Tressie McMillan Cottom Quotes

When I write, I am fixing my feet. I am claiming the ethos, or moral authority, to influence public discourse. And I am defying every expectation when I do it.

Smart is only a construct of correspondence between one's abilities, one's environment, and one's moment in history. I am smart in the right way, in the right time, on the right end of globalization.

...I had also parsed that there was something powerful about blondness, thinness, flatness, and gaps between thighs. And that power was the context against which all others defined themselves... beauty isn’t actually what you look like; beauty is the preference that reproduce the existing social order.

When we perform some existential service to men, to capital, to political power, to white women, and even to other “people of color” who are marginally closer to white than they are to black, then we are superwomen. 7 We are fulfilling our purpose in the natural order of things. When, instead, black women are strong in service of themselves, that same strength, wisdom, and wit become evidence of our incompetence.

Trump’s election could be seen as white voters reclaiming this nation as theirs

I am, by most measures, pretty smart. My grandmother was smarter. She was do-the-Times-crossword-in-pen smart.

That is because beauty isn’t actually what you look like; beauty is the preferences that reproduce the existing social order.

Black women have worked hard to write a counternarrative of our worth in a global system where beauty is the only legitimate capital allowed women without legal, political, and economic challenge. That last bit is important. Beauty is not good capital. It 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.13

Our dominant story of beauty is that it is simultaneously a blessing, of genetics or gods, and a site of conversion. You can become beautiful if you accept the right prophets and their wisdoms with a side of products thrown in for good measure. Forget that these two ideas — unique blessing and earned reward — are antithetical to each other. That makes beauty all the more perfect for our (social and political) time, itself anchored in paradoxes like freedom and property, opportunity and equality.

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.

The real criticism was directed at her turn to slavery: “back in the slave days I would’ve never been single. I am six feet tall and I am strong! I’m just saying back in the slave days my love life would have been way better. Massa would’ve hooked me up with the best brother on the plantation.” It hurts to watch the video.

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.

The things we touch and smell and see and experience through our senses are how stories become powerful. 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.

... I try really hard not to write dumb things. I cannot speak for Mr. Brooks.

"When people talk about for-profit colleges, they often do so with a lot of disdain. If traditional colleges that take in a fraction of willing students every year annoy you, then you might be disdainful of their "prestige cartel." If you are concerned about vulnerable people making expensive educational decisions with little education, then you might disdain the "predatory" for-profit schools. If you think that a strong work ethic can trump all manner of troubles, you might disdain the "weak" people who go to a "predatory" school. What is interesting to me is how much disdain is spread among students and schools and how little disdain there is for labor markets."