Carolina QuotesOne 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.
Tressie McMillan Cottom Connected to the Carolinas
Source
On inclusivity and wider conversations in "Ezra Klein Interviews Tressie McMillan Cottom" on The Ezra Klein Show (2021 Apr 13)
- year
- 2021
Cite this record
“One of the things I like to say to people is that we think t…” Tressie McMillan Cottom. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-063883968F. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/063883968f
More from Tressie McMillan Cottom
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.
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.
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.