Photo by Monica Escamilla
In May, when technology billionaire Robert Johnson relieved the Morehouse College class of 2019’s $40 million dollars of student loan debt, the country first applauded — and then started asking questions: Why is college so expensive, and is it unfairly so?
These queries are at the heart of Tressie McMillan Cottom’s 2017 book, “Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy” (The New Press, 2017). An associate professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University, McMillan Cottom traveled to Washington, D.C., in April to warn Congress about the ballooning problem in testimony that was broadcast nationally.
Though it was not her first television appearance (she’s been on “The Daily Show With Trevor Noah” twice, among other programs), McMillan Cottom says some people asked if she was “surprised or intimidated” to find herself on the small screen and in congressional chambers.
“That question suggests that I shouldn’t be in those spaces,” she says, eyebrows raised. She laughs, and then raises her voice to be heard over the sounds of R&B crooner Jaheim soulfully entreating his lover for one more round of romance, the upbeat music thrumming through a speaker wedged in a corner of Croaker’s Spot on Hull Street.
“The reason the world can’t lie to me about who I am is because my mother told me and showed me that I belonged everywhere,” McMillan Cottom explains over a piping-hot plate of fried fish and collard greens. “On TV, in the classroom, in the corner office, in a big ol’ house — anywhere I want to be, I belong there because I have just as much right to be there as anyone.”
Becoming
Vivian McAllister, McMillan Cottom’s mother, says she saw limitless potential in her newborn’s “beautiful, intelligent little eyes.” She speaks by phone from her home in North Carolina, her voice languid and warm with the memory of meeting her only child for the first time. “When they brought her to me and put her in my arms, she looked up at me. ... I remember thinking, ‘She’s going to be a curious one.’ ”
Mama was right. Some 35-plus years later, McAllister’s baby girl is a Twitter-quipping public intellectual moonlighting as a celebrity podcast host between her day jobs as a writer and sociologist. Over the last decade, McMillan Cottom has penned numerous pieces for academic journals and media outlets including The New York Times, Slate and The Atlantic, and has authored two best-selling books: “Lower Ed” and “Thick” (The New Press, 2019), a collection of personal essays on life as a black woman of substantial brains and build.
“The reason the world can’t lie to me about who I am is because my mother told me and showed me that I belonged everywhere.” —Tressie Mcmillan Cottom
Describing her family as “very matriarchal,” McMillan Cottom says her earliest days in North Carolina were spent basking in presence of the women in her life — mother, grandmother, aunts and cousins. McMillan Cottom’s is a lineage of ladies, but there were men, too.
“Whenever I say that my family is matriarchal, a lot of people make stereotypical assumptions about black women; they think there are no men present in our lives and families. That is patently untrue of my own story,” she says flatly over her food. She chews thoughtfully for a moment. “My dad was always around, and then later, my stepdad. My grandfather and great-grandfather were present in our family. They were outside cutting grass, or gone to the store or something, but our men were there. The women, though, they were the very center of everything in our lives.”
McAllister, retired now after working 31 years as a technical operations supervisor at American Airlines, describes her daughter as a “willful” child with a wild imagination. McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) often regales her more than 88,000 Twitter followers with funny stories about “The Vivian,” who is protective and proud of her daughter.
Their bond is a close one, forged by McAllister’s years of single parenthood after divorcing her daughter’s biological father. The split took place when McMillan Cottom was in middle school, a time that she says brought her lack of siblings into stark relief.
“I was an only child; I felt the weight of that,” she says of growing up the apple of her mother’s eye. “Every decision was so weighty, it sometimes paralyzed me. That is so often the case in American black families anyway, where there is this mantra that parents teach to their children, ‘You have to be twice as good to get half as far.’ It’s a lot of pressure for a kid, but it strengthened me, it put more into me than it took out of me.”
Then as now, young Tressie talked fast and read “everything she could get her hands on,” she says of herself. She basked in the words of America’s greatest black writers — Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes and Margaret Walker among them. Their words, and those of her mother and grandmother, affirmed and challenged her.
McMillan Cottom grew up and graduated high school near Charlotte, North Carolina. She studied English and political science at North Carolina Central University, a historically black university (HBCU). Sociology had not entered her mind as a course of study, because in her experience as an undergraduate at an HBCU, “We were always thinking and talking about social systems. If we’re talking about black writers, for instance, then we’re naturally talking about how race and racism shaped the lives and works of black writers. Sociology was kind of built in, without us expressly calling it that.”
After graduating, she got married, “because that’s what I thought I was supposed to do,” she says wryly. The union lasted for little more than a year, during which time she conceived a child. In “Thick,” McMillan Cottom writes of the trauma of losing her baby, a girl, about four months into the pregnancy. Her life-threatening experience navigating a health care system that often questions black women’s competence and discredits their pain mirrors events nationwide: In America, black women are three to four times more likely to die during pregnancy or childbirth than white women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“It was the darkest time in my life,” McMillan Cottom says quietly. It is clear she does not want to say any more.
After a few years in the working world, McMillan Cottom considered going back to school for a law degree. A program designed to increase the number of African-American students obtaining doctorates changed her plans. Her thinking was naturally “thick,” layered and prone to complex analysis. “I’m always looking at the scaffolding, the systems in place everywhere, in everything,” she says. “The social structures we create that define some people’s existence.” McMillan Cottom earned her doctorate in sociology from Emory University in 2015.
Counting Costs
Though her writing had been racking up recommendations since her graduate school days, McMillan Cottom garnered international attention in 2017 after the publication of “Lower Ed.” Having worked as an enrollment officer at two technical colleges in Charlotte while an undergraduate, McMillan Cottom witnessed firsthand the aggressive marketing campaigns for-profit colleges use to attract students and the negative impact the education debt the students incur could have on their lives.
McMillan Cottom interviewed 100 students and staff members at for-profit colleges as part of her research and enrolled at nine different for-profit institutions to give readers a close look at the experience from a student’s perspective: the often-rushed enrollment process, navigating financial aid, meeting with advisors about academics. Speaking about her book to Richmond magazine in 2017, McMillan Cottom said these kinds of schools ultimately don’t serve students, many of whom leave without degrees but with massive debt. “If we don’t come up with a public solution, an affordable, moral public solution for ‘lifelong learning,’ we are eventually shuttling everyone into the market for this kind of credential,” she said.
On Twitter this April, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren cited McMillan Cottom’s work as she unfurled an ambitious plan to erase education loan debt for America’s student borrowers.
Warren tweeted that McMillan Cottom “has spent years studying how for-profit colleges prey on the poor, women and people of color — sucking down taxpayer dollars and loading up students with debt for useless degrees, while Wall Street rakes in the cash. I just think that’s fundamentally wrong.” The tweet linked to a video of McMillan Cottom testifying before the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.
“Without strict regulation, these new forms of for profit institutions and partnerships can denigrate the integrity of higher education,” McMillan Cottom told the committee.
Photo by Monica Escamilla
Get Here if You Can
She has lived in the Bronx borough of New York City, Charlotte, Atlanta and Chicago, but Richmond felt strangely familiar when McMillan Cottom settled here in 2015 after accepting a job as assistant professor of sociology at VCU, a decision that made her mother happy.
“I really like that she picked Richmond over the other cities she had job offers from,” McAllister says brightly. She shares a few polite platitudes about the city’s rich history and small-town feel alongside big-city amenities, but soon reveals the real reason the River City got her approval. “Richmond is not that long a drive from Charlotte, so Tressie’s father and I can see her more often than we used to. She’s just one state over now.”
McMillan Cottom is less complimentary about her adopted city. Despite Richmond’s attractiveness to upwardly mobile young professionals, its increasing attention to the arts and its booming restaurant scene, the city’s affordable housing crisis and rapid gentrification of historically black communities is not lost on her. Deep social and economic inequities persist in Richmond, she says.
“Richmond is fortuitous because it has benefited from black labor and never really had to give black people credit for it,” she says.
In 2019, nearly half of Richmond’s population is African-American, and the inequities continue, despite the city’s many gains. By tracking poverty rates in the city and surrounding counties for 10 years, the University of Richmond’s Bonner Center for Civic Engagement found in a recent study that more than 25 percent of Richmonders live in poverty; the majority of these people are black.
Despite Richmond’s challenges, McMillan Cottom is happy to be here.
She sees reflections of herself, her family and her culture whenever she steps outside her front door in Manchester.
“It is important to me to see black people every day, because the only people who can really, fully see me [are] black people.” She explains, moments after politely asking a harried-looking waitress to wrap up two bean pies to go, that in Richmond, “I can be freer here. … I can be black-black here, meaning I can live and move without performing the respectable blackness that is so often required of black people if they wish to move up in the wider, whiter world.”
She came to VCU because she was looking for a university that allowed her to teach what she wants, how she wants, to the greatest benefit of her students. Sociology of Race, Contemporary Social Theory and Sociology of Higher Education are among the courses she leads.
“Tressie meets her students where they are and teaches in a way that people with no background in the subject can understand,” says Lauren Garcia, who will graduate from VCU in December with a Master of Science degree in sociology. “She … has an incredible ability to distill complex, intricate processes into everyday language.” Garcia has taken at least one class with McMillan Cottom every year that she’s taught at VCU, and the professor is also her thesis chair.
McMillan Cottom’s instruction has shifted her worldview dramatically, Garcia says. “In teaching us how race, ethnicity and gender interact on a macro level, she shows me how mistreatment at my job may represent a larger pattern of inequity. … I always tried to help the people around me, but Tressie has shown me that change should also be happening at a structural level if we ever want to get free.”
Even as McMillan Cottom makes an impact on her students’ thinking, she recognizes the unique challenges of being a black academic. It can be and often is an isolating endeavor, she acknowledges. According to a 2018 report by the National Center for Education Statistics, black women make up just 4 percent of full-time assistant professors at degree-granting postsecondary institutions in the United States. By comparison, white men make up 35 percent of this same faculty subset, and white women, 38 percent.
The reputation McMillan Cottom has built based on her scholarship allows her more freedom than most black professors, she says. And, as her grandmother told her a long time ago, “There isn’t nothing better than freedom.”
Tressie McMillan Cottom (left) and Roxane Gay (Photo courtesy Tressie McMillan Cottom)
Listen to Black Women
Her latest book, “Thick,” is a collection of essays that reflect McMillan Cottom’s experiences navigating spheres that are often unkind to dark-skinned women. Having learned early to look at life through the lens of empowered womanhood, McMillan Cottom’s stories center on the perspectives of black women.
“Thick” quickly earned glowing reviews from the New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post and scores of readers across the nation who were intrigued by McMillan Cottom’s sharp musings on beauty, race, gender dynamics and relationships. It is at times sobering, at times irreverently humorous, and it is the perfect segue into McMillan Cottom’s current project, “Hear to Slay,” a weekly podcast with writer Roxane Gay, author of the New York Times bestsellers “Bad Feminist” and “Hunger,” among a wealth of other books, essays and published pieces. Formerly a professor at Purdue University, Gay is also the founder of indie publisher Tiny Hardcore Press and is a lead writer of Marvel Comics’ “World of Wakanda,” a monthly series about two women who are part of the Black Panther’s security force, the Dora Milaje.
“[‘Hear to Slay’ is] a place where black women ... could come and be heard, loud and clear.” —Tressie Mcmillan Cottom
“Roxane and I are f---ing stunned by this project,” McMillan Cottom says excitedly by way of introduction to “Hear to Slay,” hosted on the app Luminary. Distinct needs shaped the show’s concept — one is the need for more media spaces that seek and amplify the voices and work of black women.
Gay and McMillan Cottom framed the show as “a place where black women — in politics, in academia, in Hollywood, in many stratums — could come and be heard, loud and clear, without anybody trying to stifle or stop them.”
The first episode aired in May, with McMillan Cottom and Gay chopping it up with Stacey Abrams, a lawyer who was the Democratic nominee in the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election. The highly contested race, which Abrams lost, shined a spotlight on voter suppression, a longstanding tool designed to stymie the voting power of African-Americans. In another episode, Gay and McMillan Cottom get real about Hollywood with veteran actress Gabrielle Union, discussing Eurocentric beauty standards, the gender pay gap and more.
What’s next for McMillan Cottom is hard to guess, even for her. Whatever she does and wherever she goes, she will build bridges for black women and make way for underserved communities, she says.
The waitress returns with the bean pies; McMillan Cottom flashes her a small smile and then grabs the pastries with one hand. With the other she takes up her phone, glancing at it surreptitiously, maybe checking in on Twitter life. She stands to leave, words tumbling from her mouth as she moves toward the door.
“I want to be an access point for black women, and a path to opportunity for people who are overlooked,” she says.
Books by Tressie Mcmillan Cottom
“Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy” was featured on “The Daily Show,” NPR’s “Marketplace” and “Fresh Air” and was called “the best book yet on the complex lives and choices of for-profit students,” by the New York Times Book Review.
“Thick” received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, which said, “The collection showcases Cottom’s wisdom and originality and amply fulfills her aim of telling ‘powerful stories that become a problem for power.’ ”
