Thick: And Other Essays

Being too much of one thing and not enough of another had been a recurring theme in my life.

As being taken seriously becomes a form of reputational capital in a culture where reputation is like the Bitcoin of status cultures, being taken seriously is real work.

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.

Saying why it matters is one of those sticky things about my work.

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 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.

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

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.

Eventually I decided that asking me to be something other than black, exchanging black for being a person of color was anything but well-meaning. Finally, for now, I have decided on being as black-black as I can be. It is my protest.