Top 15 Tressie McMillan Cottom Quotes

Beauty is not good capital. I compounds the oppression of gender. It constrains those who identify as women against their will. It costs money and demands money. It colonizes. It hurts. It is painful. It can never be fully satisfied. It is not useful for human flourishing. Beauty is, like all capital, merely valuable.

They say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and that ugly is as ugly does. Both are lies. Ugly is everything done to you in the name of beauty. Knowing the difference is part of getting free.

Smart is only a construct of correspondence, between one’s abilities, one’s environment, and one’s moment in history.

I hate small talk. It is small. Small is for teacups and occasionally for tiny houses. Too much small talk is how a country is given to sociopaths who thrive on shallow chatter to distract their emotional sleight of hand. Talk should be meaningful or kept to a minimum.

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

Being too much of one thing and not enough of another had been a recurring theme in my life. I was, like many young women, expected to be small so that boys could expand and white girls could shine.

When I would not shrink, people made sure that I knew I had erred.

Beauty isn't actually what you look like; beauty is the preferences that reproduce the existing social order.

I am living in the most opportune time in black history in the United States and that means, still, that I will die younger, live poorer, risk more exposure to police violence, and be punished by social policy for being a black woman in ways that aren’t true for almost any other group in this nation. That is the best it has ever been to be black in America and it is still that statistically bad at the macro level.

I fix myself, even when it causes great pain to do so, because I know that I cannot fix the way the world sees me.

Black girlhood ends whenever a man says it ends.

But if I believe that I can become beautiful, I become an economic subject. My desire becomes a marker.

[to know your whites] ... is to be intimate with some white persons but to critically withhold faith in white people categorically

White women need me to believe I can earn beauty, because when I want what I cannot have, what they have becomes all the more valuable.

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?

In a modern society, who is allowed to speak with authority is a political act.