[2ndDivisionVet]

Tressie McMillan Cottom is a PhD candidate in the Sociology Department at Emory University in Atlanta, GA.

As a stratification scholar, Tressie considers what inequality means both experientially and empirically when corporations are people, supranational corporations like Facebook and Twitter shape the public square, and education is increasingly privatized. Her research primarily mines organizational arrangements and structural processes to better understand inequality across rapidly changing social domains. Her current work examines for-profit college credentials and inequality. She also has a developing research agenda that examines the political economy of emerging “new” media organizations.

Tressie lectures and publishes widely. She has been invited to speak on issues of education, race, gender, social movements and inequality at MIT, the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia, Duke, UGA, GSU, UC-Irvine as well as national and international public policy agencies in Canada, New Zealand and across the U.S. Her public writing has appeared in Inside Higher Education, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Slate, Dissent Magazine, and The New York Times. Additionally, she has appeared on NPR and Dan Rather Reports. Her academic work has appeared in Contexts, WestJEM (forthcoming), and a textbook from Oxford University Press. Three papers are currently under review: an organizational analysis of admissions at for-profit colleges; an intersectional analysis of college choice among working class black and white women enrolled in for-profit colleges; and, the political economy of social media in identity movements.

In 2014, she was selected as a PhD Intern at the Microsoft Social Media Collective research labs in Cambridge, MA. That research project will examine how students use informal online spaces to form status identities and groups. The paper will be submitted for review. She is also a former research fellow at the Center for Poverty Research at UC-Davis. As a fellow, she wrote a public policy brief (forthcoming) that examines the link between 1996 changes that purported to “end welfare as we know it” and the rise in for-profit workforce credentials among poor women. She is honored to join the Barnard Center for Research on Women as an organizing consultant for their 40th anniversary Scholar & Feminist conference on gender and education.

With Sandy Darity of Duke University, she is the lead editor of “Profit U: The Rise of For-Profit Higher Education”, forthcoming from AERA books. A second book, a solo-authored manuscript on inequality and for-profit higher education, is under contract with The New Press. So far, her editors have not decided to kick her out of the fold.

Tressie considers teaching a foundational research activity. She teaches introductory sociology courses and has developed seminars in contemporary stratification (post-Great Recession), critical university studies, and technology and inequality. Her students seem to enjoy her pedagogical enthusiasm. To be fair, students do occasionally complain that she threatens to incorporate interpretative dance into lectures. Tressie assumes they doth protest too much.

She can be found at www.tressiemc.com and @tressiemcphd.

[Olog-hai]

Ta-Nehisi Coates has written a thing at The Atlantic making the case for reparations. …

Not even the liberals can come up with a name for the “thing” in question.

[Smokin' Joe]

Ohhhhh Kay.

I propose that every living person held as a slave be paid fair wages by every living slaveowner.

Barring that being good enough, if you don't like it here, how about a one time one way ticket to the third world hellhole of their choice--US citizenship/passport revoked when you get there.

Otherwise, STFU.

[windsorknot]

Unfortunately academia is filled with Tressie Cottoms. Truly intellectual challenges and pursuits are more likely to be found elsewhere.

[EEGator]

In the interest of making things right, we should send all Blacks back to Africa. There they can live out their Utopian dreams.

[Fresh Wind]

A “stratification scholar”? /facepalm

[ExTxMarine]

The stupidity and self-righteous is STRONG in this one!

That is NOT a good combination; look what it has done to our Presidency!

[Mark17]

In case you’ve been living under a rock, Ta-Nehisi Coates has written a thing at The Atlantic making the case for reparations.

You want reparations? Come get it. These slime bags seem to think they can just push and push and push, and nothing is going to happen. Sooner or later, it might erupt into a real shooting war. I hope not, but it can't go on like this indefinitely.

[Popman]

Ok...I’m convinced......I’d give them a dollar...

Now go away....

[ClearCase_guy]

The people at the Washington Post who are looking for race baiting journalists to publish, would do well to be picking Cotton.

[Hoodat]

Perhaps she should personally ask her President - whose ancestors sold her ancestors into slavery to begin with - when he plans on paying up.

[Kozak]

I’ll pay reparations as soon as I receive the check from Putin for my family being Serfs to the Russians until emancipation in 1862. I expect a bigger check because our enslavement started centuries earlier....

[Timber Rattler]

We wanna handout! We wanna handout!

[ComputerGuy]

gibsmedat, gibsmedat, oh gibsmedat

[ArcadeQuarters]

Reparations? What do you call the trillions handed out in welfare and other programs?

[icwhatudo]

I don’t know the answer, but stop naming your kids “Ta-Nehisi”, stop stealing, stop doing drugs, stop living off of government handouts, and go get a job!....might be a start.

[exDemMom]

This girl should really get some life experience, and try to see the world without the distortion of the racism prism.

From her article: During difficult economic cycles, black workers and students should benefit from the flexibility of moving in and out of college as their life circumstances allow. Without that flexibility, every educational moment becomes a zero sum decision: “If I leave school this semester to take that job or care for a family member, I probably will never be able to return.”

Is there a law that prevents black students from going back to school once they leave for some reason or another? Are they not allowed to take a college course while working? Having to make those kinds of decisions certainly is nothing unique to blacks.

When you start talking about poverty and race, inevitably most folks fall back on the usual tropes: blacks should care more about school, go to college, increase their graduation rates, choose the right majors.

That is absolutely true. And for the paragraphs following, where she describes unemployment rates that are higher for blacks than whites who are equally educated--maybe the problem is the attitude, not the education? I can't imagine that a job seeker showing up to an interview with attitudes of victimhood, resentment, and racism is going to be the number one choice of employers.

At every level of schooling, classrooms, schools, and districts reward wealth and privilege.

No, they reward the attitudes that lead to wealth and privilege. Often, you find those attitudes in children of well-to-do families, because that was how they were raised--but not always. Even if you come from a poor family, the right attitude will help you succeed.

Reparations can do what education cannot do.

No. Giving reparations is like giving a jackpot, in some ways. Those receiving reparations will almost certainly squander the money, and end up in exactly the same situation they were in before the reparations. One could say that the constant hand-outs of welfare are a form of reparation--have they helped blacks (or anyone else) succeed? No--they have resulted in generations of people who have no clue how to be self-sufficient, and who blame everything on racism.

Not all PhDs are equal. While earning a STEM PhD is a great investment in one's career--the unemployment rate among people who hold a PhD in life sciences is about 1-2%--other PhDs reward a nice diploma to hang on the wall, the right to call oneself "Doctor", high student debts, and low employability. I think that this girl's PhD falls in the latter category. If she is actually looking to work after college, she would have been better off going for a STEM PhD and foregoing all the sociological racism studies.

[jmacusa]

In addition to being a racist Tressie here is too stupid to be an idiot.

[Taliesan]

America IS reparations.

[Altura Ct.]

‘African-Americans’ must be a pathetic lot.

[Wiser now]

This country has already paid out 17 trillion dollars in reparations.
This country already offers educational grants to the poor and minorities.
If that isn’t good enough, then obviously nothing will ever be.
Sometimes I think we should give them reparations, and when the money has been squandered, and they are still living in poverty and want still more, we can finally close the door on this by pointing out that we gave them exactly what they claimed to need and they blew it and there will be no more. Ever.