In her latest book of essays, THICK , sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom describes how black women are routinely treated as inferior, no matter how competent, educated, smart, or charming they might be. “I was,” she writes, “like many young women, expected to be small so that boys could expand and white girls could shine. . . . I was, like many black children, too much for white teachers and white classrooms and white study groups and white Girl Scout troops and so on. Thick where I should have been thin, more when I should have been less.”