Thick: And Other Essays

In “Know Your Whites,” McMillan Cottom explores Whiteness. In “Black Is Over (Or, Special Black),” McMillan Cottom turns to Blackness. If Whiteness is an elastic concept that can stretch to accommodate changing desires and goals of White people, Blackness is imagined as fixed and static. She asks the question, what kind of Black am I? This is a political question that centers on whether or not her work aligns with the interests of Black people. However, there are layers that complicate this. She identifies herself as “basic Black,” while noting that it can never be that simple. As a child, she knew there were different kinds of Blackness because Black people come from all over the world. But the existential question of what kind of Blackness she identified as wasn’t a problem until she entered predominantly White spaces. She turns to sociological analysis to explores the term “Black ethnics,” which describes Black people in the US whose ancestors did not experience enslavement or the Great Migration. However, this suggests that Black Americans do not have an ethnicity which is complicated, but it is a useful term to distinguish between people born in the US and those who were not. Black ethnics complicate the idea of Blackness.

When McMillan Cottom goes to graduate school at Emory University, she is in a predominantly White space for the first time. She joins the Black Graduate Students Association, and the majority of the group is “Black and,” or Black ethnics. The university prefers students who are Black in addition to another diversity category. Black ethnic students and faculty bring a cachet that “Black-Black” people do not. For this reason, universities often hire international Black ethnic candidates to diversity their faculty. Black students who come from abroad are people who have already succeeded in social stratification, they are not representative of their home nations but rather successful outliers. This makes them more desirable to universities than Black students who are from the United States. At the Black Graduate Students Association, someone asks where the “local Black-Black people” (138) go so that they might be avoided. McMillan Cottom is surprised because she identifies with Black-Black people. At a dinner organized for a visiting professor, a fellow Black student asks McMillan Cottom repeatedly where she is from, to which she replies North Carolina, to his frustration. Someone tells her that he is asking what kind of special Black person she is, because domestic Black people are viewed as inferior.

McMillan Cottom explores the controversy generated by Ajayi and her claims to Blackness. The core issue is who can claim legitimacy to speak for and about Black people in the United States. As a Nigerian American, her domestic Blackness is complicated. McMillan Cottom concludes that Black people can’t gatekeep the boundaries of Blackness, because it’s a category defined by White people. Rachel Dolezal, a White woman who pretended to be Black, is an example of this. She adapted Black culture as her own, but she only had to convince White people that she was Black. Blackness is defined by Whiteness, and the opportunities that come to Black people are also structured by Whiteness. This produces a perception of scarcity which leads to conflicts over who is legitimately Black. For example, when President Obama was in office, media outlets needed to perform non-White perspectives. But when Obama left office, Black was perceived as over. The dismissal of the importance of “regular Black” perspectives is a problem. McMillan Cottom responds by refuting the emphasis on “special Black” perspectives by foregrounding her own Black-Black identity. She does not try to correct her Southern accent, which often includes “Whitening” her speech. She does not code switch in the media or in her classroom. Blackness is not over because postcolonialism is about Blackness, and there is no post-Black theory or racial justice that can avoid this truth. The choice between Black-Black and special Black/worthy Black is a trap.