McMillan Cottom has crafted a black woman’s cultural bible, as she mines for meaning in places many of us miss and reveals precisely how-when you’re in the thick of it-the political, the social, and the personal are almost always one and the same. Yet Thick will also fill a void on those very shelves: a modern black American female voice waxing poetic on self and society, serving up a healthy portion of clever prose and southern aphorisms in a style uniquely her own. This bold compendium, likely to find its place on shelves alongside Lindy West, Rebecca Solnit, and Maggie Nelson, dissects everything from beauty to Obama to pumpkin spice lattes. transforms narrative moments into analyses of whiteness, black misogyny, and status-signaling as means of survival for black women ( Los Angeles Review of Books ).

Darity Jr., professor of economics, public policy, and African American studies at Duke University. This is the best book I’ve read on for-profit (or shareholder) colleges and universities. In the bestselling tradition of bell hooks and Roxane Gay, McMillan Cottom’s freshman collection illuminates a particular trait of her tribe: being thick. A profound examination of the role of for-profit colleges in the emerging, ‘new’ American economic landscape. Tressie McMillan Cottom, the writer, professor, and acclaimed author of Lower Ed, now brilliantly shifts gears from running regression analyses on college data to unleashing another identity: a purveyor of wit, wisdom-and of course Black Twitter snark-about all that is right and much that is so very wrong about this thing we call society.

Smart, humorous, and strikingly original thoughts on race, beauty, money, and more-by one of today's most intrepid public intellectuals Every so often I read a piece that connects familiar dots in new ways.

Tressie mcmillan cottom books