Cottom’s work means to grant Black women permission to “do what they are already doing but for better rewards.” Her collection resembles the non-fictional narrative work of Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider (1984) for how it catalogs various themes of the Black experience. Without being pompous, Cottom is unapologetic in a way that frees both her and the reader to accept what it means for Black women to both be a problem and cause problems. A social scientist herself, Tressie McMillan Cottom turns her theoretical lens inward to discuss the interiority of American life as a ‘thick’ Black woman. More than a double entendre, Thick: And Other Essays is a rigorous analysis of Black womanhood that utilizes the auto-ethnographic technique well-practiced by women of color long before Clifford Geertz (1973) endorsed in-depth, descriptive writing.
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