Thick: And Other Essays

As a sociologist, McMillan Cottom’s work analyzes class as it relates to status, income, and wealth. She describes, “if my work is about anything it is about making plain precisely how prestige, money, and power structure our so-called democratic institutions so that most of us will always fail” (207). Throughout her essays, she highlights how economic privilege and status are used to maintain hierarchies and replicate social advantages. This particularly disadvantages Black women. In “The Price of Fabulousness,” she analyzes how narratives about the poor financial decisions that poor people make are a way of shifting the blame to the individual. In contrast, she argues that economic inequality is structural. People buy status symbols or expensive clothing because it means that people will treat them with more respect:

I learned, watching my mother, that there was a price we had to pay to signal to gatekeepers that we were worthy of engaging. It meant dressing well and speaking well. It might not work. It likely wouldn’t work, but on the off chance that it would, you had to try (163).

Because of class privilege and class expectations, the value of status symbols often comes down to the recognition that “they cannot afford to not have it” (169). Classist attitudes are used to justify the exploitation of poor people. As McMillan Cottom gains educational credentials and develops her public reputation, she increases her social capital and class position, which shapes how people engage with her. However, she also documents how her rising class position is complicated by her Blackness. This is most exemplified when her hospital blames her for her newborn’s death during her traumatic birth experience.

Throughout Thick, McMillan Cottom argues for the significance of Black women’s perspectives. In “Thick,” she shows how the denigration of the personal essay as a genre undermines the claims of Black women to public intellectual space. Denied most forms of legitimacy, the personal essay becomes the primary genre where people of color and women are able to express their opinions and show their expertise. She describes how Black women are expected to perform their pain or describe their tragedies in order to be considered authoritative public voices. They are rarely asked to opine about banal, everyday things. She outlines her own approach to the personal essay and how she links her personal experiences with structural analysis. McMillan Cottom uses her own experience of being told she writes too much to consider how the experiences of Black women are exploited by media publications that want Black voices but don’t want to put them on their masthead.

In “Girl 6,” McMillan Cottom concludes her essay collection with a reflection on how “a Professional Smart Person can be so without ever reading a black woman, ever interviewing a black woman, ever following a black woman, or ever thinking about a black woman’s existence” (219). Analyzing the Twitter engagement of David Brooks and Jonathan Chait, two prominent opinion columnists, she shows how Black women’s voices are excluded from public discourse. She calls for more Black women being paid to write and think in the public sphere. The dismissal of Black women has its roots in anti-Blackness. She also shows how Black women are frequently ignored in other contexts. For instance, in 2014, President Obama created a task force for young Black men, but it took significant pressure to get a task force for young Black women, and it remained underfunded. She also shows how Black women are expected to support and prop up Black men, even when they do not treat Black women well. Society often doesn’t value the expertise of Black women, but McMillan Cottom argues that is a mistake, as the experiences and intellectual work of Black women is deeply important.