Thick: And Other Essays

Myers Park functions as an example of how White people reproduce their privilege. McMillan Cottom describes how “resegregation” (107) reinforces White privilege, as integrating schools really only lasted 30 years. McMillan Cottom reads Myers Park as a “cultural geography of the city’s racist histories,” (104) showing how it is beautiful because it “encoded whiteness into the mundane market transactions we rarely see: zoning, planning, investment, homeowners’ associations” (105). For instance, its stable housing values survived the crash in housing prices in the 2000s, avoiding the blight that hit other neighborhoods. The White people from Myers Park typically go to private schools, though the local public school is so well-funded it functions as a private school. White people live in neighborhoods that have benefitted for years from wealth accumulation, which results in better services and maintenance. In the US public school system, enrollment is determined by zip codes, reinforcing inequality. This is known as “opportunity hoarding” (105). Yet as McMillan Cottom notes, these people mean well and want everyone to thrive, but they want their children to thrive a little bit more. They hoard opportunities which seriously disadvantage those who do not have the ability to do so. For example, Myers Park mostly supported busing students to a historically Black high school. This resulted in a rising tide of investment that benefited everyone, but mostly the White students. When experiments like busing are brought in, there is support from places like Myers Park, but White students continue to benefit more.

McMillan Cottom describes how Black people didn’t think Obama could win because they “know their Whites.” However, she comes to realize that White people in Myers Park believed that Obama is their guy. Her mother refuses to believe that Obama can win until she goes with McMillan Cottom to a second party in Myers Park. Seeing that “Whites knew Obama” convinces her that he can win.

However, Obama’s presidency is marked by “black political competence and white fear” (111). McMillan Cottom draws a parallel to Reconstruction, another eight-year period of governance some 130 years ago, after which there was a racist backlash. Obama had faith in White people and believed that they could overcome racism. McMillan Cottom argues that this didn’t matter, White people only needed to have faith in him, and he reflected their ideal selves back at them: “White voters allowed Barack Obama to become an idea and a president because he was a charming projection of the paradox that defines them as white” (118). Obama was a symbol that promised that the world had changed without White people having to actually change. Obama’s biracial identity may be why he could see racist caricatures of his wife and children or decades of White suppression of Black socioeconomic gains as racial, not racist. This framing affirmed what White voters wanted to hear. Duality can bring insight into both sides, but it can also bring delusion marked by an inability to see why these things are in tension. In the case of Obama, for instance, McMillan Cottom writes:

My first black president seems to think that he could raise his daughters to believe in systemic racism without legitimizing the idea of systemic reparations. He thinks that he can be his brother’s keeper without changing the policies, laws, and investments that keep his brothers in bad jobs, in poor neighborhoods, with bad educational options, and at the bottom of the social hierarchy. My first black president seems to think he can have black cool without black burden (116).

McMillan Cottom argues that Whiteness defends itself, and Obama’s inability to imagine why Donald Trump was elected suggests that he does not know his Whites. After the election, Obama said he was still hopeful for the soul of White America. McMillan Cottom says the hope lies in the soul of Black America because White people will always protect their Whiteness.