Thick: And Other Essays

“In the Name of Beauty” centers on the argument that “Beauty, in a meme or in the beauty myth, only holds as a meaningful cultural artifact through which we can examine politics, economics, and laws, and identity if we all share the assumption that beauty is precisely because it excludes nonwhite women” (47). Beauty is only useful and valuable because of its political and economic divisions. By claiming herself as ugly, McMillan Cottom introduces a structural critique: “When I say that I am unattractive or ugly, I am not internalizing the dominant culture’s assessment of me. I am naming what has been done to me. And signaling who did it” (60). By naming the system of oppression, McMillan Cottom rejects its logics of oppression.

McMillan Cottom describes the “White gaze,” a normative idea of beauty shaped by ideas of Whiteness, marking thin, pale bodies as beautiful. A divergent response to Olivia Newton John is presented as revealing the differences in what is considered attractive. The Black and Latino students find her too thin, but White children found her beautiful. McMillan Cottom’s mother preferred African American history and culture, and as a child, she is not aware of how race codes what is considered valuable. When McMillan Cottom was 11 years old, her breasts grew, and her waist shrunk. After that, her mom wouldn’t let her wait at the bus stop alone because “men can be dangerous” (40). At the age of 11, McMillan Cottom becomes painfully aware of how her body is sexualized by men. Her mother was likely sexually assaulted as a child, though she doesn’t fully explain it, “except when her sentences fade out in retelling certain stories” (40). Her protectiveness of McMillan Cottom reveals a fear of male desire, and McMillan Cottom absorbs her mother’s fear. McMillan Cottom learns to be cautious of men, but she “did not learn enough to be cautious of white women” (41). As her own body develops and she enters into middle school, she is exposed to the White gaze. In this context, McMillan Cottom describes how her own body is not attractive. However, White women in authority regularly tell her that there is something with her body, that her breasts, in particular, are distracting and therefore deviant.

McMillan Cottom draws a distinction between White and Black experiences of beauty that centers on a kind of capital. Most girls have self-esteem issues from unrealistic ideals of physical beauty, but this is not the violence that McMillan Cottom is analyzing. Rather, she is concerned with the power that is conferred by certain types of beauty that comes from how authority validates some preferences as normal. One of the epigraphs of the essay is from the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, whose theory of cultural capital establishes how this validation is a form of power. She articulates her thesis: “beauty isn’t actually what you look like; beauty is the preferences that reproduce the existing social order” (44). Regardless of how beauty standards change over time, beauty’s true function is to uphold Whiteness. Whiteness is a system that defines who is White against Blackness—shaped by colonization, imperialism, and domination—and Blackness cannot be included in beauty, even as standards change. This has broader implications, for “as long as the beautiful people are white, what is beautiful at any given time can be renegotiated without redistributing capital from white to nonwhite people” (45). Culture reinforces White history, White culture, and White standards. Beauty is a form of symbolic oppression that requires people to accept the standards of the system that oppresses them. That Black women occasionally are marked as beautiful—she highlights Lupita Nyong’o as an example—is an expression of how the system works for the exception has to be allowed to maintain a sense of internalized oppression by those who are oppressed by the system. By claiming herself as ugly, McMillan Cottom refuses to become complicit in her own oppression and refuses to become an economic subject who believes she can consume her way to being beautiful.

In Black culture, desirability remains complicated. Collin’s Black Sexual Politics shows how Black masculine ideals of Black women’s bodies layer on more complicated hierarchies of body types. Very rarely do these hierarchies challenge the supremacy of White female beauty. McMillan Cottom describes the complicated experience of being a Black woman dating Black men, as women of color have to negotiate both the White gaze and the desire of Black men. She has to both aspire to White femininity and embody Black beauty standards, a system where “I was losing and I knew it” (70). In the controversial response to Jones’s SNL skit, McMillan Cottom describes how people reacted strongly against how Jones was perceived as making light of systemic rape under slavery, but McMillan Cottom also concludes that people are denying Jones the right to talk about the pain that comes from undesirability, writing “the joke was not on enslaved black women of yesteryear but on the idea that it would take a totalizing system of enslavement to counter the structural violence that beauty does to Jones in her life today” (51). McMillan Cottom suggests that her response to this is rooted in her own body and that both experiences are shaped by colorism and colonialism. McMillan Cottom describes her family as dark, rural, and disconnected from the Black social elite. At the HBCU, McMillan Cottom is coded as desirable. This experience of being desired shapes her sense of self. It is for this reason that McMillan Cottom suggests that Black feminism needs to take desire and desirability more seriously as an analytic.

People tend to respond to essays McMillan Cottom writes, both with stories of recognition and with anger. She highlights the scrutiny that prominent Black women are subjected to, describing the anger she gets from readers for being “Black, a woman, and popular” (37), so she is used to receiving anger, often from White people and men. In this case, however, the anger came from Black women who want to believe that they can be desirable under a system designed to exclude and oppress them. White women write to her to convince her that she is beautiful, reflecting that White women need to believe that beauty is “both achievable and individual” (60) because otherwise they are vulnerable and victimized in their own way. For White feminists, beauty being commodified and random is threatening, so they need to believe that it can be democratic and achievable.