Tressie McMillan Cottom was born in Harlem to a Southern family who moved north in the Great Migration. She was raised in Charlotte and Winston-Salem, North Carolina. McMillan Cottom was an avid reader as a child, and her grandmother encouraged her education. She went to a historically Black college/university (HBCU), North Carolina Central University, where she earned a BA in English and political science and thrived in the majority Black space.

McMillan then went to Emory University for graduate school, which was a predominantly White institution, where she earned a PhD in sociology. Her time at Emory informs her critique of Whiteness. While in graduate school, she wrote a biweekly column for Slate, which developed her reputation as a public intellectual and ensured that she was one of the most published sociologists. Her writing has appeared in a number of publications, including The Atlantic, Slate, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. McMillan Cottom is an associate professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and her academic work informs her approach to writing. Her personal experiences are the starting point for her essays, which use her concept of thick methodology to situate individual experiences within structural analysis.