Thick: And Other Essays by Tressie McMillan Cottom (2018)
Thick: And Other Essays by Tressie McMillan Cottom (2018)
Thick
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. 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 In all of our working we can sometimes work the wrong way. That is what I was doing. I was working the wrong way… for a black woman who did not want to become a problem.
At the time, I was far too hurt to understand what the sister in the academic conference hall was telling me. When you are vulnerable and on the losing end of a power dynamic, all you can hear of that kind of direct, unsolicited feedback is how-despite all of your hard work-you are still doing everything wrong. But I have thought a lot about that moment and all the moments that have shaped what kind of thinker I have become. That is what this book is about (10-11).
Black women writers spoke up about the personal essay. For them, it was the only point of access for telling the creative stories of empirical realities. Latinas said the same. Queer women and trans women and all manner of women stepped forward to add dimensions to what the personal essay form is and what it is assumed to be.
The personal essay was an economic problem and a social problem dressed up as a cultural taste problem (17).
The personal essay had become the way that black women writers claim legitimacy in a public discourse that defines itself, in part, by how well it excludes black women. In a modern society, who is allowed to speak with authority is a political act. Of course, all U.S. citizens are allowed to speak. We have an entire amendment guaranteeing us this right with notable exclusions like hate speech and prisoners, who can be arbitrarily denied speech by the State. But not all of us are presumed by the publics to which we belong to have the right to speak authoritatively. Speech becomes rhetoric, or a persuasive form of speech, only when the one speaking can make a legitimate claim to some form of authority. It can be moral authority or legal authority or rational authority. At every turn, black women have been categorically excluded from being expert performers of persuasive speech acts in the public that adjudicates our humanity (18-9).
In a modern capitalist society, what is moral is often determined by what has economic value.16
As social and economic subjects in this system, we ad hoc ascribe morality to all kinds of capital and status that reifies social categories that exclude black women by definition: wealth, high income, professional status, marriageability, religious leadership, beauty (20).
Where black women have excelled is in the pursuit of legal authority, or the technical qualifications of social status. We go to school. We will, on average, go to all the school that the constraints on our time and money will allow us (20).
Even outside that narrow purview of professionalization, though, black women strive for forms of professional status. We start businesses at surprisingly high rates given how little family wealth we have to draw on or social networks we have to support us. We perform phenomenally high rates of community service and lay leadership in churches, schools, and civic organizations. We are, it could be argued, professional professionals. In public discourse, our aspirations and achievements in professions should translate into the right to speak authoritatively on something. On anything. On politics. On economics. On sports. On education. On climate science. On urbanization. At the very least on our own lives.
But, as Stacia L. Brown points out in her essay on how and why black women writers find themselves hewn to the personal essay genre, black women find that no amount of pathos, logos, or ethos includes them in the civic sphere of public discourse and persuasion. We do not have enough authority, as judged by the audiences and gatekeepers who decide to whom we should listen, to speak on much of anything. 17 For us, the personal essay genre became a contested point of entry into a low-margin form of public discourse where we could at least appeal to the politics of white feminist inclusion for nominal representation. We were writing personal essays because as far as authoritative voices go, the self was the only subject men and white people would cede to us.
We had learned or have always known that we cannot change the public, and we cannot change the minds of those on whom we rely to grant us the audience that confers moral authority to speak in public (21-2).
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 (26).
In the Name of Beauty
All girls in high school have self-esteem issues. And most girls compare themselves to unattainable, unrealistic physical ideals. That is not what I am talking about. That is the violence of gender that happens to all of us in slightly different ways. I am talking about a kind of capital. It is not just the preferences of a too-tall boy, but the way authority validates his preferences as normal. I had high school boyfriends. I had a social circle. I had evidence that I was valuable in certain contexts. But 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. That was beauty. And while few young women in high school could say they felt like they lived up to beauty, only the non-white girls could never be beautiful. That is because beauty isn’t actually what you look like; beauty is the preferences that reproduce the existing social order (43-4).
When white feminists catalogue how beauty standards over time have changed, from the “curvier” Marilyn Monroe to the skeletal Twiggy to the synthetic-athletic Pamela Anderson, their archetypes belie beauty’s true function: whiteness. 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 (44-5).
As long as the beautiful people are white, what is beautiful at any given time can be renegotiated without redistributing capital from white to nonwhite people (45).
We have yet to make strides toward fleshing out a theory of desirability, the desire to be desired, in black feminist theory or politics (51).
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? (52)
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
Because it is valuable, black women have said that we are beautiful too. We have traveled the cultural imaginations of the world’s nonwhite people assembling a beauty construct that does not exclude us. We create culture about our beauty. We negotiate with black men to legitimize our beauty. We try to construct something that feels like liberation in an inherently oppressive regime, balancing peace with our marginally more privileged lighter-skinned black women while refuting the global caste status of darker-skinned black women. Some of us try to include multiple genders and politics in our definition of beauty. This kind of work requires discursive loyalty. We must name it and claim it, because naming is about the only unilateral power we have.
When I say that I am unattractive, concede that I am ugly, the antithesis of beauty, I sound like I am internalizing a white standard of beauty that black women fight hard to rise above. But my truth is quite the opposite. When oppressed people become complicit in their oppression, joining the dominant class in their ideas about what we are, it is symbolic violence. Like all concepts, symbolic violence has a context that is important for using it to mean what we intend to mean. It is not just that internalizing the values of the dominant class violently stigmatizes us. Symbolic violence only makes sense if we accept its priors: all preferences in imperial, industrialized societies are shaped by the economic system. There aren’t any “good” preferences. There are only preferences that are validated by others, differently, based on social contexts.
These contexts should not just be reduced to race, class, and gender, as important as those are. Institutions that legitimize the “right” ideas and behaviors also matter. That’s why beauty can never be about preference. “I just like what I like” is always a capitalist lie. Beauty would be a useless concept for capital if it were only a preference in the purest sense. Capital demands that beauty be coercive. If beauty matters at all to how people perceive you, how institutions treat you, which rules are applied to you, and what choices you can make, then beauty must also be a structure of patterns, institutions, and exchanges that eats your preferences for lunch.
Internalizing your inferiority is violent. Psychologically it cleaves you in two, what W.E.B. DuBois famously called the double veil. As our science becomes more advanced, we find that the violence may even show up in our bodies as stress (55-8).
...the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing us that he does not exist. That is why naming is political. 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. Exclusion can be part of a certain kind of liberation, where one dominant regime is overthrown for another, but it cannot be universal (58-9).
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 (59).
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. This is a notion often ascribed to a type of feminism, be it neoliberal feminism, marketplace feminism, or consumption feminism (60-1).
Beauty is a wonderful form of capital in a world that organizes everything around gender and then requires a performance of gender that makes some of its members more equal than others.
Beauty would not be such a useful distinction were it not for the economic and political conditions. It is trite at this point to point out capitalism, which is precisely why it must be pointed out. Systems of exchange tend to generate the kind of ideas that work well as exchanges. Because it can be an idea and a good and a body, beauty serves many useful functions for our economic system. Even better, beauty can be political. It can exclude and include, one of the basic conditions of any politics. Beauty has it all. It can be political, economic, external, individualized, generalizing, exclusionary, and perhaps best of all a story that can be told. 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 (62). 14
14. Beauty has an attendant religious doctrine, perfected through white western women who are its ideal consumers and site of what we sociologists call prosumption, the new-economy exchange where market actors simultaneously produce and consume monetized cultural forms. We are consumers when we buy a smartphone. We become prosumers when the data we transact through our smartphones produces a new product or idea or consumer good. We co-create goods with those who own its value at our expense. That is prosumption. The elegance of our appified, digitally mediated, late-stage capitalism is that producing beauty feels empowering and obscures how we are also consuming beauty produced by others. When I said that I was unattractive, I violated a prime directive of gender that, if I were allowed to do without penalty, undermines the ideology of beauty. Challengers pushed me on the value of my “inner beauty,” which is the kind that can be achieved through the conspicuous consumption of the right books, right media, and right makeup.
Big Beauty-the structure of who can be beautiful, the stories we tell about beauty, the value we assign beauty, the power given to those with beauty, the disciplining effect of the fear of losing beauty you might possess-definitionally excludes the kind of blackness I carry in my history and my bones. Beauty is for white women, if not for all white women. If beauty is to matter at all for capital, it can never be for black women.
But if I believe that I can become beautiful, I become an economic subject. My desire becomes a market. And my faith becomes a salve for the white women who want to have the right politics while keeping the privilege of never having to live them. 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.
I also refuse the men. Oh, the men. I wish I could save this for another essay that I would promise to write but never do. Women’s desire for beauty is a powerful weapon for exploitation. Even if the desire is natural, in that it is rational and also subconsciously coercive, open wanting against a backdrop of predatory constructs of cross-gender interactions is dangerous for women. There is an entire industry of men, self-proclaimed pickup artists, who sell their strategies for landing women. One of the most common techniques involves begging (65-6).
Good men love to mock pickup artists and negging as evidence of their goodness. But good men also consume beauty, contributing much to its value. Without good men, the socio-cultural institution of Big Beauty could not be as powerful as it is.
Big Beauty encompasses the norms that shape desirable traits in a romantic partner but also acceptable presentations of women in work, at play, and in public. 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 (67-8).
Repeatedly people have said to me in their own way, from within their own stratified statuses, that I need to believe I am beautiful or can become beautiful-not for my own benefit, but because it serves so many others. I reject the implicit bid for solidarity from every single white woman and I reject every overture from a man who wants to convince me that I am beautiful. I want nice people with nice-enough politics to look at me, reason for themselves that I am worthy, and feel convicted when the world does not agree. God willing they may one day extrapolate my specific case to the general rule, seeing the way oppression marginalizes others to their personal benefit (70-1).
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 (72).
Black Girlhood, Interrupted
The thing I remember most about reading for black girlhood was that the easiest way to locate the girl in a story about a woman was to search for the sexual trauma. It was always there: a dirty uncle, a mother’s new husband, a dotty brother, a mean boy at school, a nasty white man, any nasty man. Being raped, molested, “touched” seemed to be the one thing, other than Jim Crow and beauty salons and spirituals, that hung black womanhood together (176).
What wasn’t complicated was what it meant that I was a wife. He had not made it to the wedding. We had eloped, which should have told me something that I was too distracted to notice. This was his first look at my husband. They bonded over their shared careers in television. Pleased, my dad turned to me and said, “Just so you know, if he ever beats you, I won’t just take your word for it. There are two sides to every story.” To my mind, husband beating and husband raping are right next to each other on the Richter scale of fucked- up things men you trust can do to you. I took it to mean what my cousin once meant- black girlhood ends whenever a man says it ends.
Two sides to every story. Almost ready. She a ho.
Those are the kind of comments I have heard hundreds, if not thousands, of times, from men and women, to excuse violence against black women and girls. If one is “ready” for what a man wants from her, then by merely existing she has consented to his treatment of her. Puberty becomes permission.
All women in our culture are subject to this kind of violence, when people judge their bodies to decide if they deserve abuse. But for black women and girls, that treatment is specific to our history as much as it is about today’s context. New research corroborates what black women have long known: people across gender and race see black girls as more adultlike than their white peers. In her book Pushout, Monique W. Morris shows that teachers and administrators don’t give black girls the care and protection they need. Left to navigate school by themselves because they are “grown,” these girls are easily manipulated by men. 3
The presumption of childhood is not only that you are off-limits to adult desires, but that should an adult violate you, the penalties will account for your structural innocence. But, for black girls, the presumption of innocence is gossamer, at best. One of the few surveys of public attitudes about black girls was conducted in 2014.4 The majority of those surveyed said that black girls need less protection and nurturing than white girls. Being perceived as grown comes with consequences even when you are not yet an adult.
Those consequences are far-reaching. When a black girl is perceived by those in her immediate social sphere as “ready,” the legal system reinforces that she was ready when it sees her through the expectations of an adult. And we know how little concern the legal system has for women who report sexual assault. Women have the burden of proving not only their assault, but that they did not deserve to be assaulted. The former is bad enough. How do you prove the penetration was forced in the hours after you are emotionally traumatized? Or that you weren’t drunk or high? Or that you said no before he started but not while he was “finishing”? 5
Women have found it nearly impossible to meet the burden of proof. But what if you have proof of violence on your body but the protocols for seeing them systematically erase them? That is the potential of domestic violence protocols that rely on photographic evidence to corroborate a woman’s claim in court. The cameras used in criminal domestic violence cases are supposed to document the bruises thought typical of getting one’s ass beaten. In a quest to be “evidence-based,” a nurse is only allowed to call a spot on a battered woman’s body a bruise if it can be seen with the naked eye. What if your skin is too dark to show the bruises that the police often require to believe that you were abused? 6 For black women, a camera designed not to see our abuse becomes a protocol that will only label such spots “dark.”
There are many what-ifs for women to prove that they have been sexually assaulted. And each of them fails most women, but they fail black women as if by design. Like the cameras that cannot see and the protocols that will not name, the what-ifs just barely work when the woman involved has the possibility of innocence. That is something black women rarely have, and black girls are thrust into that structural vulnerability younger than their non-black peers.
When adults say that black girls, not yet adults, are more knowledgeable about sex than their white female peers, they are saying that a girl child is responsible for all the desires that adults project onto her. She does not need the protection of childhood, for she has never been a child. This system of neglect and abuse is mostly ignored in social and education policy, because the violence is often sexual and it happens to girls whom society views as disposable. We rarely focus on how programs are failing black women and girls, or how we could intervene to help (183-7).
Sexual violence against black girls and women has, until very recently, been hidden in the statistics about “women” writ large. In many ways, those stores are similar. We are most vulnerable to the men in our homes. We are taught to blame ourselves. We fear reprisal for speaking up. But black women and girls face additional burdens of protecting the reputations of black boys and men. As black feminists have argued, that burden has trapped us in cultural silences that a focus on gender violence alone cannot capture.
People of color are similarly hypervigilant when we navigate a white social world. We screen our jokes, our laughter, our emotions, and our baggage. We constantly manage complex social interactions so we are not fired, isolated, misunderstood, miscast, or murdered. We can come home, if we’re lucky enough to have a home, and turn off that setting. We often do, as I once did, look for versions of ourselves in literature and pop culture.
But for black girls, home is both refuge and where your most intimate betrayals happen. You cannot turn off that setting. It is the dining room at your family’s house, served with a side of your uncle’s famous ribs. Home is where they love you until you’re a ho (192-3).
Girl 6
In media as in higher education, we need to believe that all publications matter. And they do, to someone somewhere. But, for good or for ill, elite publications are still a thing. I am very amenable to the idea that perhaps they should not be a thing. But wishing don’t make it so. Reality matters.
The reality is that for writers, there are few gigs as good as those at publications where they have the freedom and protection to write well. Writing well takes research assistance, editorial expertise, copyeditors, lunch breaks, fresh air, desk space, peers, and LexisNexis subscriptions. Writing is democratic. Writing well is not.
You know who knows this is true? Writers at nonprestige publications. They love their freedom. They may love their publication’s mission. But I know a lot of writers, and few of them would agree that their work would not benefit from the kind of wealth that accompanies the prestige of the publications that we all complain about (208).
Thick
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. 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 In all of our working we can sometimes work the wrong way. That is what I was doing. I was working the wrong way… for a black woman who did not want to become a problem.
At the time, I was far too hurt to understand what the sister in the academic conference hall was telling me. When you are vulnerable and on the losing end of a power dynamic, all you can hear of that kind of direct, unsolicited feedback is how-despite all of your hard work-you are still doing everything wrong. But I have thought a lot about that moment and all the moments that have shaped what kind of thinker I have become. That is what this book is about (10-11).
Black women writers spoke up about the personal essay. For them, it was the only point of access for telling the creative stories of empirical realities. Latinas said the same. Queer women and trans women and all manner of women stepped forward to add dimensions to what the personal essay form is and what it is assumed to be.
The personal essay was an economic problem and a social problem dressed up as a cultural taste problem (17).
The personal essay had become the way that black women writers claim legitimacy in a public discourse that defines itself, in part, by how well it excludes black women. In a modern society, who is allowed to speak with authority is a political act. Of course, all U.S. citizens are allowed to speak. We have an entire amendment guaranteeing us this right with notable exclusions like hate speech and prisoners, who can be arbitrarily denied speech by the State. But not all of us are presumed by the publics to which we belong to have the right to speak authoritatively. Speech becomes rhetoric, or a persuasive form of speech, only when the one speaking can make a legitimate claim to some form of authority. It can be moral authority or legal authority or rational authority. At every turn, black women have been categorically excluded from being expert performers of persuasive speech acts in the public that adjudicates our humanity (18-9).
In a modern capitalist society, what is moral is often determined by what has economic value.16
As social and economic subjects in this system, we ad hoc ascribe morality to all kinds of capital and status that reifies social categories that exclude black women by definition: wealth, high income, professional status, marriageability, religious leadership, beauty (20).
Where black women have excelled is in the pursuit of legal authority, or the technical qualifications of social status. We go to school. We will, on average, go to all the school that the constraints on our time and money will allow us (20).
Even outside that narrow purview of professionalization, though, black women strive for forms of professional status. We start businesses at surprisingly high rates given how little family wealth we have to draw on or social networks we have to support us. We perform phenomenally high rates of community service and lay leadership in churches, schools, and civic organizations. We are, it could be argued, professional professionals. In public discourse, our aspirations and achievements in professions should translate into the right to speak authoritatively on something. On anything. On politics. On economics. On sports. On education. On climate science. On urbanization. At the very least on our own lives.
But, as Stacia L. Brown points out in her essay on how and why black women writers find themselves hewn to the personal essay genre, black women find that no amount of pathos, logos, or ethos includes them in the civic sphere of public discourse and persuasion. We do not have enough authority, as judged by the audiences and gatekeepers who decide to whom we should listen, to speak on much of anything. 17 For us, the personal essay genre became a contested point of entry into a low-margin form of public discourse where we could at least appeal to the politics of white feminist inclusion for nominal representation. We were writing personal essays because as far as authoritative voices go, the self was the only subject men and white people would cede to us.
We had learned or have always known that we cannot change the public, and we cannot change the minds of those on whom we rely to grant us the audience that confers moral authority to speak in public (21-2).
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 (26).
In the Name of Beauty
All girls in high school have self-esteem issues. And most girls compare themselves to unattainable, unrealistic physical ideals. That is not what I am talking about. That is the violence of gender that happens to all of us in slightly different ways. I am talking about a kind of capital. It is not just the preferences of a too-tall boy, but the way authority validates his preferences as normal. I had high school boyfriends. I had a social circle. I had evidence that I was valuable in certain contexts. But 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. That was beauty. And while few young women in high school could say they felt like they lived up to beauty, only the non-white girls could never be beautiful. That is because beauty isn’t actually what you look like; beauty is the preferences that reproduce the existing social order (43-4).
When white feminists catalogue how beauty standards over time have changed, from the “curvier” Marilyn Monroe to the skeletal Twiggy to the synthetic-athletic Pamela Anderson, their archetypes belie beauty’s true function: whiteness. 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 (44-5).
As long as the beautiful people are white, what is beautiful at any given time can be renegotiated without redistributing capital from white to nonwhite people (45).
We have yet to make strides toward fleshing out a theory of desirability, the desire to be desired, in black feminist theory or politics (51).
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? (52)
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
Because it is valuable, black women have said that we are beautiful too. We have traveled the cultural imaginations of the world’s nonwhite people assembling a beauty construct that does not exclude us. We create culture about our beauty. We negotiate with black men to legitimize our beauty. We try to construct something that feels like liberation in an inherently oppressive regime, balancing peace with our marginally more privileged lighter-skinned black women while refuting the global caste status of darker-skinned black women. Some of us try to include multiple genders and politics in our definition of beauty. This kind of work requires discursive loyalty. We must name it and claim it, because naming is about the only unilateral power we have.
When I say that I am unattractive, concede that I am ugly, the antithesis of beauty, I sound like I am internalizing a white standard of beauty that black women fight hard to rise above. But my truth is quite the opposite. When oppressed people become complicit in their oppression, joining the dominant class in their ideas about what we are, it is symbolic violence. Like all concepts, symbolic violence has a context that is important for using it to mean what we intend to mean. It is not just that internalizing the values of the dominant class violently stigmatizes us. Symbolic violence only makes sense if we accept its priors: all preferences in imperial, industrialized societies are shaped by the economic system. There aren’t any “good” preferences. There are only preferences that are validated by others, differently, based on social contexts.
These contexts should not just be reduced to race, class, and gender, as important as those are. Institutions that legitimize the “right” ideas and behaviors also matter. That’s why beauty can never be about preference. “I just like what I like” is always a capitalist lie. Beauty would be a useless concept for capital if it were only a preference in the purest sense. Capital demands that beauty be coercive. If beauty matters at all to how people perceive you, how institutions treat you, which rules are applied to you, and what choices you can make, then beauty must also be a structure of patterns, institutions, and exchanges that eats your preferences for lunch.
Internalizing your inferiority is violent. Psychologically it cleaves you in two, what W.E.B. DuBois famously called the double veil. As our science becomes more advanced, we find that the violence may even show up in our bodies as stress (55-8).
...the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing us that he does not exist. That is why naming is political. 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. Exclusion can be part of a certain kind of liberation, where one dominant regime is overthrown for another, but it cannot be universal (58-9).
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 (59).
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. This is a notion often ascribed to a type of feminism, be it neoliberal feminism, marketplace feminism, or consumption feminism (60-1).
Beauty is a wonderful form of capital in a world that organizes everything around gender and then requires a performance of gender that makes some of its members more equal than others.
Beauty would not be such a useful distinction were it not for the economic and political conditions. It is trite at this point to point out capitalism, which is precisely why it must be pointed out. Systems of exchange tend to generate the kind of ideas that work well as exchanges. Because it can be an idea and a good and a body, beauty serves many useful functions for our economic system. Even better, beauty can be political. It can exclude and include, one of the basic conditions of any politics. Beauty has it all. It can be political, economic, external, individualized, generalizing, exclusionary, and perhaps best of all a story that can be told. 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 (62). 14
14. Beauty has an attendant religious doctrine, perfected through white western women who are its ideal consumers and site of what we sociologists call prosumption, the new-economy exchange where market actors simultaneously produce and consume monetized cultural forms. We are consumers when we buy a smartphone. We become prosumers when the data we transact through our smartphones produces a new product or idea or consumer good. We co-create goods with those who own its value at our expense. That is prosumption. The elegance of our appified, digitally mediated, late-stage capitalism is that producing beauty feels empowering and obscures how we are also consuming beauty produced by others. When I said that I was unattractive, I violated a prime directive of gender that, if I were allowed to do without penalty, undermines the ideology of beauty. Challengers pushed me on the value of my “inner beauty,” which is the kind that can be achieved through the conspicuous consumption of the right books, right media, and right makeup.
Big Beauty-the structure of who can be beautiful, the stories we tell about beauty, the value we assign beauty, the power given to those with beauty, the disciplining effect of the fear of losing beauty you might possess-definitionally excludes the kind of blackness I carry in my history and my bones. Beauty is for white women, if not for all white women. If beauty is to matter at all for capital, it can never be for black women.
But if I believe that I can become beautiful, I become an economic subject. My desire becomes a market. And my faith becomes a salve for the white women who want to have the right politics while keeping the privilege of never having to live them. 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.
I also refuse the men. Oh, the men. I wish I could save this for another essay that I would promise to write but never do. Women’s desire for beauty is a powerful weapon for exploitation. Even if the desire is natural, in that it is rational and also subconsciously coercive, open wanting against a backdrop of predatory constructs of cross-gender interactions is dangerous for women. There is an entire industry of men, self-proclaimed pickup artists, who sell their strategies for landing women. One of the most common techniques involves begging (65-6).
Good men love to mock pickup artists and negging as evidence of their goodness. But good men also consume beauty, contributing much to its value. Without good men, the socio-cultural institution of Big Beauty could not be as powerful as it is.
Big Beauty encompasses the norms that shape desirable traits in a romantic partner but also acceptable presentations of women in work, at play, and in public. 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 (67-8).
Repeatedly people have said to me in their own way, from within their own stratified statuses, that I need to believe I am beautiful or can become beautiful-not for my own benefit, but because it serves so many others. I reject the implicit bid for solidarity from every single white woman and I reject every overture from a man who wants to convince me that I am beautiful. I want nice people with nice-enough politics to look at me, reason for themselves that I am worthy, and feel convicted when the world does not agree. God willing they may one day extrapolate my specific case to the general rule, seeing the way oppression marginalizes others to their personal benefit (70-1).
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 (72).
Black Girlhood, Interrupted
The thing I remember most about reading for black girlhood was that the easiest way to locate the girl in a story about a woman was to search for the sexual trauma. It was always there: a dirty uncle, a mother’s new husband, a dotty brother, a mean boy at school, a nasty white man, any nasty man. Being raped, molested, “touched” seemed to be the one thing, other than Jim Crow and beauty salons and spirituals, that hung black womanhood together (176).
What wasn’t complicated was what it meant that I was a wife. He had not made it to the wedding. We had eloped, which should have told me something that I was too distracted to notice. This was his first look at my husband. They bonded over their shared careers in television. Pleased, my dad turned to me and said, “Just so you know, if he ever beats you, I won’t just take your word for it. There are two sides to every story.” To my mind, husband beating and husband raping are right next to each other on the Richter scale of fucked- up things men you trust can do to you. I took it to mean what my cousin once meant- black girlhood ends whenever a man says it ends.
Two sides to every story. Almost ready. She a ho.
Those are the kind of comments I have heard hundreds, if not thousands, of times, from men and women, to excuse violence against black women and girls. If one is “ready” for what a man wants from her, then by merely existing she has consented to his treatment of her. Puberty becomes permission.
All women in our culture are subject to this kind of violence, when people judge their bodies to decide if they deserve abuse. But for black women and girls, that treatment is specific to our history as much as it is about today’s context. New research corroborates what black women have long known: people across gender and race see black girls as more adultlike than their white peers. In her book Pushout, Monique W. Morris shows that teachers and administrators don’t give black girls the care and protection they need. Left to navigate school by themselves because they are “grown,” these girls are easily manipulated by men. 3
The presumption of childhood is not only that you are off-limits to adult desires, but that should an adult violate you, the penalties will account for your structural innocence. But, for black girls, the presumption of innocence is gossamer, at best. One of the few surveys of public attitudes about black girls was conducted in 2014.4 The majority of those surveyed said that black girls need less protection and nurturing than white girls. Being perceived as grown comes with consequences even when you are not yet an adult.
Those consequences are far-reaching. When a black girl is perceived by those in her immediate social sphere as “ready,” the legal system reinforces that she was ready when it sees her through the expectations of an adult. And we know how little concern the legal system has for women who report sexual assault. Women have the burden of proving not only their assault, but that they did not deserve to be assaulted. The former is bad enough. How do you prove the penetration was forced in the hours after you are emotionally traumatized? Or that you weren’t drunk or high? Or that you said no before he started but not while he was “finishing”? 5
Women have found it nearly impossible to meet the burden of proof. But what if you have proof of violence on your body but the protocols for seeing them systematically erase them? That is the potential of domestic violence protocols that rely on photographic evidence to corroborate a woman’s claim in court. The cameras used in criminal domestic violence cases are supposed to document the bruises thought typical of getting one’s ass beaten. In a quest to be “evidence-based,” a nurse is only allowed to call a spot on a battered woman’s body a bruise if it can be seen with the naked eye. What if your skin is too dark to show the bruises that the police often require to believe that you were abused? 6 For black women, a camera designed not to see our abuse becomes a protocol that will only label such spots “dark.”
There are many what-ifs for women to prove that they have been sexually assaulted. And each of them fails most women, but they fail black women as if by design. Like the cameras that cannot see and the protocols that will not name, the what-ifs just barely work when the woman involved has the possibility of innocence. That is something black women rarely have, and black girls are thrust into that structural vulnerability younger than their non-black peers.
When adults say that black girls, not yet adults, are more knowledgeable about sex than their white female peers, they are saying that a girl child is responsible for all the desires that adults project onto her. She does not need the protection of childhood, for she has never been a child. This system of neglect and abuse is mostly ignored in social and education policy, because the violence is often sexual and it happens to girls whom society views as disposable. We rarely focus on how programs are failing black women and girls, or how we could intervene to help (183-7).
Sexual violence against black girls and women has, until very recently, been hidden in the statistics about “women” writ large. In many ways, those stores are similar. We are most vulnerable to the men in our homes. We are taught to blame ourselves. We fear reprisal for speaking up. But black women and girls face additional burdens of protecting the reputations of black boys and men. As black feminists have argued, that burden has trapped us in cultural silences that a focus on gender violence alone cannot capture.
People of color are similarly hypervigilant when we navigate a white social world. We screen our jokes, our laughter, our emotions, and our baggage. We constantly manage complex social interactions so we are not fired, isolated, misunderstood, miscast, or murdered. We can come home, if we’re lucky enough to have a home, and turn off that setting. We often do, as I once did, look for versions of ourselves in literature and pop culture.
But for black girls, home is both refuge and where your most intimate betrayals happen. You cannot turn off that setting. It is the dining room at your family’s house, served with a side of your uncle’s famous ribs. Home is where they love you until you’re a ho (192-3).
Girl 6
In media as in higher education, we need to believe that all publications matter. And they do, to someone somewhere. But, for good or for ill, elite publications are still a thing. I am very amenable to the idea that perhaps they should not be a thing. But wishing don’t make it so. Reality matters.
The reality is that for writers, there are few gigs as good as those at publications where they have the freedom and protection to write well. Writing well takes research assistance, editorial expertise, copyeditors, lunch breaks, fresh air, desk space, peers, and LexisNexis subscriptions. Writing is democratic. Writing well is not.
You know who knows this is true? Writers at nonprestige publications. They love their freedom. They may love their publication’s mission. But I know a lot of writers, and few of them would agree that their work would not benefit from the kind of wealth that accompanies the prestige of the publications that we all complain about (208).