Tressie McMillan Cottom

American writer, sociologist, and professor

Studied at North Carolina Central University
Worked at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

sociologist, university teacher

Quotations with a citation

The hyper-visibility means that you both can't hide, but also never really feel completely seen by authority figures and by your peer groups. Trapped in that space of hyper-visibility, I think, is where we wrestle with the ideas of, 'What part of me matters?'

The farther away you move from our dominant assumptions about who should have expertise, generally speaking, the more you have to prove that you have a legitimate claim to whatever you're speaking on. For black women that means we're dealing with racist ideas and stereotypes about who's knowledge is valuable, but we're also dealing with gender stereotypes about who should be allowed to speak and to lead…

I want to be able to show up and raise the hell at the precise right moment that might tip the scales in a way that will make something a little more clear, or a little bit more just, for people I care about…

We don’t even have the power to build a bubble, right? That’s the ultimate story of being who we are and writing about ourselves. We don’t even have the authority to create that bubble.

One of the things I like to say to people is that we think that broadening access in any realm — we do this with everything, by the way. It’s such an American way to approach the world. We think that broadening access will broaden access on the terms of the people who have benefited from it being narrowed, which is just so counterintuitive. Broadening access doesn’t mean that everybody has the experience that I, privileged person, had in the discourse. Broadening it means that we are all equally uncomfortable, right? That’s actually what pluralism and plurality is. It isn’t that everybody is going to come in and have the same comforts that privilege and exclusion had extended to a small group of people. It’s that now everybody sits at the table, and nobody knows the exact right thing to say about the other people.

As I said earlier, there’s a point in my process where I just basically start over, from scratch — that is, re-seeing the work and rethinking it. I don’t think it’s a natural stage for anybody, by the way. I think we all had to learn it, but what happens in formal schooling these days is that there’s almost no leeway in teaching that process to most students. So by the time they come to me, many of our students have just never, ever approached revising as part of the thinking process.

Recorded without a firm citation

Kept here, labelled, rather than mixed in above.

Part of my personal political project is naturalizing the sound of expert information in a Black American woman’s voice.

“I’m well known for not being very enthusiastic about giving advice, because advice is only useful as an ego exercise unless you actually know the recipien.

It depends on your power and status in the professional community. The reality is, it is going to be more difficult for you to turn down requests earlier in your career. The sooner you accept that you are at a disadvantage in negotiating those requests, the better it is for you — if only because you can be kind with yourself and give yourself grace because you understand why it’s happening, and that it won’t stay that way forever.

I always believed that if I was willing to defend the veracity of my work and if I was willing to hold that work up for evaluation — for critique and judgment — then who I was when I was doing the work would eventually matter less. And that took time. And I took hits. But I do think that that is ultimately what happened.

I have got to say, I’ve struggled more with the process stuff than anything else in my career. I feel like I restart and come up with a new process every year, but I think I’ve done better over the last couple of years, in part, because I now respect and acknowledge some of the work I do that is less obvious. For example, I used to say, “Oh, I don’t have time to read everything. I just have to pick up something here and there.” But now I think of those 15 or 20 minutes of reading as being absolutely part of my formal research process and creative process. I value those little bits and less obvious forms of work.

Oh yeah. Ontological categories are all about domination, so that’s the whole point. I think at its highest level of abstraction, it’s impossible to divorce the rules of language, or the language math as I call it, from the normative structure of white supremacy as a domination regime. Absolutely. And then having said that, I do accept that if I’m writing into a tradition, I have to learn enough of the rules to consider myself part of that discursive community.