San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Demystifying black women’s magic
“Black women have generations of earned and inherited moral philosophy that has sustained families, communities and institutions.” These are the words of Tressie McMillan Cottom in “Thick,” a collection of essays on everything from beauty and politics to social status and public intellectualism. It’s a book that comes at a time when #Blackgirlmagic has gone beyond being a viral hashtag in society; it’s become a reflection for how we both celebrate and dismiss black women in America.
Black women have been politically magical, saving us in national and local elections, entering the White House and imbuing our morals with a unique sort of fortitude that is seen as a superpower. But that quality has also accounted for how we’ve marveled at how black women can magically disappear under our noses, too, suggesting that their other superpower is invisibility.
But no more. Both biographical and anthropological, Cottom’s “Thick” demystifies that magic by showing us that society is actually responsible for the magic act by giving us the tools and a set of lenses to examine the interior lives and minds of black women. It’s confessional, sympathetic, indignant and strong work, with Cottom never pleading for sympathy as she talks about the lopsided standards that come with navigating bars, academia, beauty standards, Obama, sex and white people. She does, however, make it clear that all these fixed standards need to change.
In the second chapter, “In the Name of Beauty,” Cottom writes, “Ugly is everything done to you in the name of beauty” — a statement that could serve as the book’s hypothesis. That chapter unpacks beauty standards through the politicized lens of white feminism and democracy, male complicity and permission, and how she sees herself in it all. “Thick” has many moments like this, where Cottom, an essayist and professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University by trade, makes points about society’s various gatekeepers and the harm they have in the power to open, close and destroy lives.
“Dying to Be Competent,” an essay that tackles the racialized aspects of the American health care system from a statistical and personal perspective, is the book’s centerpiece. Dissecting the data with a cultural scalpel, Cottom recounts her pregnancy at the hands of a medical system that fatally dismissed her pain. Her miscarriage, also excerpted in a Time essay, joins the data: “When she died, my daughter and I became statistics.”
The chapter reads like both a medical and existential crisis; Cottom’s story is about not just disbelief in black women’s pain, but also their capacity for self-advocacy at large. “The assumption of black women’s incompetence — we cannot know ourselves, express ourselves in a way that the context will render legible, or that prompts people with power to see us as agentic beings,” Cottom shares, “... supersedes even the most powerful status cultures.” “Status” is a point “Thick” revisits in ways that aren’t going to comfort you. Rather, it will likely embarrass you.
As historically positioned tenders, workers and saviors of America’s literal and figurative households, black women have strangely been rendered absent from much of the country’s advocacy and representation conversations. “Thick” then feels like Cottom’s attempt to rectify that dynamic by pushing for opportunities to examine how America’s mythological meritocracy system — that ensnares everything from our sexual mores (“Girlhood, Interrupted”) to who gets the public platform to debate and shape our culture (“Girl 6”) — becomes an arbitrary rationalization for why we don’t meaningfully include black women in public policy, discourse, academia and politics. It also adds itself to a growing body of work alongside recent black thought contemplations like “Heavy” and “There Will Be No Miracles Here,” which also look at how sliding definitions of power, politics and purpose are often thwarted by systems, often led and incentivized by the white majority, to leave groups like black Americans scrambling to find their footing.
“Thick” feels timely not only because of rising stories like Kamala Harris’ run for the White House or Michelle Obama’s “Becoming.” But it also should lend some guilt and re-examination of how we let the stories of Sandra Bland or Cyntoia Brown fall in and out of the public conscience. As a result, “Thick” is all these women and more, as well as a reminder that for all their magic, black women deserve to no longer be hidden figures.