Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom: Raising Really Good Hell for People Who Cannot

Tressie McMillan Cottom is a consummate public intellectual. She is sharply intelligent, curious, passionate, and in everything she writes and researches she is rigorous, expansive, and incisive. In her first book, Lower Ed, she examined the for-profit education industrial complex, revealing how such institutions offer the lure of education and credentialing to vulnerable populations—especially black women—while encouraging them to assume massive amounts of debt they will likely never be able to repay.

In her second book, Thick, McMillan Cottom assembles a broader but just-as-incisive range of her intellectual work. In essays about how American culture treats black women as incompetent—often with lethal results—or how “inclusive” beauty standards remain exclusionary, she concludes that, above all, it is imperative to reject thin, or un-nuanced, ways of thinking.

One of the most remarkable things about McMillan Cottom’s work is the way she blends the theoretical and the practical: how she prioritizes the intellectual work done in secular spaces as much as, if not more than, such work done in the Ivory Tower. She knows who she is and where she comes from; she knows the people who made her and the woman she has made herself into. She is provocative, yes, but always with purpose—with an eye toward challenging and changing the status quo. She is a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, a cultural critic, and a popular figure on the lecture circuit. Dr. McMillan Cottom has a singular voice on social media, where, all too often, people willfully misinterpret the things she says, then lose all sense when she remains unbothered in the face of their futile blathering.

During a wide-ranging telephone conversation, McMillan Cottom and I