Thick: And Other Essays

McMillan Cottom defines Blackness as “necessarily static as a counterweight to whiteness” (9). Blackness is the fixed idea that Whiteness defines itself against. Blackness is something that is imagined by White people as “a fixed, homogenous biological project that supersedes culture, nation, and environment,” (135) an idea that has never held up in reality. McMillan Cottom defines Whiteness as a paradox. In contrast, “blackness is not a paradox. Blackness is” (111). In “Black Girlhood, Interrupted,” McMillan Cottom analyzes how Whiteness views Black girls as less deserving of protection and more grown up, which impacts how they are treated by both men and society at large.

McMillan Cottom distinguishes between types of Blackness and their perceived value. She identifies herself as basic Black, or Black-Black, someone who reflects the typical American Black experience. As she accrued education and therefore social capital, her “social status necessitated that I perform or at least desire a different kind of blackness” (146), what she calls “special Black.” She holds up President Obama as typical of special Black, someone who is “Black and biracial and immigrant and Black ethnic” (146). Obama’s complicated relationship to Blackness is described by McMillan Cottom as follows: