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Opinion | What’s Shame Got to Do With It?

A Times survey that year found that 54 percent of white New Yorkers said the civil rights movement was going too fast. The argument went that Black enfranchisement caused white resentment. It was a Catch-22, since white resentment was the reason the civil rights movement was necessary. Polls and surveys are snapshots. As with a photograph, we can see only what is in the frame. At their best, most systematic and most mathy, polls can only ever capture who we are and not who we should be.

I take the difference seriously. I must also now take it personally. After partnering with The New York Times for a newsletter, I have joined the paper as a regular columnist. It is an unqualified achievement that is not without challenges. As a sociologist, I am far more comfortable critiquing power than wielding it. Many would convincingly argue that you cannot do both. I hear that. I have said that. I am keeping that in mind, always.

But I am not only a sociologist. I tell my first-generation university students that I was not born getting a Ph.D. For much of my life, I labored with the idea that my life would not be much different from my parents’. I am a Black woman from the American South born into a working-class rural family who marched in the civil rights movement, organized with the Black Panther Party and raised me on the middle-class respectability of “The Cosby Show.” Mine is a complex mélange of influences. That complexity taught me that context changes everything. It also taught me that public discourse is where we hash out our values. It can be a contentious fight but is one worth having.

I hope it matters that I am in that fight, with careful arguments and the best of intentions. I trend more left than some of my new colleagues and not far enough left for some of my intellectual comrades. At my core, I am a pragmatist — the Fannie Lou Hamer kind, not the John Dewey kind. I bring that pragmatic perspective to bear on a wide range of issues: higher education, labor, inequality, the internet and popular culture. My Times newsletter covered cryptocurrency and political fashion in the space of several weeks. I am a cultural omnivore with a dogged interest in a common thread: how we enact the everyday theater of an unequal society.

In 1964 when that poll of attitudes about the civil rights movement was taken, there was no commonly held notion of a Black female columnist at the nation’s paper of record. From the civil rights movement to the feminist movements, a lot of people expanded the public’s imagination at great personal cost. They made me possible as an idea and as a person. That involved a little shame, yes, and for that I am in their debt.

Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science, the author of “Thick: And Other Essays” and a 2020 MacArthur fellow.

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