Thick: And Other Essays

Tressie McMillan Cottom’s Thick: And Other Essays (2019) is a collection of personal essays that explore race, gender, and class in the US. McMillan Cottom is a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an influential public intellectual whose writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Slate, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. Thick situates McMillan Cottom’s personal experiences within sociological and structural analysis to link her experiences to the experiences of Black women more broadly.

Plot Summary

The first essay, “Thick,” explores how Black women and girls are understood, treated, and disadvantaged by a society that systematically undervalues Black females. The term “thick” references curvier or plus-size bodies, but it is also a method of sociological inquiry that centers lived experience and extensive description. “In the Name of Beauty” explores how beauty is linked to “Whiteness.” Beauty is a cultural concept that values White culture at the expense of Black culture. “Dying to Be Competent” turns to how the expertise of Black women is undermined. McMillan Cottom uses her own experience of losing a child as an entry point into a larger exploration of structural inequality and how perceptions of incompetence are used against Black women.