Thick: And Other Essays

Before I was a real academic, I was a black woman and before I was a black woman I was a black girl. I was a certain kind of black girl. I am the only child of an only child who was the child of a woman whose grandparents had been touched by slavery. We are southern, almost pedestrianly so. We are the people who went north to Harlem but not west to

I learned, watching my mother, that there was a price we had to pay to signal to gatekeepers that we were worthy of engaging. It meant dressing well and speaking well. It might not work. It likely wouldn’t work, but on the off chance that it would, you had to try.

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.

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.

White women, especially white feminists, need me to lean in to pseudoreligious consumerist teachings that beauty is democratic and achievable. Beauty must be democratic. If it is not, then beauty becomes a commodity, distributed unequally and, even worse, at random.

We do not share much in the U.S. culture of individualism except our delusions about meritocracy.

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.

Our so-called counternarratives about beauty and what they demand of us cannot be divorced from the fact that beauty is contingent upon capitalism. Even our resistance becomes a means to commodify, and what is commodified is always, always stratified. There is simply no other way. To coerce, beauty must exclude.

More often than not the hierarchy of diffuse status characteristics overpowers any status characteristics that we earn.