Thick: And Other Essays

Thick is a book of first-person essays, a genre associated with women, people of color, queer people, and the internet. In 2017, the writer Jia Tolentino said that the personal essay boom was over, summing up a mood that the death of the personal essay was overdue. However, for Black women writers, the personal essay is a significant way to tell their own stories. McMillan Cottom concludes that “the personal essay was an economic problem and a social problem dressed up as a cultural taste problem” (18), and the death of the personal essay was an attempt to stifle the voices of the people who used the genre to “become a problem.”

McMillan Cottom is one of the people who used the personal essay to become a problem. McMillan Cottom is one of the most published sociologists, even while a graduate student. Her writing—a blog post responding to the leading publication in her journal publishing a piece criticizing a group of young scholars of color—goes viral for the first time while in graduate school. Within a day, the essay inspired a petition which ultimately led to a White woman getting fired for writing the article. McMillan Cottom highlights that this impact is highly unusual for graduate students, especially Black women, who are not expected to cause problems for White women and important publications in the field. Black women are expected to work hard but not to become problems. When the senior Black woman tells her that she is being used, she is highlighting that Black women are used for their labor, and that McMillan Cottom is working the wrong way. She claims space without permission from gatekeepers. But McMillan Cottom clarifies that it is wrong only for people who don’t want to become a problem, and she is comfortable being a problem.

Black women face hurdles in accessing the traditional markers of authority: wealth, high income, professional status, marriageability, religious leadership, beauty. Their voices are deemed less authoritative. However, Black women excel at pursing authority, often by acquiring credentials like education and accruing professional status. Despite this, they remain excluded from systems of power, so they adapt and claim space where they are able to. The analogy of fixing her feet is invoked throughout. While Black women’s experiences and stories create value for media platforms, they rarely make any money from it. The senior Black woman academic highlights this in her comments to McMillan Cottom, that McMillan Cottom is providing content from a Black female perspective without being hired as staff, without making real money for it. McMillan Cottom concedes this is true but refuses to stop writing because of this. She recognizes that the payoff for continuing to write and continuing to show up are likely to be low, but she does it anyway. She persists.

For McMillan Cottom, writing is tied to reality, she cannot escape her subject position as a Black woman in a country where that means that her life expectations and expectancy are lower. She does not write beautiful, flowery essays, or work that people can escape into, but rather, her work is rooted in sociology, the study of systems and society. Her “thick description” jumps between genres and includes a personal voice, but is rooted in “social locations,” the recognition that free will is circumscribed by histories that “shape who we are allowed to become” (26). Her grandmother, who was incredibly intelligent, wasn’t able to achieve the intellectual status that McMillan Cottom does. McMillan Cottom’s work thus accounts for why: why now, now here, why me or them? Her use of the personal essay thus introduces more complex questions of society and systems. Her experiences are used to make social theory more legible, but her writing can’t be reduced down to this. She writes to create space for Black women to write and think, but also points to the need for basic economic security that makes this possible. She concludes with:

If anyone ever reads me and finds it useful, as I hope that you do, may doing so spark a gold rush for black women writers at institutions and publications that will pay them and protect them. I hope we build a body politic so thick with contradictions and nuance and humanity and blackness (because blackness is humanity), that no black woman public intellectual has to fix her feet ever again to walk this world (32).

By concluding here, McMillan Cottom indicates to the viewer how the remaining essays should be read.