Thick summary

When Tressie McMillan Cottom was a kid, her family’s neighbor faced a problem. She had been denied the child care benefits that she desperately needed to support the grandchild that she looked after. The neighbor had been unable to convince the staff at the social service agency that she was entitled to and needed the benefits. 

McMillan Cottom’s mother decided to help the neighbor. One day, she put on one of her fanciest outfits – a camel-colored cape with matching slacks and knee-high boots. She coiffed her hair and put on pearl earrings. Then she went down to the social service agency with the elderly neighbor in tow. In her respectable, expensive outfit and speaking her best version of the Queen’s English, she managed to secure, in one afternoon, the benefits that the elderly neighbor had been unable to secure in a year. 

In 2017, David Brooks, a conservative op-ed columnist at the New York Times, wrote a column about sandwiches. The column was 865 words long. In other words, the illustrious newspaper gave Brooks a significant chunk of space to write about deli meat. 

Now, imagine if a Black woman wanted to write about a mundane topic that was relevant to her. Say she wanted to write about the silk headscarf she sleeps in, or about the erratic trash collection in her neighborhood. Would the New York Times give her a whole column to do so? It’s unlikely. That’s because by and large, it’s only white men who can be banal and mediocre and yet still be given ample space to express themselves, as well as reap the rewards of money and prestige. 

When tennis superstar Serena Williams gave birth to her first child in 2017, things went terribly wrong; shortly after the delivery, Williams developed blood clots in her lungs and came pretty close to losing her life. But even more troubling was that her urgent requests for critical medical attention were at first dismissed by staff.

Williams was eventually given the treatment necessary to save her life. But many Black women – inevitably those without Williams’s stature – are not so lucky. In fact, Black women are chronically neglected by the medical system. In the United States, the wealthiest country in the world, Black women die in childbirth at rates comparable to those found in much poorer countries, such as Uzbekistan and Mexico. The US Centers for Disease Control estimate that Black women are 243 percent more likely to die from pregnancy and childbirth-associated causes than white women are. 

In 2008, something spectacular happened. A country that was founded on the enslavement of Black people, and which continued to treat them as second-class citizens, elected a Black president, Barack Obama. 

Many thought Obama’s election heralded a new era in American race relations. If so many white Americans could vote for a Black man, surely something in the landscape of race in America had changed. But while Obama’s election was a significant symbolic victory, little changed in white–Black relations. Young Black men continued to be killed at unprecedented rates by the police, and Black people continued to be significantly poorer than their white counterparts.

During her graduate studies at Emory University, Tressie McMillan Cottom attended an academic dinner. The man sitting beside her asked her where she was from. Her answer – that she was from the state of North Carolina – apparently didn’t satisfy him, because he insisted, “No, where are you from?”

The man’s inability to accept that McMillan Cottom was from the South points to a common belief about successful Black people. If you are Black and an achiever – one such as McMillan Cottom, who at the time, was studying for her PhD at a prestigious university – you must be some kind of “special Black” person, not a regular African American from the South, with working-class roots to boot. 

Tressie McMillan Cottom has always liked reading biographies of Black women that highlight inspirational role models. But she has also identified a troubling pattern in these life narratives. Many of the Black women she reads about have experienced some sort of sexual trauma in childhood – abuse by a mother’s new husband, an uncle, or an older boy at school. 

Indeed, a number of the men with whom McMillan Cottom grew up with expressed troubling attitudes toward women. Once, a male cousin of hers defended the boxer Mike Tyson, who, in 1992, was convicted of raping an 18-year-old woman in a hotel room. Her cousin argued that the 18-year-old wasn’t a woman, but a “ho” – a derogatory term equivalent to the term “slut.” In characterizing the woman in this way, McMillan Cottom’s cousin suggested that the woman deserved to be raped because she had gone to Tyson’s hotel room. 

In 2013, the singer Miley Cyrus performed at the MTV Video Music Awards. The performance was controversial not only because Cyrus – a young white woman – appropriated an African American dance style known as twerking, but also because many of her back-up dancers were large-bodied Black women. These women were relegated to the background in a performance of a dance taken from their culture. To make matters worse, Cyrus touched their bodies in intimate ways – by putting her hands on the butt of one dancer, for example, she reinforced the impression that Black women were simply props in her performance. 

Cyrus’s act exemplifies how beauty standards are constructed and reinforced by excluding Blackness. The Black female bodies in the performance were not meant to be seen as beautiful. Rather, they were presented as a contrast to, and therefore a reinforcement of, Cyrus’s own blue-eyed, white-skinned, thin-bodied beauty. In this way, the performance privileged Cyrus’s desirability and beauty precisely by excluding the Black bodies behind her.