Tressie McMillan Cottom Quotes

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.

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. I refuse them.

We work. Lord do black girls and black women work. 4 We start work early before it is paid work. Then we start paid work and most of us never stop, are unable to ever stop. We work to keep churches financially viable, 5 black colleges in business, 6 black families functioning, 7 black politics respectable, 8 and black men alive. 9

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.

In sociology, we often refer to black people who are in the United States but who are not descendants of either the enslaved or, later, of those who experienced the Great Migration as “black ethnics.” It is a complicated term because it implies that black Americans do not have an ethnicity.

It is the industrial complex of cosmetics, enhancements and services that promise individual women beauty. The idea that Big Beauty is evil but good men are nice is part of Big Beauty’s systematic charm. Big Beauty is just negging without the slimy actor. The constant destabilization of self is part and parcel of beauty’s effectiveness as a social construct. When a woman must consume the tastes of her social position to keep it, but cannot control the tastes that define said position, she is suspended in a state of being negged. A good man need only then to come along and capitalize on the moment of negging, exploit the value of negged women, and consume the beauty that negs. It is really quite neat, if you think about it.

Such is the foolishness of wanting to be competent in a political economy that can only sell you ways to feel competent, but does not offer sufficient ways to enact competency.

I was just a black girl, a little long in the tooth, but still in my mind just a black girl writing. Black girls do not cause problems for powerful white women or august professional publications or public discourse. 3 Black girls have not, for most of my understanding of our history in this nation, had the power to cause those kinds of problems. Black girls and black women are problems. That is not the same thing as causing problems. We are social issues to be solved, economic problems to be balanced, and emotional baggage to be overcome.

Being structurally incompetent injects friction into every interaction, between people, and between people and organizations, and between organizations and ideologies. Frictionless living is the promise of neoliberal capital — that is, if you are on the winning side of power. But when black women in the United States are dying trying to give birth and their babies are dying trying to get born, not simply because of poverty but because the grotesque accumulation of capital in the West is predicated on our structural incompetence, then we can see the ends of hypercapitalism in daily life.

Whiteness exists as a response to blackness. Whiteness is a violent sociocultural regime legitimized by property to always make clear who is black by fastidiously delineating who is officially white. It would stand to reason that beauty’s ultimate function is to exclude blackness. That beauty also violently conditions white women and symbolically precludes the existence of gender nonconforming people is a bonus.

When beauty is white and I am dark, it means that I am more likely to be punished in school, to receive higher sentences for crimes, less likely to marry, and less likely to marry someone with equal or higher economic status.16 Denying these empirical realities is its own kind of violence, even when our intentions are good. 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.

Those of us who know our whites know one thing above all else: whiteness defends itself. Against change, against progress, against hope, against black dignity, against black lives, against reason, against truth, against facts, against native claims, against its own laws and customs.

black women are 243 percent more likely to die from pregnancy- or childbirth-related causes that are white women.

We were respectable.13 We went to church and paid tithes and wore slips and we drank but had the good sense to be ashamed that we did.

...we find that what black feminists promised all along was true: to know the most present marginalized oppressions is to know the future.