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4.48 AVERAGE
4.48 AVERAGE
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
funny
informative
reflective
fast-paced
funny
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
informative
reflective
fast-paced
Really good. I don’t necessarily remember every topic discussed but I know she discussed thinness, whiteness, blackness, and woman hood.
My take for the 2019 NPR Book Concierge https://apps.npr.org/best-books/#year=2019&book=320
By far the best book I have read of 2020 so far. I rented this book from my library and I plan to buy it asap. I would love to read more of this author's works. Her essay "Know Your Whites" is something I plan to read multiple times, in fact I plan to read the whole book again.
Tressie McMillan Cottom is so right in the ways that Black American female voices are silenced and discounted. She discusses the tensions of wanting her voice to be heard while simultaneously understanding that by having her voice heard across national publications makes it easier for those same publications to refuse a permanent position to an equally deserving black woman, and then point to her contributions as markers of the culturally diverse bodies of their work.
She enlightened me in the dangers that Black women face growing up being perceived as "grown", and as such have to come of age when the men around them dictate they are ready for it. How Black women are defenseless in that the way rape is prosecuted, because cameras cannot as noticeably pick up the bruises on their skin. How the shapes of their bodies are mistreated in the healthcare system by doctors that have sworn the Hippocratic oath yet simultaneously treat black female bodies as less susceptible to pain and prone to incompetent understanding and use of their bodies. Cottom reshaped my understanding of seeming materialism by those that struggle to make ends meet—that that silk chemise can be a gateway into a new career, and then a new social class.
While I am not a Black women, I am a minority woman who has grown up surrounded by whiteness. When Cottom writes, "But I had parsed that there was something powerful about blondeness, thinness, flatness, and gaps between thighs. And that power was the context against which all others defined themselves. That was beauty." I too felt that as a child, whiteness and blondeness was the standard, and I didn't fit and I would never fit. She is absolutely correct in her assessment that "beauty isn't actually what you look like, beauty is the preferences that reproduce the existing social order. Her assessment that media portrays a picture of self-love that is based on a certain socio-economic level of whiteness is absolutely correct, and knowing this feels freeing.
My problem with this book really comes from the fact that while many of her points were excellent, many passages were absolutely opaque in terms of conveying actual meaning. Another reviewer already pointed this line out, but I'll repeat it. She says,"Like whiteness itself, Obama was because Trump is." I had no idea what she meant by this or what point she was trying to make and she never clarifies or further explains this point. This happens throughout the book where she will discuss some issue in a brilliant soundbite-y way but then does not break it down to clarify what she is truly saying. On paper it sounds great, but means nothing. She attempts to speak about white privilege and dismantling its pervasiveness in all aspects of American society, but instead can come across as reverse racism. I feel like she communicated her points the best when she dropped the inflated academia jargon. This was when her words and message were the most powerful. Lastly, I wish the annotated footnotes she had included in the back of the book were actually included in the body of her essays. They helped provide further context into some of the arguments and points she was making.
She enlightened me in the dangers that Black women face growing up being perceived as "grown", and as such have to come of age when the men around them dictate they are ready for it. How Black women are defenseless in that the way rape is prosecuted, because cameras cannot as noticeably pick up the bruises on their skin. How the shapes of their bodies are mistreated in the healthcare system by doctors that have sworn the Hippocratic oath yet simultaneously treat black female bodies as less susceptible to pain and prone to incompetent understanding and use of their bodies. Cottom reshaped my understanding of seeming materialism by those that struggle to make ends meet—that that silk chemise can be a gateway into a new career, and then a new social class.
While I am not a Black women, I am a minority woman who has grown up surrounded by whiteness. When Cottom writes, "But I had parsed that there was something powerful about blondeness, thinness, flatness, and gaps between thighs. And that power was the context against which all others defined themselves. That was beauty." I too felt that as a child, whiteness and blondeness was the standard, and I didn't fit and I would never fit. She is absolutely correct in her assessment that "beauty isn't actually what you look like, beauty is the preferences that reproduce the existing social order. Her assessment that media portrays a picture of self-love that is based on a certain socio-economic level of whiteness is absolutely correct, and knowing this feels freeing.
My problem with this book really comes from the fact that while many of her points were excellent, many passages were absolutely opaque in terms of conveying actual meaning. Another reviewer already pointed this line out, but I'll repeat it. She says,"Like whiteness itself, Obama was because Trump is." I had no idea what she meant by this or what point she was trying to make and she never clarifies or further explains this point. This happens throughout the book where she will discuss some issue in a brilliant soundbite-y way but then does not break it down to clarify what she is truly saying. On paper it sounds great, but means nothing. She attempts to speak about white privilege and dismantling its pervasiveness in all aspects of American society, but instead can come across as reverse racism. I feel like she communicated her points the best when she dropped the inflated academia jargon. This was when her words and message were the most powerful. Lastly, I wish the annotated footnotes she had included in the back of the book were actually included in the body of her essays. They helped provide further context into some of the arguments and points she was making.
dark
emotional
funny
informative
reflective
medium-paced