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.
Thick, Tressie McMillan Cottom
Table of Contents
Preamble
I heard about Thick: And Other Essays from one of my favourite booktubers lexi aka newlynova when she mentioned it in her “everything I want to read in spring” video. Since I have been looking for more non-fiction to read this year and I especially wanted to read more essay collections, this book went into my to-be-read pile and I also moved it up in my queue so I could read it as soon as possible.
This is my first time reading Tressie McMillan Cottom so I had no idea what her style was and no particularly strong expectation. Let’s get into it.
The Book
This book was easy to read but not to digest. What I mean by that is that I finished this book in a couple of sittings, I started it on Monday and finished it on Tuesday. But a lot of the of the thoughts, ideas, and concepts that Tressie talks about in the book didn’t really start to sink in until I began looking at the annotations I had saved.
The first essay in this book is the titular Thick where Tressie talks about being a Black woman in the world of online publishing, and its relation to the genre of the personal essay. In some ways I felt like I was missing important context about the discourse about the personal essay genre that she alludes to in this essay.
For example:
We weren’t killing the personal essay as much as we are killing those who used the personal essay to become a problem.
Thick, Tressie McMillan Cottom
I’d argue that it people were indeed trying to kill the personal essay, the success of authors like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Hanif Abdurraqib proves that such an attempt has decidedly failed. That said, I don’t generally read personal essays in the publications that authors like Tressie have published their work in and end up reading them years later in essay collections like this one so I can’t say if the personal essay is as popular as it used to be in online publishing spaces.
Tressie’s essay about the nature of beauty and its relation to the structures of patriarchy and capitalism is also poignant.
It is actually blackness, as it has been created through the history of colonization, imperialism, and domination, that excludes me from the forces of beauty. For beauty to function as it should, it must exclude me. Big Beauty–the structure of who can be beautiful, the stories we tell about beauty, the value we assign beauty, the power given to those with beauty, the disciplining effect of the fear of losing beauty you might possess– definitionally excludes the kind of blackness I carry in my history and my bones. Beauty is for white women, if not for all white women. If beauty is to matter at all for capital, it can never be for black women.
In the Name of Beauty by Tressie McMillan Cottom
In the essay titled “Dying to be Competent” Tressie tackles the topic of medical racism. She tells a heartbreaking story about being ignored by medical professionals when she was in great pain which turned out to be her in labour; a case in the medical professional assuming a general incompetence when it comes to their own health. Here is another quote.
What so many black women know is that what I learned as I sat at the end of a hallway with a dead baby in my arms. The networks of capital, be they polities or organizations, work most efficiently when your lowest status characteristic is assumed. And once these gears are in motion, you can never be competent enough to save your own life. That is how black feminism knows the future.
Dying to be Competent, by Tressie McMillan Cottom
The essay that stood out most to me was the one titled “Black is Over (Or, Special Black)” in which Tressie talks about the distinction between “black-black” aka Black people from the USA and “black ethnics” which where black people from elsewhere–Nigerians, Beninese, Jamaica, Cape Verdean, Dominican, Haitian.
This particular distinction is one that I had never heard about before. So this essay taught me something new.
Black is not over. The postcolonial project of dismantling the vestiges of imperialism is about blackness, just like the U.S. Civil War was about slavery. There is no post-black race theory or race work or racial justice or activism that can thrive by avoiding this truth, Whether at a dinner table or in grand theories, the false choice between black-black and worthy black is a trap. It poses that ending blackness was the goal of anti-racist work when the treal goal has always been and should always be ending whiteness.
Black is Over (Or, Special Black) by Tressie McMillan Cottom
Conclusions
While I did not enjoy the particular writing style that Tressie employs, I appreciated her directness when it came to tackling complex issues. She definitely writes like an academic but not in a way that I found overbearing. Her writing is dense not because of the prose but because the subject matter she talks about needs a certain density to its writing.
These are essays one needs to read and then sit with for a bit for them to truly sink in. While personally, I’ll always enjoy non-fiction writers who are more poetic and create a greater sense of vibes, I don’t mind reading this kind of non-fiction writer every once in a while.
I welcome more suggestions for essay collections like these.
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