thick and other essays tressie mcmillan cottom

McMillan Cottom has crafted a black woman’s cultural bible, as she mines for meaning in places many of us miss and reveals precisely how-when you’re in the thick of it-the political, the social, and the personal are almost always one and the same. Yet Thick will also fill a void on those very shelves: a modern black American female voice waxing poetic on self and society, serving up a healthy portion of clever prose and southern aphorisms in a style uniquely her own. This bold compendium, likely to find its place on shelves alongside Lindy West, Rebecca Solnit, and Maggie Nelson, dissects everything from beauty to Obama to pumpkin spice lattes. In the bestselling tradition of bell hooks and Roxane Gay, McMillan Cottom’s freshman collection illuminates a particular trait of her tribe: being thick. Tressie McMillan Cottom, the writer, professor, and acclaimed author of Lower Ed, now brilliantly shifts gears from running regression analyses on college data to unleashing another identity: a purveyor of wit, wisdom-and of course Black Twitter snark-about all that is right and much that is so very wrong about this thing we call society.

People have increasing anxiety about their job security because of the increasing deregulations of neoliberalism and the precarization of work, and LinkedIn’s promises of endorsements and networking are an inadequate balm to this anxiety.Smart, humorous, and strikingly original thoughts on race, beauty, money, and more-by one of today's most intrepid public intellectuals She points to LinkedIn as an exemplar of the promises that technology fails to meet. Neoliberal capitalism celebrates competence and productivity, shifting the critique from structural questions to one of individual hard work and competence. She uses this moment to reflect on the reality that for the first time in her life, she can afford all of the lifestyle perks of a middle-class person. She reflects on this desire for competence from a freezing house in Virginia because she has forgotten to pay her bill. She doesn’t dream about a husband, or a wedding, or babies but she fantasizes about the sound of high heels clicking on the floor as she walks purposefully with a briefcase, embodying competence. As a child, McMillan Cottom dreams of being competent.

Thick and other essays tressie mcmillan cottom