She is a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, a cultural critic, and a popular figure on the lecture circuit. She is provocative, yes, but always with purpose-with an eye toward challenging and changing the status quo. 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. 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. 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. In her second book, Thick, McMillan Cottom assembles a broader but just-as-incisive range of her intellectual work. 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. She is sharply intelligent, curious, passionate, and in everything she writes and researches she is rigorous, expansive, and incisive. Tressie McMillan Cottom is a consummate public intellectual. Photo courtesy of Tressie McMillan Cottom
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