Thick: And Other Essays

Studying race is called the “race beat,” an area of study that is exhausting and demoralizing. A common joke is that this area never moves beyond 101, because the world is stuck in first gear on race issues. In 2018, McMillan Cottom sits down with members of her crew who also write on race. The incident that triggers the meeting was the so-called Starbucks Incident, where a Starbucks manager called the police on a Black male patron for not buying a drink quickly enough. McMillan Cottom uses this incident to explore how Black people’s consumption patterns are viewed as contributing to their poverty.

Whenever stories about Black shoppers being harassed become part of the news cycle, there is a predictable backlash. The discourse quickly shifts from outrage that people were racially profiled to a critique of why a Black person was shopping there at all or why they were wasting money on things they can’t afford. McMillan Cottom answers that Black people buy things that convey status because it helps them get better treatment. To demonstrate this, she turns to her own family.

McMillan Cottom’s family’s experience is typical of the Black American migration experience. She has rural Southern roots, though her family moved north for work, but almost all of them have returned to the South.