What is the main message of Thick?

The main message of Thick is a compelling analysis of race, gender, and inequality in America.

Who is the author of Thick?

Tressie McMillan Cottom is the author of Thick.

Society & Culture

Thick Book Summary - Thick Book explained in key points

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Thick summary

Name: Thick
Rating: 4.2 (37 reviews)
Author: Tressie McMillan Cottom

Tressie McMillan Cottom

And Other Essays

4.2 (37 ratings)

25 mins

Brief summary

In 'Thick', Tressie McMillan Cottom offers a collection of essays that critically examine issues of race, gender, and inequality in America. She challenges readers to interrogate their beliefs and assumptions and think more deeply about the systems that shape our society.

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Race Black Lives Matter Women's Stories

Table of Contents

Thick
Summary of 8 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 8

What’s in it for me? Learn about the importance of intersectional feminism.

Feminism is popular these days. From Beyoncé’s famous performance at the 2014 Video Music Awards, in which she danced in front of the word “feminist,” to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s popular brand of “lean in” feminism, to the #MeToo movement, feminism has become all the rage.

All too often, however, feminism in mainstream culture privileges the stories and perspectives of celebrities and women who are wealthy, white, or both. But to practice a truly inclusive feminism, it’s necessary to embrace intersectionality. That means taking into consideration how class oppression, as well as racial oppression, intersect with and feed into the oppression of women. Here’s where the blinks to Thick come in handy. Taking author Tressie McMillan Cottom’s African American, working-class roots as a starting point, they show you why the only way to beat the patriarchy is to beat racism and capitalism too.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

how prevalent beauty standards marginalize Black women;
how racism, classism, and patriarchy position Black women as incompetent; and
why Black girls are more likely to be victimized by sexual predators.

Thick description allows Tressie McMillan Cottom both to embrace her unique position and to reveal the world in which she lives.

One day, a man approached Tressie McMillan Cottom at a bar, and the two started to chat. Just before he asked for her phone number, he told her, “Your hair thick, your nose thick, your lips thick, all of you just thick.”

This statement wasn’t just true of McMillan Cottom’s appearance – it applied to her existence, too. Throughout her life, people had made her feel like she was too much – thick where she should have been thin, more when she should have been less. This was especially true of her interactions with white teachers, white classmates, and white people in general.

For a long time, McMillan Cottom tried to change herself. She tried losing weight and disciplining her manners. But when an editor deemed even her writing to be too thick – too complicated to be easily classified as academic, literary, or popular writing – she had a realization. To express herself authentically, she had to stop trying to fit in; instead, she decided to embrace her thickness.

In doing so, McMillan Cottom also turned to thick description, a concept she encountered in her work in the social sciences, to make sense of her position. Thick description is the notion that in order to understand a social behavior, we need to understand its context. A woman crying at her mother’s funeral, for instance, means something entirely different from a woman crying with joy at her daughter’s high school graduation. In thick description, McMillan Cottom finally found a label as complex as her way of thinking.

McMillan Cottom’s essays exemplify thick description by drawing on the research concepts and methods of the social sciences to illuminate behavior in context. More than that, though, they also reflect the term according to her personal definition – using her position as a “thick” Black woman as a lens through which to read the world. That lens is an important one because McMillan Cottom’s social location as a Black woman reveals a lot about the society in which she lives.

This may be the best time in the history of America to be Black, but Black women are still more likely than other groups in America to die younger, make less money, experience police violence, and be punished by social policy.

In other words, thick description allows McMillan Cottom to embrace her thickness in all its complexity, as well as reveal much about American society today.

Poor people spend money on status symbols so that they can belong and have access to opportunity.

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.

White men are given more space in public discourse not because they deserve it but because they are white men.

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.

Racism, sexism, and classism position Black women as incompetent.

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.

No matter the political moment, white privilege always defends itself.

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.

High-achieving Black people are always assumed to be “special Black,” rather than regular African Americans.

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.

Black girls are more likely to be abused because they’re perceived to be adultlike.

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.

Beauty standards reinforce white privilege by excluding Blackness.

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.

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What is Thick about?

Thick: And Other Essays (2019) is a collection of essays by author Tressie McMillan Cottom that centers on the experiences of African American women. Drawing on her own lived experience as well as that of others, McMillan Cottom’s smart, incisive prose provides a fresh perspective on topics as varied as race, beauty, politics, and capitalism, and sheds light on the most pressing issues of today. Part sociological tract, part polemic, the book reveals the brutal and often absurd paradoxes of modern-day America.

Thick Review

Thick (2019) explores the intersection of race, gender, and social inequality in America with a fresh and thought-provoking perspective. Here's why this book is worth reading:

With meticulous research and real-life stories, it delves deep into the complexities of racial discrimination, challenging conventional narratives.
The book offers a nuanced examination of how power dynamics shape society, shedding light on the experiences of marginalized communities.
Through its incredibly insightful analysis, it prompts readers to question their own assumptions and understand the structural forces at play.

Best quote from Thick

[W]hiteness defends itself. Against change, against progress, against hope, against black dignity.

—Tressie McMillan Cottom

Who should read Thick?

Feminists interested in deeper insight into the experiences of Black women
Activists who want to learn more about the current state of racial inequity
Social scientists and academics interested in current affairs

About the Author

Tressie McMillan Cottom is an associate professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is the author of Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy, and her essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Slate, and the Washington Post, among others. In 2019, her book Thick: And Other Essays was a finalist for the National Book Award.

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