Thick: And Other Essays

McMillan Cottom writes an essay about Miley Cyrus in her post Disney phase. In her essay, McMillan Cottom describes her experiences of the “White gaze” and race, racism, and beauty. The essay is very controversial; specifically, McMillan Cottom’s description of herself as unattractive. The anger and brutal comments that the essay incites surprises McMillan Cottom. Shortly after the essay is published, McMillan Cottom delivers a lecture at her alma matter, a historically Black college. Her experience at the HBCU is foundational because for the first time, she could be “a kind of beautiful: normal, normative, taken for granted as desirable” (53).

In middle school, McMillan Cottom quickly learns how desirability is coded to race, and blond, in particular, is equated to beauty. By high school, she has learned what is beautiful and she knows that she is not. She comes to learn that there is a certain power that comes from “blondness, thinness, flatness, and gaps between thighs” (44), a power that Black women can never achieve. Beauty is linked to Whiteness, and Whiteness exists in opposition to Blackness. In this context, beauty’s function is to exclude Blackness. Female Black scholars have critically analyzed where Black women are situated within beauty, situating beauty within political economy.