A thought on Thicke by Tressie Mcmillan Cottom
https://www.theliftedbrow.com/liftedbrow/2019/11/8/thick-an-interview-with-tressie-mcmillan-cottom-by-nayuka-gorrie
“Graduate students are not people. In the academic hierarchy graduate students are units of labor. They can be students, but not just students they are academics in the making”
Tressie McMillan Cottom, in Thick: And other Essays
As someone who just submitted his graduate school applications, I truly wonder how this will impact me. Will I become just another pawn of the very tower, or will I craft my own academic adventure. I am not too thrilled in being anyones labor class, but I find the teaching aspect of graduate work does truly excite me. and lord knows I am no stranger to alot of work. But like many teachers across the country this call to teach comes with crappy benefits, lower pay, and alot of stress. The economy needs to shift towards teachers because I think we are the biggest fighters of “democracy”. I also am realizing that I will soon have to embed myself within a discipline, within a methodology, and within a specific canon. A canon that is probably, pardon my french, white asf and in no way caters to the specificity of blackness. There are numerous ways in which I will have to fix my feet as Tressie McMillan Cottom states. Despite my politics and protests, I may once again play the respectability game. Learn to be less militant, less deviant if you would.
Reading Tressie McMillan Cottom and hearing about her accomplishments make me both excited and scared to pursue graduate school. I would love to be published by my third year in graduate school, but I have not been able to find my groove yet. I am still growing not my voice. Still learning to flex this liberatory muscle. I just finished the color purple and once again I am in awe of the accomplishments that Black people have made since enslavement. Words, letter, and literacy, are all tools of the fugitive. Tools that help one escape, and in Ms. Seele’s case tools to help one resists and walk away from domestic violence. I remember growing up hating to read. Reading felt like a chore, and it wasn’t until college that. My love for reading truly grew. Ms. Steele was right when she said I should’ve majored in English, but it scared me honestly. I still have never taken an English class that was strictly literature. I think that writing scares me. I’ve been slowly getting over it with my thesis, but overall I know that writing is where I need to be. The academy is where I want to be. Where I want to joyfully disrupt through studying the black radical tradition and through studying the pedagogy of black culture.
“Ugly is everything that happens to you in the name of beauty” (72)
After reading her entire book, I am so thankful to Tressie Mcmillan Cottom for using the personal essay style as a way to talk about a legal concept like whiteness and a philosophical concept like beauty. She also exposes the violence of gender from her positionality as a Black woman who grew up in an era where meritocracy and medical racism were normalized violence. Cottom shows that beauty is political, that beauty is violent, and that “beauty’s ultimately functions to exclude blackness.” She disconnects beauty from the concept of attraction and exposes it for the social construction that it truly is. A social construction that is tethered to whiteness, fat phobia, and capital.
