Thick: And Other Essays

Tressie McMillan Cottom is a very public intellectual. A sociologist by trade, she tweets with great volume and skill and has been placing essays across the internet since grad school—writing too much, as one protective older academic once warned her. But that's what she does, turning the analytical tools of her trade as well as her lived experience into unsparing, funny, paradigm-shifting commentary about, among other things, the brutal cost for a black woman of being presumed incompetent and the rationality of the "irrational" spending of the poor. These are not essays written to make you feel good about what's possible—she's just telling you what is.