A Brief Book Review of Thick by Tressie McMillan Cottom
Three percent of America’s 1.8 million postsecondary faculty members are black. A professor of sociology, Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom is one of them. She is a black woman who thinks and writes for a living, and she does it very, very well. I cannot recall exactly when she came into my awareness, but I am sure it was years ago through Twitter. As is her habit, she had probably said something in 140 characters or less that was funny or provocative or insightful (or all of the above) that was in turn retweeted by several thousand people. I probably soon thereafter joined the masses retweeting and liking her posts.
While I don’t spend much time on Twitter, she was and remains one of my favorite follows. But I am not sure I had ever read any of her opinions beyond tweets until I picked up this just-released collection of her essays, Thick (2019). I only wish I had dived into her longer-form work sooner. I don’t have anyone other than myself to blame for that, her work having been featured in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and in her book Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy (2017). Then again, I haven’t even read Harry Potter yet so <emoji man with dark skin tone face-palming>.
In eight essays that are at times hilarious, challenging, and brilliant, she unpacks and shares how and why she became the thinker she is today and how, in her own words, she uses data and research to tell “evocative stories that become a problem for power.” In Thick, she tackles concepts and topics such as Big Beauty (“beauty isn’t actually what you look like; beauty is the preferences that produce the existing social order”), social locations, knowing your whites, structural vulnerability, the tragic paradoxes of competence, presentability versus acceptability, black girlhood, hard-to-measure dividends, and many others. Her writing voice is so clear and engaging I couldn’t put Thick down, skipping out on a 50-mile bike ride to curl up on my couch and thumb through these pages.
If you want to understand the world better, whether through the lenses of race, gender, education, or capitalism (or all of the above), Dr. Cottom is a worthy guide. A voracious reader (she has 14 designated reading spots in her home), a deep thinker, and an industrious writer, her work should be taken seriously. She is willing to think for herself even if it makes her a problem sometimes. Fortunately for us, reading her work often feels more like a blessing.