Tressie McMillan Cottom Quotes

My first black president seems to think that he could raise his daughters to believe in systemic racism without legitimizing the idea of systemic reparations. He thinks that he can be his brother’s keeper without changing the policies, laws, and investments that keep his brothers in bad jobs, in poor neighborhoods, with bad educational options, and at the bottom of the social hierarchy. My first black president seems to think he can have black cool without black burden. For all his intimacies with his white mother and white grandparents, my first black president doesn’t appear to know his whites.

In one sense, it seems obvious why credentials matter. Median weekly earnings for full-time workers with a master’s degree are $1,380, while someone with only a high school diploma can expect to earn just under $700/week.

Indeed, any system of oppression must allow exceptions to validate itself as meritorious. How else will those who are oppressed by the system internalize their own oppression?

Perhaps our planet is for learning to appreciate the extraordinary wonder of life that surrounds even our suffering, and to say Yes, if through the thickest of tears. — Alice Walker, from the foreword to Zora Neale
Hurston’s Barracoon

He means what kind of special negro are you?

As I have argued elsewhere in this volume, whiteness has the political power to be elastic. Originating as it does not from nation or kin but from the primordial ooze of capitalism, whiteness can only be defined by state power.

But I have never wanted to only tell powerfully evocative stories. I have wanted to tell evocative stories that become a problem for power. For that, I draw upon data and research.

Decades before I valued myself enough to be careful for myself, I was careful so that my mother would not worry.

Controlling images were never just about the object of study — popular culture memes or characters from movies and television shows — but about the process of reproducing structural inequalities in our everyday lives. Social psychologists study how we acknowledge and reproduce status groups like “man,” “woman,” “black,” “white,” “Asian,” “poor,” “rich,” “novice,” and “expert” in routine interactions. These are statuses of people that we recognize as meaningful categories. When we interact with someone, a few things happen. We size up the person we are engaging with, scanning for any risks to our own social status. You don’t want to be the person who mistakes the company president for the janitor, for example. We also scan others’ perception of us. This is how all kinds of impromptu moments of cooperation make our day go smoothly. It’s the guy who sees you struggling to get something on the bus and coordinates the four people around you to help you get on. Or it’s the three women in a fast food line who all grab for a baby’s bottle just before it hits the floor. We cooperate in micromoments and in longer settings like the waiting room of a doctor’s office. And, when we are cooperating with strangers or near strangers, we are using all kinds of ideas about status to make the interaction work to our benefit.

The farther away you move from our dominant assumptions about who should have expertise, generally speaking, the more you have to prove that you have a legitimate claim to whatever you're speaking on. For black women that means we're dealing with racist ideas and stereotypes about who's knowledge is valuable, but we're also dealing with gender stereotypes about who should be allowed to speak and to lead…

Throughout the public discussions about “white people calling the cops on black people who are just living” is the idea that black people were, in almost all of these cases, buying something. Or they had rightfully bought something: a house, a meal, a cup of coffee. People made many appeals to the right of consumption. Americans have the right to buy! It is a tenuous right indicative of our consumer society. Being a consumer, or not, should not condition your civil rights. That kind of thinking is how we end up with cruel policies that police where homeless people can sit in public or where poor people can stand without violating an ordinance.

What we forget, if we ever knew, is that what we know now about status and wealth creation and sacrifice are predicated on who we are — that is, not poor.

If you change the conditions of your not-poor status, you change everything you know as a result of being a not-poor. You have no idea what you would do if you were poor until you are poor. And not intermittently poor or formerly not-poor, but born poor, expected to be poor, and treated by bureaucracies, gatekeepers, and well-meaning respectability authorities as inherently poor. Then, and only then, will you understand the relative value of a ridiculous status symbol to someone who intuits that they cannot afford to not have it.

Much as we interrogate what a woman was wearing when she was raped, we look for ways to assign personal responsibility for structural injustices to bodies we collectively do not value.

"To get the "healthcare" promised by the healthcare bureaucracy, it helps tremendously if the bureaucracy assumes that you are competent. When I called the nurse and said that I was bleeding and in pain, the nurse needed to hear that a competent person was on the phone in order to process my problem for the crisis that it was. Instead, something about me and the interaction did not read as competent. That is why I was left in a general waiting room when I arrived, rather than being rushed to a private room with the equipment necessary to treat a pregnancy crisis."

When I say that I am unattractive or ugly, I am not internalizing the dominant culture’s assessment of me. I am naming what has been done to me. And signaling who did it.