is Over (Or, Special Black),” McMillan Cottom unpacks the quiet hierarchy that emerged as universities and media industries embraced multiculturalism. She calls it “the moment when being just regular Black went out of style.”

The Politics of Black Ethnicity

At Emory University, she noticed that many “Black” students were actually international or multiracial—Nigerian, Haitian, Cape Verdean. While everyone was technically Black, these students were often framed as more disciplined, grateful, or cosmopolitan than U.S.-born descendants of slavery. This dynamic, she argues, lets elite institutions enjoy “diversity” without confronting the legacy of American racism. Hiring one Nigerian professor, for example, is not the same as addressing anti-Blackness in the U.S. classroom.

The same pattern plays out in media, where biracial or foreign-born celebrities stand in for Black America writ large. When African and Caribbean immigrants express skepticism toward African Americans, or when Latinas are celebrated as “post-racial,” the system wins twice—it divides the category of Black and sells inclusion as progress.

Rejecting Scarcity Logic

McMillan Cottom refuses this manufactured scarcity. “Black is not over,” she insists. The goal of racial justice isn’t to move “beyond” Blackness—it’s to dismantle whiteness as dominance. Claiming her identity as “regular black-black” becomes a protest. For her, authenticity lies not in purity, but in solidarity—the right to be fully Black without apology or special explanation.

In “Girl 6,” McMillan Cottom asks a deceptively small question: why isn’t there a single Black woman with a full-time opinion column at a prestige newspaper? That question unfolds into an X-ray of how legitimacy works in media and public intellectual life.

Legitimacy and the Ether

She contrasts her world with that of David Brooks and Jonathan Chait—white male columnists who write weekly musings, even on absurd topics like gourmet sandwiches, and are never disqualified from being “public intellectuals.” She jokes about Brooks’s deli metaphor but makes a serious point: these men shape the “ether” of public conversation, meaning everyone else must respond to them. Their authority is ambient, inherited, self-reinforcing.

Through a creative social media experiment, she even analyzes who these men follow on Twitter: out of hundreds of accounts, only six are Black women. “What does it say,” she asks, “when it costs nothing to listen to us—and still they don’t?”

Free to Fail and Still Belong

Her wish is modest but revolutionary: for one Black woman to be paid, protected, and free to fail in the same way Brooks is allowed to fail. Because visibility without safety isn’t power—it’s exposure. Until Black women are treated as peers whose banal thoughts can shape the ether, legitimacy itself remains white property. By ending with the 2018 hiring of Michelle Alexander at The New York Times, she admits progress, but not resolution. One column does not end centuries of erasure, but it’s something to read—and to breathe.

Why do poor people buy expensive things? McMillan Cottom dismantles the moral panic around “poor spending habits” by reframing consumption as a matter of dignity. Her mother called it “people who can do, must do.” Clothes, cars, or handbags aren’t wasteful—they’re tools for negotiating respect in a world that denies poor, and especially Black, people the benefit of the doubt.

Respectability as Cultural Capital

Citing sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of symbolic capital, she recounts how her mother dressed up to help a neighbor navigate welfare offices because “people listen when you look respectable.” The camel-colored cape and pearl earrings weren’t vanity—they were a language the system understood. What looks frivolous to outsiders can be survival signaling to insiders. “Status symbols,” she writes, “are sometimes just passports.”

She recalls job interviews where being “too classy” saved her from shift work, or where a clean Nissan and a silk shell opened doors others could not. These small acts of presentation carry material consequences, proving that competence and class are staged, not earned.

Survival, Not Aspiration

McMillan Cottom pushes back against the idea that financial literacy can fix structural poverty. “You have no idea what you’d do if you were truly poor,” she writes. When scarcity defines your horizon, it’s not irrational to chase the symbols of belonging. The “fabulous” poor aren’t delusional—they’re performing necessity. In their choices lies a lesson about what survival costs when human worth is indexed to appearance.

What happens to a society that decides some girls are never children? In “Black Girlhood, Interrupted,” McMillan Cottom traces how Black girls are denied innocence, beginning with her own reading of Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi and moving through cultural cases like R. Kelly and the criminalization of Black femininity.

The Erasure of Childhood

She recalls family conversations where men dismissed rape victims as “hoes” or “grown.” Those words, she argues, encapsulate centuries of Black girls being held responsible for the violence against them. Studies she cites confirm this bias: adults of all races perceive Black girls as older and less in need of protection. Once a girl is “grown” in the cultural imagination, she can no longer be a victim—she becomes complicit.

In cases like R. Kelly’s, this logic allows predators to go free while communities defend them. McMillan Cottom notes that even in feminist movements like #MeToo, Black girls remain peripheral—too sexualized to be innocent, too marginal to be believed.

Refusing Disposable Daughters

By centering Black girlhood as a site of knowledge, she reframes protection as a public responsibility, not private charity. She challenges both patriarchy and respectability politics, refusing to trade silence for safety. “Black girls are not problems to be solved,” she writes, “but people to be believed.” Through memory and data, she forces readers to confront how much violence hides behind cultural familiarity. Protecting Black girls, she insists, is how we protect our collective humanity.