Finally Some Wisdom to Move Forward! Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom

Speaker 1 It feels like Christmas to me. I'm very, very honored and thrilled that you are here.

Speaker 2 Thank you. Well, thank you very much for having me, but that does suggest that we need to step up your Christmases just a little bit.

Speaker 1 There's so much we need to step up again.

Speaker 2 You have no idea. I'm just saying, we could do this.

Speaker 1 Okay,

Speaker 1 I know we're stressed.

Speaker 1 I know

Speaker 1 we're not sure exactly what's going on or what to do about it.

Speaker 1 And by exactly, we mean not at all what's going on or what to do about it.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 1 Behold, I bring you tidings of great joy that shall be for all the people. And that is, we have Tressie Macmillan Cotton.
If you don't know Tressie, you probably do.

Speaker 1 Tressie is the one on the computer or in newspapers explaining this shit to us. Okay?

Speaker 1 That is what she does. She is incredible mind.
She is an incredible storyteller. She is precise.
She is brilliant. And she's funny.
Really funny. And she's hopeful.
And she's hopeful. Okay.

Speaker 1 In this episode, she explains to us clearly with amazing clarity what stories got us to this place and what will get us out and how to get through it, what to do every day.

Speaker 1 Like, I felt, I felt like I wanted to just run out of my house and start doing something at the end of this. Wow, I did not feel that.
Okay,

Speaker 1 I did. I felt like I was like, let's go.

Speaker 1 I felt like I was going to stay home and do lots of stuff.

Speaker 2 Okay, that's so important.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 We'll see how you feel at the end of this.

Speaker 2 Pod squad, enjoy.

Speaker 1 Dr. Tressie McMillan Cotton is a professor at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, a New York Times columnist, a MacArthur Fellow Genius Grant awardee.

Speaker 1 Her work has earned national and international recognition for its urgency, depth, and insightfulness in her critical perspective and analysis of some of the greatest social challenges we face today.

Speaker 1 Her book, Thick, was named one of the 30 best nonfiction books of the last 30 years by the LA Times.

Speaker 1 And I am personally very impatiently awaiting her upcoming documentary, Power to the People, Y'all, about the Black Panther Party of the South.

Speaker 1 So exciting. It's so exciting.

Speaker 1 Tressie, you introduced me to the term

Speaker 1 Griots. Oh, yeah.
And I would love to introduce our audience to

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 term.

Speaker 1 The Griots are

Speaker 1 those in West African culture who are gifted with the gift of storytelling.

Speaker 1 They have a deep spiritual, social, and political discernment to preserve their people's genealogies, historical narratives, values, and their storytelling makes them the advisors, diplomats, and delighters of their people.

Speaker 1 They are the truth tellers, but there are truth tellers, and then there are the miraculous few who, as Tressie has noted, are able to tell the truth and make you want to hear it.

Speaker 1 And you, Tressie, are a griot of our times. You're able to discern and tell the truth and make us want to hear it.

Speaker 1 And I can't think of a gift more valuable in the crucible of this time and place than that. And so we are deeply grateful for your work and for you being here with us today.
Thank you.

Speaker 2 Well, thank you very much, not only for that lovely introduction, but for tying it to one of, you know, my favorite cultural traditions.

Speaker 2 The idea of the people who hold the spiritual, political, and historical knowledge of a community is just one of my favorite concepts ever.

Speaker 2 And I never would have called myself that, but I can't stop you if you do. So I thank you.
I thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here.

Speaker 1 I love it. And since you are

Speaker 1 the storyteller of our times, we were hoping to frame this conversation around

Speaker 1 story and the power of story and really the stories that delivered us to this place and the stories that, God willing, could deliver us from this place

Speaker 1 where we are. And I wondered if you could

Speaker 1 start with landing us, like,

Speaker 1 what is the story that delivered us to this place? Like, what is the MAGA story and why did it win? Because

Speaker 1 it was truly that story that carried us here.

Speaker 1 Just tell us what your take is on that story that prevailed.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah, that's a great question. And I don't know if it's one story.
You know, I'm here, I'm thinking very deeply here about, you know, the danger or the tyranny of a single story and that idea.

Speaker 2 Because sometimes our desire desire for a single story is sometimes the problem, right?

Speaker 2 So, I don't know if it is one story, but if I had to choose a story that I think broke through, which is often how I think of it, because there are always tons of stories, especially we are a multiracial,

Speaker 2 you know, cross-class culture and society. And so, there are always many stories.
It's about the story that tends to break through, right?

Speaker 2 So, the story that I think broke through over the last, you know, my math here is terrible. I think the 90s were like 20 years ago.

Speaker 2 So I always say 10 years ago, but I don't know if that means 1990 or 2000, but whatever.

Speaker 2 So we're probably somewhere around year eight or nine or 10 where this story starts to break through, I think both nationally and in the minds of regular people that there is a threat, right?

Speaker 2 And it's a almost, you know, it's a, it's a,

Speaker 2 an amorphous threat because depending on who you ask, they'll tell you a different threat. But the threat is what everybody agreed on.

Speaker 2 There's a threat, whether it's a threat to our culture,

Speaker 2 there is a threat to our existence, climate change, you know, which I'd argue that's what a lot of our fear is about. We just are misdirecting it in other places.

Speaker 2 But there was a threat, a threat to our way of life, right? A threat to our economic survival and mobility. What we were fundamentally saying is there was a threat to the American dream,

Speaker 2 right? Because that had been the prevailing story. You work hard, you roughly follow the rules, and you will do better than your parents.

Speaker 2 That was the promise. Now, I can try to tell people that's a new story, y'all.
That story didn't exist, I'll say to them, 60 years ago.

Speaker 2 But it was so prevailing, it was so big that we stopped being able to imagine the world outside of it, really.

Speaker 2 So, when someone says there's a threat to that, which is the MAGA story, there's a threat, and even better, I'm going to name a threat for you. You won't even have to think about it, right?

Speaker 2 So, you know, the threat are immigrants, the threat are migrants, the threat are trans people, the threat of gay people, the great, the threat is, you know, professors, you know, like myself.

Speaker 2 The threat is worker, the workers, it is librarians. I mean,

Speaker 2 the threat assessment here of the people that suddenly became so dangerous. It was like a hodgepodge group of like

Speaker 2 insignificant sexual minorities, a librarian, a bookseller, and like five migrant children. And this became, in the minds of millions of people the threat.

Speaker 2 But I think it was the threat that made people feel alive and feel seen in MAGA because they are afraid, cannot do the work of figuring out what their actual fear is.

Speaker 2 And here is someone telling them that this is what you're afraid of and I can fix it. I alone can fix it.
So that story, I think, it's an old story, right?

Speaker 2 Powerful, dangerous people have told that story for millennia. The question for me isn't like, why is the story there? The story is always bubbling beneath the surface.

Speaker 2 The question is, why is in this moment with that story breakthrough?

Speaker 2 Why right now, you know, does that story get so much currency? But that is the story.

Speaker 2 And the story that I will tell you, I continue to be sort of amazed by its resilience right now in the face of so much evidence that this is not a strong man, that this is not

Speaker 2 the, you know, dangerous, war-torn country that he would tell you this is, that you are actually, you know, mostly fine and safe, that we do have hard problems to tackle.

Speaker 2 We can do hard things, but we don't have impossible ones, right?

Speaker 2 In the face of all the evidence to the contrary, however, this story, the MAGA story, is deeply sticky. And the question that's driving me these days is why? Why is it so sticky right now?

Speaker 2 But yeah, I think that's the story we're living with.

Speaker 1 Do you have any takes

Speaker 1 on why it's so sticky right now?

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 so I just finished saying that there are always competing stories, and that is true, but we don't have a good competing story right now. We do not.
No, we do not.

Speaker 2 I mean, I look out at the people I would turn to

Speaker 2 that, you know, trust, but I think the people who are responsible for telling us a better story, a different story. And I, you know, we've had enough time now, I think, to come up with one.

Speaker 2 And so I will tell you this, this might not be very reassuring, but I'm almost as befuddled as everybody else about why there is not a better competing story.

Speaker 2 I'm starting to see some things that I think are breaking through the wonderful, powerful,

Speaker 2 peaceful resistance that has been happening in Chicago, for example.

Speaker 2 And I think that there is a clear moral, ethical voice starting to break out there with their religious community and religious leaders on the ground in Chicago.

Speaker 2 And so I am seeing some glimmers, but as of yet, there has not been anybody who I think speaks less to our fear and more to our strength in a way that feels honest and authentic.

Speaker 2 Because here's the thing: here's the truth. The truth is, actually, we do have some really big problems and we are running out of some runway to make hard choices.
Right.

Speaker 2 And I think part of the problem is nobody wants to tell people that. Yeah.
Right.

Speaker 2 Right. I can sit in the room with Democrats, for example, professional Democrats or Democratic pollsters or political advisors.
They know how deep the problems are.

Speaker 2 But nobody wants to be the person who goes to people and says,

Speaker 2 your life really is going to have to change. Now, it doesn't have to end and it doesn't have to be worse, but it is going to have to change.

Speaker 2 We really do have to make hard decisions, again, about the environment and about climate. We just got to do it.

Speaker 2 But nobody wants to give that hard truth.

Speaker 2 And in the absence of a story that is honest about the truth, but makes you feel better about it, people are willing to listen to the story that might be dishonest about it,

Speaker 2 but tells you a way to feel better about it, right? It's a real hard story. Yeah.

Speaker 1 This was going to be our last question, but I feel like it

Speaker 1 is rearing now.

Speaker 1 Do you believe? Because as you've noted,

Speaker 1 there is no compelling counter story to the easy

Speaker 1 to swallow, I don't have to change my life, I just have to hate those people narrative

Speaker 1 from the democratic side. And there also, it seems to me, it seems to be the story is we're not evil like them.
Like that's the story. We're not them.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 1 that became really complicated, I think, for me personally and for a lot of people when we had no red line. on a genocide,

Speaker 1 it became very hard to say, to take well, how evil do we have to be?

Speaker 1 Raise the moral high ground where is it no one where is it and so i my my like huge question is

Speaker 1 as the structure exists right now is there anyone capable of carrying that

Speaker 1 any story that could deliver us with our modern two-party system or are we looking at if we are to be delivered from this a whole different paradigm that needs to come up like what you're saying with the communities and the faith communities and all of us.

Speaker 1 Like, does this system even work to carry a better story if we could make one?

Speaker 2 I am with you. First of all, let me say this.

Speaker 2 I do think that a lot of people who believe themselves to be well-meaning, reasonable people lost the moral high ground when they could look at starving children and

Speaker 2 not say the obvious thing, which is, oh, we are killing these children, right? We share culpability here. Yeah, this is a genocide, and people are dying, right?

Speaker 2 And you can argue then about the historical significance and the contemporary politics of it, but what was irrefutable

Speaker 2 was that people were dying, and you can see that.

Speaker 2 And I actually attribute some of people's inability to do that with the fear

Speaker 2 of

Speaker 2 not knowing a story that was going to redeem them, right? If somebody had been willing to say, you can say the hard thing and you won't experience a social death, right?

Speaker 2 You're not going to be cut off from your friends or your community, right? There will be a path for you here.

Speaker 2 Now, the reason, however, we could not build that way forward and that path leads into your bigger point.

Speaker 2 It is more politically powerful to have a two-party system where people can be cut out of that system than it is for somebody to do the hard work of building a way, a path of reconciliation.

Speaker 2 That is is to say, it is unfortunately good politics to be bad people.

Speaker 2 Doing the good thing and being a good person actually was going to make you a bad politician.

Speaker 1 That's right.

Speaker 2 You've gone on the record about something where there was no clear right or wrong.

Speaker 2 And you can't do that as a politician. People will hold you to the things you said, and it can be misconstrued, and it might come up in a campaign ad later, and it might, you know,

Speaker 2 right. Good politics then has become hostile to being a good person.

Speaker 2 A moral, ethical, maybe complicated person, we all are, but one with a pretty clear moral compass. So then the question becomes the one I think that you have posed, which is what?

Speaker 2 Do we want the good politics or do we want to be the good people with a functioning society? And when those two things are at odds, what I think a lot of

Speaker 2 reasonable people who see themselves as reasonable are going to have to accept is that right now, in this moment, the reasonable position is the political system we have is not conducive to the world we want the problem is eight years ago 10 years ago that made you sound crazy

Speaker 2 it happened so fast for so many people that really though now the centrist position if you want to be honest when the extremes however go so far to the extreme on the right the centrist position can seem really radical to people if you weren't paying attention.

Speaker 2 But y'all, a lot has happened and you can be forgiven for missing some of it, to be fair. There was a lot of TV the last 10, 15 years.
There was a lot of prestige TV to watch. You can be forgiven.

Speaker 2 But in the event that you missed it, let me be the one to update you here. A lot has happened.

Speaker 2 You now go out into regular society and you say something like, well, I think we should reform

Speaker 2 the electoral system. You actually sound a little whackadoodle, right? People have been paying attention.
We'll tell you the centrist position, honey, it's too late now for some of that.

Speaker 2 Now, I, we can get into the weeds here a little bit, and I won't, but to say that there are a lot of smart people who have proposals.

Speaker 2 And I will tell you this: some of the smartest people I know who have studied this as a career, both in the United States and across the globe, says that we are almost past the point of making a decision about how we are going to reform our electoral system.

Speaker 2 So, that means regular people now have to clock in. Yeah.
You're up, right?

Speaker 2 The experts have said, oh, we're here. The danger zone is here.
It is now time for us to tune in and decide, does that mean we are expanding the Supreme Court?

Speaker 2 Does that mean constitutional amendments? These are all big, historically hard things, but totally not impossible. I am here because of constitutional amendments.

Speaker 2 Women are here working because, well,

Speaker 2 they weren't fully constitutional amendments.

Speaker 2 We're still working on that part, but certainly because of reforms, right, to our system that at one time sounded absolutely radical, but had to become the normal position because the other side had just gone so far afield.

Speaker 2 And I think the experts are saying to us, this is now that time.

Speaker 2 Regular people need to decide which side they are on, and we need to pretty quickly get to the point of deciding what's our rallying cry. And now, this is where the one story would be very useful.

Speaker 2 I asked someone pretty high up in the democratic machine not too long. long ago, what is it you want people to ask for?

Speaker 2 There is some unmet need, I think, among the people I talk to who are like, no, I'm suitably angry. I'm suitably radicalized.
Tell me what I should be demanding.

Speaker 2 When I make my five calls to my congressperson, what is it I want them to do? And the fact that we haven't given people

Speaker 2 that, well, now that just,

Speaker 2 that stuns me.

Speaker 2 But that's where we are. We need a really good ask.

Speaker 2 And the people who are ready to make the ask need to know that somebody's working on it.

Speaker 1 Do you think that the story could be something about, like, I don't know why our story isn't

Speaker 1 eradicating billionaires.

Speaker 2 I don't know why our story isn't. I like that story.
I mean, I mean, yeah, I like that.

Speaker 1 We have people to point to. We know who the, we know who the, if, if everybody needs, they're anxious and they need somebody to blame,

Speaker 1 we have a great option that's actually true.

Speaker 2 And it's not like these are very likable people. If you cannot, as just a matter of just like basic politics, if you cannot character these

Speaker 2 class of billionaires, then you probably should not be in the political communication game. I will agree with you.
These are weird, dangerous, spiteful, petty, mean people.

Speaker 2 You know, these are people who have said

Speaker 2 things cannot continue as they are. So let's destroy it with as much joy

Speaker 2 and excitement as as we can. Let's watch it explode.
Let's accelerate the explosion, use it for my fireworks while I sail off into the sunset.

Speaker 2 That, by the way, is quite literally the position of a lot of wealthy, powerful people who say, oh, no, we just can't have democracy anymore. It hasn't worked.
We actually can't have women working.

Speaker 2 That hasn't worked, right? We need straight up biological determinism and a small group of men to make the decisions for everybody. And I want that to happen as quickly as possible.

Speaker 2 So I am investing in that chaos and destruction that is the position of someone like a peter thiel right who is on a tour a lecture tour right now telling people his post apocalyptic version of the world right if you cannot say to people look at that

Speaker 2 we are not that we are against that i agree with you i think we've got a problem now here's the real the the real crux of the issue. If you want to be a politician, you need people to give you money.

Speaker 2 And it's very difficult then to court the people, the donor class, we would call that, and then go tell the people who have to live with the politics of that that they should be against those donors, right?

Speaker 2 It is very difficult to serve two masters. And in fact, when you try to serve two, you just end up serving both of them really poorly.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Which circles back to the same reason why the system, the people in the system who are supposed to have the the moral high ground would not call a genocide a genocide is because of APAC and whatever.

Speaker 1 So it's like, it's all the money, which is

Speaker 2 listen. At the end of the day, I think one of the decisions that seemed at the time like a pretty wonky political

Speaker 2 decision, and I think that's why we didn't really get a narrative around it, didn't really explain it to everyday Americans.

Speaker 2 At the point that corporations become citizens and the Citizens United decision, this starts an arms race for money to pour into politics.

Speaker 2 It's not to say money had ever mattered, but there were some meaningful checks on how much money could matter in politics.

Speaker 2 Once you threw open that door, the incentives then for the people who could afford it, for really wealthy people to buy politicians, really just lock stock and barrel, were all in place.

Speaker 2 And now we're about 15 years behind explaining to people what that decision meant and putting it in like everyday terms.

Speaker 2 I'm of the belief that regular people shouldn't have to be experts in politics to live in the world.

Speaker 2 That this was a sort of a division of labor we did. We said, listen, we will put our faith in you.
We will give you the power of people, people power. We'll put our faith in you in exchange for

Speaker 2 a certain level of accountability and expertise.

Speaker 2 All of the money that is poured into politics has broken that compact between people and the people who represent them. This is what I like to liken it to.

Speaker 2 When people, when politicians are not afraid of their voters, when they can go out and not do listening tours in their local communities or go to those local communities, even worse, do the listening tour and then insult the voters,

Speaker 2 right? Which I've seen over and over again, right? Because they are not afraid of the voters. That means the system you have is not your system.

Speaker 2 And now then the question is, what are you going to do about it? Now, I am of the belief that they need to be afraid of voters again. And there are only a few ways you can do that, right?

Speaker 2 We need to claw back the checks and balances system. I do think that we're going to have to reform, if not completely expand and

Speaker 2 de-emphasize this court, the Supreme Court.

Speaker 2 But you got to, you also, you've just got to get a rallying cry about getting money, this amount of money. out of politics.

Speaker 2 If politicians are not afraid of you, you just do not have a republic or a democracy.

Speaker 1 So, is that the call? Is that because

Speaker 1 I like it? What do you think?

Speaker 1 I just don't know what the hell it is if not that first. Yeah.
Like, if they're not,

Speaker 1 we don't have a democracy. Like, we, it's, it's a fable.
It's that we, that these politicians represent us. They don't.
They represent the, the, the groups that are lobbying.

Speaker 1 Like, we're never going to get out of our gun nightmare because they answer to the NRA. They answer to APAC.

Speaker 1 They answer to, and seeing the boldness and brazenness of what they're saying now should be chilling to all of us because they are not afraid of us because they don't answer to us.

Speaker 1 And behind the scenes, they are changing things a little by little. So by the time we get to the next elections, it will not matter.

Speaker 1 They don't, they know they're not accountable. Yeah.
to us anymore.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Over and over again, I've talked with people about this, about watching some of what's happening, you know, some of the

Speaker 2 just, you know, almost absurdist, I would say. If, you know, if I could laugh, I would.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 just the sort of coarse, blatant, obvious, undemocratic

Speaker 2 political decisions and political speech coming, not just out of this administration, I would argue, but it has now become the culture of American politics. Everybody is coarser.
Everybody is crueler.

Speaker 2 Everybody is less competent and is, you know, relishing being incompetent, even.

Speaker 2 The scam is visible. You know, scammers are usually supposed to try to do some sleight of hand.
They don't even care to pretend anymore, right? You can just see the scam.

Speaker 1 And that's the power move.

Speaker 2 And that is the power move. It says, I can rip you off and you can't do anything about it.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 2 That is right. That is how a strong man is how an authoritarian shows that they have that power.

Speaker 2 But I've looked at it and said, I don't understand how you look at that and think that these are people who intend to be governed by voters.

Speaker 2 These are not people who intend to have an election matter to them. That is not to say then men tend to come out and say that, you know, we're being alarmists.

Speaker 2 You know, we say that they can get upset. I'm not saying we won't have elections, but elections alone don't mean that you have a democracy.
Yeah. Right.

Speaker 2 You have a democracy when they are afraid of people. Period.
So you ask yourself, are your representatives afraid of you? I don't know.

Speaker 2 When you call, do you get them or do you get their legislative aid, or do you get a voicemail?

Speaker 2 Or, like some of the people, I'm in the state of North Carolina, we have some elected officials you call and they have turned off even the voicemail. It just rings and then hangs up on you, right?

Speaker 2 If you can call, if you can email, if you can show up at your local political events and your elected representatives are not afraid of you, I promise you, you do not live in a competitive democracy.

Speaker 2 You just don't.

Speaker 1 Well, just look at reproductive, I mean, look at reproductive justice.

Speaker 1 Like when, when 70% of Americans support action, um, access to abortion and they full slate go and take it away, like they aren't afraid of

Speaker 1 the entire country. They are doing what they're doing because they've been not only bought after the fact as politicians, they have been manufactured from the beginning.
Yes. J.D.

Speaker 1 Vance exists because Peter Thial decided he would.

Speaker 2 That's exactly right. They found somebody with a narrative who was willing to be remade in the image of what Peter Thiel wanted.
And that I could not agree more.

Speaker 2 Someone who was willing to play that role in exchange. And let's just be very honest, in exchange for personal gain.
This is not about some ideological project.

Speaker 2 We keep thinking that these people have deeply held convictions about when life begins or the Second Amendment. No, these are people who have been promised.

Speaker 2 We can protect you and we can make you very rich. Your children's children will still be rich, right? They are buying themselves that ticket and we just need to be very, very clear.
But that's right.

Speaker 2 You manufacture the story you want in the candidate you then create. And again, I would ask people, do people have that power?

Speaker 2 Can we go and manufacture that and then have that person have the resources and the attention they need to actually be a politician? And no, we can't.

Speaker 2 And that happened, admittedly, very fast, but that is where we are. Now, these aren't even, to my mind, these aren't even real politicians.

Speaker 2 You know, I was speaking with someone last night about there was a moment when Mitt Romney resigned from Congress.

Speaker 2 And I remember doing, listen, and I was at odds policy-wise with Mitt Romney on many, many, many things. But I remember the speech he gave about why he was leaving.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 He said, is not just that this isn't a Republican Party I don't recognize anymore. He said, this is a government and a job I don't recognize anymore.
anymore.

Speaker 2 When you have a candidate who is ideologically committed to the ideas, you know, the Republican ideas, or we should say maybe conservative ideas, and they are terrified of what they are seeing.

Speaker 2 To me, that meant that even the pretense of us being a normal functioning

Speaker 2 system had been called off and it was over. That to me felt like an important moment.
And I think we have seen that, right? They've even gotten rid of their committed believers in the party.

Speaker 2 That is, is Cheney, all of you. I mean, that's right.

Speaker 2 Cheney, you know, when you would make fun of people who helped build your party, they didn't just, you know, they didn't just run them out, the mockery of them, right?

Speaker 2 All of that, that signaled to me where we were. And where we are is that, yeah, you can buy politicians, and many of them have already been bought.
Yeah.

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Speaker 1 You are a very proud, deeply rooted Southern black woman.

Speaker 2 I am.

Speaker 1 And I'm wondering if, in speaking of story, if you could

Speaker 1 walk us through

Speaker 1 the story,

Speaker 1 just real quick,

Speaker 1 the story of the South in terms of

Speaker 1 the real South versus the South that has been

Speaker 1 weaponized, turned into idolatry, turned into kind of a political pawn in the

Speaker 1 creation of these stories

Speaker 1 and what it means

Speaker 1 to you as kind like the epicenter of so much of this racial gender

Speaker 1 crisis, how it's being misused and the promise of it in its realness.

Speaker 2 Listen, I happen to believe that there is nothing that needs to be solved in this country, that can be meaningfully solved in this country, if it is not solved first

Speaker 2 and best in the American South.

Speaker 2 because the South holds everything that the rest of the country wants to sort of shunt off, right?

Speaker 2 So you want to have a progressive

Speaker 2 California, let's say, right? You want to have a progressive state.

Speaker 2 Okay. Well, then let's be, you know, let's really police who can afford to live here.
creating a certain amount of class and racial homogeneity, right?

Speaker 2 Well, then you have basically bought yourself the comfort of being progressive. You know, be progressive in Alabama, and then I'll be impressed.

Speaker 2 You know,

Speaker 2 right? Be, okay, yeah, I get it.

Speaker 2 You're progressive in a world where you control who can live there, who can afford to work there, who can travel there, what kind of public transportation is available. Oh, that's really nice.

Speaker 2 But again, do it someplace where you have to live side by side with people that you have meaningful differences with. And that is the one thing the South has always had.

Speaker 2 We have an intimacy with our enemies in the South.

Speaker 2 That means if you can't solve it here, if you can't do climate change off of the coast of South Carolina, listen, I think we absolutely need to get on this, but I'm telling you that if these solutions don't work in a place where you have a lot of poor Native American people and a lot of poor black people and a lot of poor white people, chances are excellent that you don't really have a solution.

Speaker 2 You've just got something that makes comfortable people a little bit more comfortable in the rest of the country.

Speaker 2 So when I I say that the South matters, I don't just mean it in the historical sense, which is how we love to talk about the South. We love the South historically.
We love the South.

Speaker 2 Oh, come down and visit, you know,

Speaker 2 the grand antebellum mansions, right? You can take a tour of the romantic historical South. I'm like, this half the South is still here today, right?

Speaker 2 We are present as we have the internet, we have TV, just like everybody else, right? We are living in the modern political moment.

Speaker 2 That means every problem that we are facing in this country exists here.

Speaker 2 And I say that because the promise of this country is that it would not just be a democracy, but it would be a multiracial one.

Speaker 2 So, creating democracy by getting rid of all of the racial minorities is not, to my mind, living up to the American ideal.

Speaker 2 So, solve it in the place where you have to actually reckon with our hard, deep,

Speaker 2 interpersonal factions.

Speaker 2 I also believe that we use the South as a character. They say no matter how bad the problems are in Chicago, in Detroit,

Speaker 2 in Palo Alto, at least we aren't the South.

Speaker 2 And I go, well, no, you exist because the South exists. The South holds your cheap labor.

Speaker 2 The South is a place where we tax poor people almost to death and provide absolutely no social contract in exchange.

Speaker 2 That creates an immense amount of wealth that the rest of the country gets to benefit from, right?

Speaker 2 When you want to use all of your money from selling your house in California or Montana and you want a big home, where do you move?

Speaker 2 You move to Florida, you move to Georgia, you move into North Carolina. That means you are taking advantage of the fact that people there have not been able to build their own economic survival.

Speaker 2 You're taking advantage of cheap housing, which is cheap because

Speaker 2 we have made it so that people can't afford to live, right? You're taking advantage of that. So the South exists, and that means the rest of the country gets to exist.

Speaker 2 And I also really reject this idea that there's something uniquely racist about the South.

Speaker 2 Right? This idea that, like, oh, we don't do that. We would never say that here.
I always like to tell people, I think the last time that somebody had,

Speaker 2 I'll just be honest with you, the last time somebody had the balls to call me a racial slur to my face, it was in Northern California. Wow.

Speaker 2 It was not in Birmingham, a place I've been quite recently, right?

Speaker 2 So the idea that we are uniquely racist is one of those fictions, one of those stories, y'all, that people love because it makes them feel good about themselves. Yeah.
Right.

Speaker 2 And so I defend us only to the extent that I say that we are worth defending.

Speaker 2 Because if not, you get these things like, you know, self-proclaimed liberals and progressives who are like, well, we should just write off, if they are going to vote against their interests, right?

Speaker 2 We should just write off Florida, Georgia.

Speaker 2 Well, you look at a map about race and class in this country and who you're saying you should write off, the people you're saying who should be cut off from the union are disproportionately black, Hispanic, poor, and I will also point out women,

Speaker 2 right? That's the South. So you're saying that you can only have your country if you get rid of the rest of us.
And I would say there's a word for that, and it's fascism.

Speaker 2 It's polite fascism. It has a little sign in its yard that says, in this house, we believe.

Speaker 2 But it is the exact same principle. If you can only have your freedoms by me not having mine, then we aren't doing the same project.

Speaker 2 So I think about the South as being this place that holds these ideas that people aren't comfortable with. But you know who is comfortable with it?

Speaker 2 Somebody who comes along and wants to exploit it for political gain.

Speaker 2 Somebody who wants to point out your hypocrisies to you and make them into memes to discredit you. You know who ended up being really good at that? Donald Trump.

Speaker 2 Who said, okay, I will puncture all of your liberal hypocrisy by taking all of these ideas from the South. Here is a New Yorker who

Speaker 2 can

Speaker 2 say with no irony and without much pushback, can draw on all these southern images, the lost cause, the Confederacy.

Speaker 2 He's a New Yorker. What is he even doing here, playing in our repertoire of ideas? Well, he can get away with it because he knows the hypocrisy around it.

Speaker 2 When centrists and liberals and progressive people aren't willing to be honest, that they hold some of the same ideas about Southerners, some of the same ideas about what we deserve and what we don't deserve.

Speaker 2 And he knows that and he's able to exploit it. And so the South becomes just another political pawn.
But I would argue that both sides make us a political pawn.

Speaker 2 It's just right now, one side is doing a better job at it than the other.

Speaker 1 You're talking about New York. I was in upstate New York a couple of weeks ago, and

Speaker 1 we're driving through

Speaker 1 this town, and my kids

Speaker 1 have their jaws on the ground because we are in upstate New York, and every other house has a Confederate flag on it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I've seen it.

Speaker 1 They were just like,

Speaker 1 this doesn't even make sense. I know.
This is, they weren't even part of the Confederacy. There is no claim to the actual quote-unquote heritage.

Speaker 1 If that flag is supposed to, we believe,

Speaker 1 represent some part of Southern heritage, y'all are the farthest from that Southern heritage that we can get outside of Maine. So

Speaker 1 what is that iconography? And then they're all over the January 6th insurrection, which was not predominantly Southerners up there.

Speaker 2 You had Midwesterners and Westerners, very urban, urbane, upper, middle-class, wealthy people who were flying. Yes, the Confederate flag, who were dressed up in

Speaker 2 a Confederate uniforms, wearing the Confederate hat,

Speaker 2 using, you know, don't tread on me, all of this language, all this iconography, the images, the stories, the slogans from the Civil War and from the South's version of the Civil War.

Speaker 2 I was at an event recently where someone presented, she was presenting her research showing the connections between

Speaker 2 Nazis in Germany and their connections to the American South. And she said, the thing is, the American South has always been global.

Speaker 2 The racism that we say is unique to the South, she said, has always had a global audience. She talks about Amanda being in Germany and seeing a Confederate flag fly.

Speaker 2 You trying to make sense of New York? Try to make sense of that.

Speaker 2 Well, yeah, it makes sense if you realize that the ideas have nothing to do with land or property rights or citizenship or sovereignty and have everything to do with white supremacy.

Speaker 2 It's the only thing that makes all of that logical and coherent. So then I would ask us, well, then why is the South caretaking those ideas? Yes.

Speaker 2 So this is what happens every six, seven, eight, 12 years between bouts of social progress, somebody can tap in to the

Speaker 2 you know the rage, the isolation that some group of people feel.

Speaker 2 And the most efficient way to tap into it is to come back to the South, to resurrect that flag, to remind them that you don't need to feel guilty,

Speaker 2 right?

Speaker 2 You don't need to compromise or sacrifice for the ideas of inclusion, equality, or social progress.

Speaker 2 And that is the idea of the lost cause, that even in losing, you can be a winner. And that will always have currency when you wrap it up in white nationalism.

Speaker 2 And that's why you can see a Confederate flag in upstate New York. And people do that with absolutely no irony whatsoever.
Because they know it's not about

Speaker 2 land or property or rights, just like the South knew that it was never about states' rights. It was always about slavery.
They know what the real story of those images are.

Speaker 2 And that's what they want to communicate.

Speaker 1 Okay, so

Speaker 1 if our sign in our yard, and I'm in

Speaker 1 Southern California,

Speaker 1 my sign in my yard, which I may or may not have had in the past, nope, nope, you don't need to go on the record here with me at all. Because

Speaker 1 I,

Speaker 1 in this house, we, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah.
We are inclusive because we have made sure not to include anyone.

Speaker 1 Super easy to be inclusive when anyone is

Speaker 2 not allowed.

Speaker 2 It's a smidge easier. I'm going to be honest with you.

Speaker 1 I take the point.

Speaker 1 If

Speaker 1 the Confederate flags that are in northern New York, is that right you were in New York? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Are those houses,

Speaker 1 what is the story that they think they're telling?

Speaker 1 Do they actually

Speaker 1 believe I understand that

Speaker 1 that is evoking white supremacy, that is evoking

Speaker 1 no more guilt?

Speaker 1 But like, what are they telling themselves that that means?

Speaker 1 And are we at the point where, just like the politicians, the mask is off, and they actually are just saying, in this house, we do white supremacy?

Speaker 2 Yes. I think that's far more of it than people are willing to accept or believe.

Speaker 2 That these aren't people who have just been led astray, who are just confused, who have fallen down the misinformation rabbit hole, right, and are living in a conspiracy theory.

Speaker 2 No, these are a lot of, in many cases, well-educated,

Speaker 2 productive people and citizens who know exactly what that sign means, and that is exactly what they want to communicate. And I think we need to be honest with ourselves and accept that.

Speaker 2 That may even be true of your friend, of your family member, of someone that you can play golf with who seems like a nice enough, a nice enough person.

Speaker 2 But to me, there's no difference between having the Confederate flag in your yard as a message and having a

Speaker 2 lawn jockey on the front yard as a message. They are the exact same thing, and people are deeply aware and they know exactly what they're doing.

Speaker 2 And we should not give them a pass that they haven't asked for.

Speaker 2 Okay, they haven't asked for

Speaker 2 that.

Speaker 2 That's right. They're not coming out saying, Oh my gosh, I didn't know.
Please forget. You know, no, they're not asking for a pass.
So, why are we volunteering to give them one?

Speaker 2 No, no, you know, unless we're just uncomfortable with the discomfort, which I think is a lot of it.

Speaker 2 Then, I think there's a smaller set of people for whom there is a story they have that it is a story of nostalgia. The past was always better, by which they usually mean

Speaker 2 I could have been defensibly innocent

Speaker 2 about the price of my progress, the price of my good life, my quality life, right? There was a time when I didn't have to know that we were killing bombing babies in Palestine.

Speaker 2 There was a time when I didn't have to know that we were enslaving tens of millions of people in a prison system, right? There was a time when I didn't have to know, right?

Speaker 2 That's the nostalgia. That's what the nostalgia is for.
Now, it just so happens that they are nostalgic for a time where they had that innocence because of white supremacy.

Speaker 2 But I think the story they're telling themselves about a kinder, gentler time is about a time of innocence when they did not have to deal with all of the moral conflict, the ethical conflict, the discomfort people feel when they realize the American dream was always costing somebody else their nightmare.

Speaker 2 And so we need to question like, what trade-offs are we willing to accept? Now, you got to be a brave person. I think you actually also have to be a curious person.

Speaker 2 I think curiosity is an undervalued human trait.

Speaker 2 I think people who are curious about the world, no matter how much or how little education or exposure they have to other people, there's just a curiosity there where they ask questions.

Speaker 2 But if you don't have that curiosity, or you don't have to have that curiosity, and you feel uncomfortable about now having to deal with the moral, the moral consequences of your choices, it's real easy to say, you know what, forget it.

Speaker 2 It was better in 1929 and that's what I want.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I still see the no king stuff, there's still signs everywhere that say if Kamala had won, we'd be at brunch right now. And that is not actually

Speaker 2 these two. I'm like, no, no, let's not go back to the brunch delusions.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 The brunch delusion. Like that,

Speaker 1 that strikes me in a deep way because

Speaker 1 I think that had Kamala won, I would be at brunch.

Speaker 2 I feel you. Yeah.
I'm afraid I too would have been, maybe not at brunch, but I've been like at a round table. Yeah.

Speaker 2 You know what I mean?

Speaker 2 I get invited to lots of those.

Speaker 1 A scholarly brunch. Yeah.

Speaker 2 There you go. A scholarly brunch.
And I am deeply like, and that fear motivates me, though.

Speaker 2 So I use it as like, okay, Tressie, let's not be the person at the round table while Rome is burning behind us, right? But I feel you.

Speaker 2 That's a, I actually would say that being afraid of knowing, of thinking you might be that person is a really good inoculation from becoming that person.

Speaker 2 But I'm like you, I see all of this. I could have been back.
I could have been at brunch, you know, we could have been. And I'm like, what you're saying is you could have,

Speaker 2 again, had an innocence that I don't think you deserved, that none of us deserved. Yes.
None of us deserved.

Speaker 1 Why? There are many people in the new generation who are done with pretending that the Democratic Party

Speaker 1 is just a bunch of good guys. That a lot of these kids see them as the exact same one with a mask and one without one.

Speaker 1 And they think that what we wanted was just for somebody to keep on the mask so we could pretend that we all still believe in liberty and justice for all while we went to brunch.

Speaker 1 And what we're really annoyed about is that the mask is off and now we're not allowed to keep pretending yes i mean i a couple months ago i was so frustrated and i came downstairs to abby and i was like i just i can't i can't write i i can't make anything every day it just feels like how does anybody be creative anymore it's just reaction constantly yes i feel that too yeah

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 we just sat and was like oh that's

Speaker 1 for people who have been engaged constantly that's how life that's life that's life yeah

Speaker 2 first of all power to your kids that's but that's yeah this is why everybody for the record this is why people get so upset when their kids come home from college they think we radicalized and I'm like no they just told you that's not on us that's not our fault but yeah because that's tough yeah they come home and they tell you these things they're like oh yeah you know I work with college students all the time and I think you have nailed it in that what they're saying is First of all, that we didn't give them a world where they could really choose that innocence.

Speaker 2 So like, how dare we be grieving the loss of that when we didn't give them that, which is totally fair, by the way.

Speaker 2 But also the clarity they have about,

Speaker 2 in some ways, I think they are not just more brave than us, because some of that can come with youth, certainly, but I do think that they are more courageous about

Speaker 2 whatever comes after the knowing. could be worse, but it could be better.
Yes.

Speaker 2 It could be better.

Speaker 2 They're the ones who remind me of that when i'm like oh everything is collapsing well guess what it kind of had to to rebuild it it's like getting the the tower card and tarot you know or the death card it has to die for the rebirth and what i think they are better at because they did not they weren't as immersed in our brunch past when we could just you know vote every two or four years and then go back to our lives and our self-actualization and our becoming and all of that, right?

Speaker 2 Because they don't have as much of that. I think they can also be excited about what's possible

Speaker 2 in facing the truth that

Speaker 2 we've got two sides here, one with a mask and one without, and we have to unmask before we can even get to anything better. That's fair.
Yeah. And I do think that they are right.

Speaker 2 I will say that for those of us, though, who

Speaker 2 it is, I have to

Speaker 2 almost weakly convict myself on that, right? That the end of a way of life doesn't mean the end of the world.

Speaker 2 Just the end of the way we were living, y'all. It's not the end of the world.

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Speaker 1 I'm interested as you're talking, as we're thinking about like

Speaker 1 what is the third way? What are the alternatives? Like, what is

Speaker 1 what is the thing that will make these people afraid enough to hold to account?

Speaker 1 And it makes me think about your work on the Black Panther project that you're doing and the way that that

Speaker 1 community

Speaker 1 threatened the powers by

Speaker 1 taking care of each other, that that serving each other and not looking to the state or to the government to meet its needs that in itself was deemed so threatening

Speaker 1 so as to be deemed violent yes to the state

Speaker 1 so

Speaker 1 there is something there in that of the community and and your partner

Speaker 1 um

Speaker 2 your partner's phrase where they say uh freedom is responsibility freedom is responsibility i know and he's such a good egg good says babe, he's like, babe, I wasn't free until I was responsible to other people, which, gosh, really got me.

Speaker 2 You know, in our moment of our, you know, focus on self, you know, listen, I'm like every other woman. Yes, we need the boundaries.
We need the care. We need all of that.

Speaker 2 But there was something almost intimately radical about him looking at me going, no, the more responsible I am to other people, the more freedom I have.

Speaker 2 And, you know, he meant several things, but one of the things that I think about a lot that is so evident in

Speaker 2 working with this chapter, the Black Panther Party, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Speaker 2 So again, the South, and in a place not, you know, imagined, people don't think, if they think of Winston-Salem at all. And it's perfectly fine if you haven't.
It's fine. It's a small regional

Speaker 2 area.

Speaker 2 It is. It's darling.
Thank you for telling people. It's darling.

Speaker 1 I love North Carolina.

Speaker 2 Huge fish. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Chapel Hill especially was there last weekend. Love it.

Speaker 2 For you. Next time, you let me know you're here.
I'm in downtown chapel. I will see you next time.
Seriously. It's one of my favorite places.
There's a reason I choose to live here.

Speaker 2 I really do think it's amazing. And West of Salem is amazing in that way, you know, sort of a bedroom sort of community.

Speaker 2 But you don't think of this as a place, as a hotbed of radical activism, right?

Speaker 2 But I knew that it was. My mom had been in the party.
She was in the party when she got pregnant with me.

Speaker 2 And so in many ways, figuring out my own origin story involved understanding this chapter, but also the fact that we've kind of erased it, right? The fact that there was no southern presence for this.

Speaker 2 And not only was that chapter active, in their minds, they are still active. So I go back to them 55 years, the 55th anniversary of their chapter was this past year.

Speaker 2 And we had a gathering there to do some filming for this documentary. And one of the things that I want people to see is something that I needed to see at this point in my life.

Speaker 2 Y'all, some people survive the movement. Some people grow.
You can grow old.

Speaker 2 As a revolutionary thinker you can you can grow oh you can have a life the movements do move on right they are put down the government puts down a radical movement sure those things happen but their work didn't end they are still feeding people they are still housing people they're still educating people The work goes on even when the cameras stop showing it and the politicians have moved beyond it and we think it's in the past.

Speaker 2 And in fact, it is the people who continue to do the work in between those times. Well, they're caretaking those ideas for us.

Speaker 2 So, when I was sitting there, I was like, You, Linda, I'm sitting in my house going, How am I supposed to be this person? I worked so hard to be able to be.

Speaker 2 All I've wanted all my life is to read books and sometimes write a little something down in a notebook. It was all I wanted,

Speaker 2 you know, and I sacrificed so much and I got here, and then this happened. And I've been a little pissed.

Speaker 2 Yes, thank you, Trez.

Speaker 1 Thank you for saying that. That's a real thing that people are going right now, which is like, I had individual dreams.

Speaker 1 I had a joy to cultivate in me. I have a little and for

Speaker 1 you.

Speaker 2 And I'm middle-aged. I can't just keep rebuilding this thing.
I also was feeling like the time.

Speaker 2 I was like, oh my God, by the time we get rid of him and we do all this and blah, blah, blah, blah, right? I'm not going to be able to drive my car anymore. Right.

Speaker 2 I was just so like, I've got a short ramp.

Speaker 2 And I was really feeling that.

Speaker 2 Then you go home, as I did. And when these are people, you know, I call aunties and uncles and extended family, they're in their 70s now, some of them in their 80s.

Speaker 2 And now maybe they show up to the meeting in a hover around. Sure, sometimes they're in their assistive devices, and sometimes we have to roll out their oxygen tanks for them.

Speaker 2 And sometimes, you know, we make all of these allowances for the physical passage of time.

Speaker 2 But these are people who are still actively, intellectually, and spiritually alive and engaged. And I looked at, and had gone on with lives.
They became teachers, professors, lawyers,

Speaker 2 you know, preachers,

Speaker 2 corporate, you know, marketing, corporate branding. They got jobs.
They had jobs like the rest of us. And yet, and yet, they were still fomenting these ideas.
They were still showing up.

Speaker 2 The small acts of when I asked them how the party remained alive for them, even after it's long since dissolved, it's been villainized by the government.

Speaker 2 You know, you become an enemy of the state, which is a deep grief, by the way. We don't have a language for this.

Speaker 2 When the country turns against you,

Speaker 2 it is a deep level of loss.

Speaker 2 It's like you're stateless in your own country and it hurts. They go through a deep trauma here.

Speaker 2 Anybody's ever been in a union or any kind of collective movement, and when it ends, the trauma of that is so deep. And they lived with that, but they lived despite it.
And they took their ideas

Speaker 2 that you should never take from the poor, basic idea. And they took it into the professions with them.
They took it into their work with them.

Speaker 2 And so, no, that doesn't maybe look radical when we write it down later, but I think surviving and thriving

Speaker 2 even during times of great unrest is a type of radical

Speaker 2 way of living. And I needed to see that.
I needed to see them. They can still pick up the phone and call each other and they can turn out 300 people in an hour.
What power to be able to do.

Speaker 2 And they can do that because they've been serving people in their own way for so long. And so what they reminded me is that, yes, keep up with the news.
Know what's happening.

Speaker 2 But don't think that's the work. And that in fact, if I was serving people, if I was doing something in service, if I was responsible

Speaker 2 to other people and to the things I believe in, they are right.

Speaker 2 Remarkably, at the end of the day, when I have done that, I feel far more free than I do on the days when I have kept up with all of the Supreme Court decisions and the judicial testimony and the minutiae of whatever it is Donald Trump has tweeted.

Speaker 2 Miraculously, I do feel more free when I have served people than when I have kept up with the news.

Speaker 2 They're right about that.

Speaker 1 There's this, that's the story. That's the better story.
It's like, how do you,

Speaker 1 how do you put that into words? I feel the better story in my body when I'm organizing.

Speaker 1 When I'm at a table full of people that are like, I feel that I'm like, oh, oh, this is better than the other thing.

Speaker 1 I mean, there's a reason that the, I think the American Dream whole story started from mortgage companies, if that's true.

Speaker 2 I think

Speaker 2 certainly the language of it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And there's a reason that the symbol is a fence.
Like, when you think of American Dream, you think white picket fence. That's what.
Yep.

Speaker 1 Whatever our story, the better story isn't, it's, it's not a fence.

Speaker 2 That's good. It's not a fence.

Speaker 2 Yep.

Speaker 2 No, I think that's exactly right. A lot of the ideas that we now think of as taking for granted edicts from a higher power really started either as satires or marketing campaigns.

Speaker 2 So we have the same thing with meritocracy. Meritocracy was a satire.
It was a book written to satirize the idea that you would work hard and get ahead.

Speaker 2 They thought it was funny, and he came up with this term. It was a joke.

Speaker 1 And he wrote it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he written and wrote it into our social fabric like it was some, you know, like Ben Franklin sat at the feet of Jesus and handed us this idea. You know what I mean?

Speaker 2 And it's not, it just comes from like

Speaker 2 a marketing spiel most of the time.

Speaker 1 The real,

Speaker 2 the real stuff I think that we are looking for,

Speaker 2 unfortunately is never as easily branded as that, right? The American Dream, work hard, get ahead, bootstraps, and all of that. It is harder to market,

Speaker 2 but it is much better to live it than to live. in the commercial, right? To live in the marketing campaign.

Speaker 2 I'm with you, nothing makes me feel both smaller, but more significant than organizing with people around any meaningful idea. Nothing does it.
Right.

Speaker 2 And we talk so much about what we are losing right now and what we have lost. And I have worried a lot that even I have contributed to that.
Right.

Speaker 2 Because my job, part of my job in this world, I think, is to chronicle what I think is happening and to make sense of the moment.

Speaker 2 But that means I think sometimes we haven't told people that actually, though, yes, it can be better. You also get something, you've lost something, and we are.

Speaker 2 We're asking you to give up comfort, we are asking you to give up privileges, but you get so much. And we should talk, I think, as much about what you get as what you will sacrifice.

Speaker 2 You really are. I promise you, everything I have seen says that you are a healthier, happier, more connected person

Speaker 2 when you sometimes have to argue with people about in a meeting about a movement. It doesn't sound right, but it sounds counterintuitive.

Speaker 2 But the more you argue with people about something meaningful, to do something meaningful, I promise you the happier you will be.

Speaker 2 And you are going to gain so much more than anything you gave up in comfort.

Speaker 2 But it's not a good, it's not, I know, it's not an easy story to sell, but I do think it's the truth.

Speaker 1 It's like the cure circles back

Speaker 1 to

Speaker 1 the diagnosis it's like i i so much of that anxiety that underlying anxiety to which maga etc have answers have got to be connected to our profound disconnection yes

Speaker 1 and lack of communities yes

Speaker 1 and I don't know if white people know how to be in community.

Speaker 2 I don't know if we do. Listen, you can't do it as as white people.

Speaker 2 Tell you what I mean about this. The thing is, white is a choice.
It's not like because it doesn't, being white is not

Speaker 2 a country, right? It's not a religion. It's not, right? It really did start as an idea, and then we backfilled the people,

Speaker 2 right? We needed white people, and then we decided this is who this will be. And by we, I'm being generous here because I wasn't part of that committee, but you know what I mean.
Fair enough.

Speaker 2 We made this up, and then we backfilled it. So here's the thing.
You do have to give up that. But here's the thing.
That you can give up because that is it is a construction.

Speaker 2 So no, I do believe because it's just an idea about who should be in power. It's just an idea about who deserves the right to rule.

Speaker 2 You actually don't need that to be a person.

Speaker 2 You actually don't need that to have ancestry. You don't need that to have culture.

Speaker 2 And in fact, it is usually, being white, is usually standing in the way of you having culture, ancestry, community, identity, place, and belonging, right?

Speaker 2 It's usually the thing that's standing in your way. So people,

Speaker 2 yes, I think can have it, but not while they're holding on tightly to being white.

Speaker 2 You do have to give that up, I think.

Speaker 1 Have you guys seen the

Speaker 1 One Battle After Another movie?

Speaker 2 No, but I've read so much about it. You've seen it?

Speaker 1 I fucking loved it. Okay.
But there's this one scene where shit is going down. Okay.
Like the police, they're all over the place. They're looking for the revolutionaries, everything.

Speaker 1 And Leo is like this mess of a, but he was a revolutionary. And he's, and then Venicio Del Toro is this character who is also in a movement and is protecting people and getting them out.

Speaker 1 And he hands something to Leo and he looks him in the eye. He goes, don't get selfish now

Speaker 1 and keeps going. And it was like, it felt like, don't, you're white.
Yeah. Don't evoke it.

Speaker 1 Don't, you're you're with us you could right now yep it's just like a constant not it is embodying evil fake power that's not real

Speaker 2 i think it's really yeah

Speaker 2 i think what people think they can do is they can layer a good identity on top of that poisoned one yeah

Speaker 2 right and i say to them no you're just going to keep poisoning the well

Speaker 2 you can't layer feminism on top of that you can't you know layer you know i don't know uh you know bike path guy i don't know or co-op person you can't layer any of these progressive or radical identities on top of the one that's poisoning the well you gotta root out that white power identity first and consistently constantly yeah that's the thing it i do think it is a it is a practice over time and power power is so seductive which is why that's such a good yeah, he gave him something.

Speaker 2 And now you got power. And now it matters what you choose.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it matters. That's good.
I mean, don't get selfish makes me think so much of, you know, all the different reactions people are having, which I understand completely. And it's everyone has to do.

Speaker 1 But the whole like, get out of the country, do the thing,

Speaker 1 do the protective thing

Speaker 1 is maybe a snitch of that. of like the moment of don't get selfish right now.

Speaker 1 We are all in this together.

Speaker 2 I'm sorry. And I always say to people, did those other countries ask for us? I always feel like,

Speaker 2 what a mentality to have. I'm just going to like,

Speaker 2 did they ask for us?

Speaker 1 Sure as hell not. That's what I'm thinking.

Speaker 2 I'm like, you know, most people look at us and for good reason, I'm like, nah, we're good. And I'm always like, you're going to flee.
I would, what, you know, were you invited?

Speaker 1 But that's, yeah, it's exactly.

Speaker 2 Were you invited?

Speaker 1 Aren't we just like reproducing the same problem?

Speaker 2 Like, I'm now going to go over here and do what we did here without an invitation. Isn't that how this all, this whole thing started? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Then we're going to be like, we discovered another country.

Speaker 2 No, we just have to find it.

Speaker 1 Just look at what we built.

Speaker 2 Thousands of Christopher Columbuses. All over the world.
I'm like, I think we should really think this thing through, y'all.

Speaker 1 If you broke it, you buy it.

Speaker 2 There you go. That's exactly it.

Speaker 1 You broke it, you bought it.

Speaker 2 That's exactly it. It's fair.

Speaker 1 That's our story.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 1 But you guys, it's like tied back to that, right? It's like our story is fucking Christopher Columbus. It's the poisoning of the well all the way through.

Speaker 1 And it's all that. All of it is a refusal to accept the real story.
We're all just making up stories

Speaker 1 because we don't want to look like a family. You don't want to like look at your dad and your mom.
Yeah. So you just keep repeating.
That is what we're doing.

Speaker 1 We're repeating the whole Western expansionism bullshit.

Speaker 2 Over and over again. Over and over again.
Now we're going to do it to the moon. Then we're going to do it to Mars.
And then we're going to do it beneath the ocean.

Speaker 2 Then we're going to do it on the internet.

Speaker 2 But it is the same mindset of colonizing the new place so that we can keep our bad ideas, but recreate them in a place that doesn't know they're bad ideas yet. That's it.

Speaker 2 Because you don't want to do it.

Speaker 1 That's the opposite of

Speaker 1 look around at your community, stay still.

Speaker 1 You are where you are.

Speaker 1 And take care of the people around you.

Speaker 2 That's it.

Speaker 1 That's really scary and hard.

Speaker 2 Yep. People don't do that.

Speaker 1 Amanda, go ahead. I'm sorry.
Well, I'm interested in this idea of, you know,

Speaker 1 perpetuating the story, which is what we're doing, but we're also in a moment, and specifically you, Tressie, as a chronicler of our times and as a keeper of stories.

Speaker 1 It's really scary to me in this moment what we're seeing around, you know, the effort to control story necessarily includes eradicating the parts of the story that you don't want inherited

Speaker 1 down the line. So, we're seeing right now with the Smithsonian,

Speaker 1 you know, the Department of Interior just took down,

Speaker 1 you know, the

Speaker 1 scorged back photo, which was this iconic photo of this enslaved man, Gordon, who

Speaker 1 escaped, ran 80 miles to flee enslavement. And and that became the iconic picture that was reprinted all over the north to show the

Speaker 2 horrors of slavery

Speaker 1 was just taken down.

Speaker 1 It's against ideology according to the president's directive.

Speaker 1 The women's contributions to the military, that was taken down. Japanese Americans' contributions to the military, that was taken down.

Speaker 1 Harriet Tubman exhibits in the National Park have been taken down. This is all about trying to forget.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 What to you, what does that signify to you? What do we do with that? What do we make of that in terms of the trying to remaking? Because it's very similar to forget a genocide of Native Americans.

Speaker 1 This story has always been good. That's why we're continuing this power structure.

Speaker 2 That's exactly right. The story has always been good, so there's no need to change who is writing the story.
You know, the

Speaker 2 great irony of a nation that has always been so future-oriented, because we were a new young country, right?

Speaker 2 You can't appeal to a long ancient history, so we decided to sort of colonize the future instead, right? So we're always very future-oriented.

Speaker 2 The irony, though, is that to

Speaker 2 control the future, you have to control the past.

Speaker 2 You got to control people's memories of the past.

Speaker 2 So, ironically, our obsession with the future has made us obsessed with history, owning it, controlling it, erasing it.

Speaker 2 And I think what we're seeing in this administration is just the full embodiment of that, but there's always been some element of that in the American project of exceptionalness,

Speaker 2 or exceptionalism.

Speaker 2 Are we going to go with that? Yeah.

Speaker 2 Let's go with that. It's fine.

Speaker 1 It's made up anyway, so it doesn't matter.

Speaker 2 Let me just tell you. If people want clear thinking for me these days, they better come up with new hormonal drugs.
Let me just tell you.

Speaker 2 We'll talk about that another time. Thank you.
As I said, you're getting for me what you're going to get, people.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 you got to control what people are allowed to remember.

Speaker 2 That does a couple of things, I think, especially when you can see it so clearly as we see it in Trumpism. Because one of the things that Trump does is he

Speaker 2 removes the plausible deniability. Oh, they're just building a museum.
No, he just says, No, no, no, we're just going to take all of the bad people and the women down.

Speaker 2 We're just going to take all of that away because I don't like it. America's always been good.
Get over it, right? Because this is what winners do, right? He's so

Speaker 2 overt about it that now we don't have plausible deniability.

Speaker 2 But there's always been a battle for whose stories will be remembered, whose will be enshrined in institutions, in the formal history of this country.

Speaker 2 And here's the thing. If you want to exist in the future, you have to defend people's right to remember in the present.

Speaker 2 If not, you're going to get to a future where somebody has also decided to erase you. I promise you, your fates are linked

Speaker 2 to other people's. This is why when people thought, you know, when you remove black people and indigenous people from the walls, the women were always going to come next.

Speaker 2 And then it was always going to be queer people. And then it's going to be poor people.
And then it's going to just be our enemies.

Speaker 2 Just writ large, our enemies, anybody that we don't like.

Speaker 2 If you then want to exist, if you want to project yourself into the future, you have to defend today every group's right to remember.

Speaker 2 The beauty of living in a complicated world with a document that I really really do think gives us the possibility for to live in a complicated reality.

Speaker 2 I think there's more room in our sort of constitutional structure than there is in some other existing forms of governance.

Speaker 2 Is that you have we, it is not about making everybody seen and comfortable, it is about everybody being a little uncomfortable,

Speaker 2 it's about sharing the discomfort.

Speaker 2 Everybody should be doing a little self-censorship at a dinner party.

Speaker 2 Everybody should be doing a little bit of checking their language

Speaker 2 in a public square. Everybody should be a little uncomfortable.

Speaker 2 That means the parts of my story that make me feel good about myself need to peacefully coexist with the parts of your story that says we weren't always good. and great and moral.

Speaker 2 I got to make room for both stories. If I don't, someone is going to come along.
Some fascist regime, some horrible human impulse is going to come along and decide to erase both of our stories.

Speaker 2 And that is what we're doing. And I think Trump, in particular, however, is a particular type of authoritarian in that he is doing it mostly out of self-interest.

Speaker 2 He wants to control which stories are remembered because he intends to write his story as the American story. He is about trying to protect the Trump legacy

Speaker 2 in the near future. He wants to enshrine it in these cultural institutions before he is, you know, run out, arrested, or whatever ends up happening to him.

Speaker 2 And he's just trying to get out ahead of that because he understands and appreciates probably culture and education and memory more

Speaker 2 than a lot of people who enjoy those institutions and think of themselves as progressive and open-minded. He knows how powerful they are.
He's willing to make enemies to protect them and to own them.

Speaker 2 And we aren't.

Speaker 2 Nobody thinks a library is more powerful than the person who wants to ban the books in them.

Speaker 2 They think those books are so powerful that they can change the world. So, where are we, the people who love reading and love books?

Speaker 2 We should be just as protective and vigilant and vicious about defending them as the people who would destroy them.

Speaker 2 But yeah, he believes in, he actually believes in culture, frankly, I think far more than a lot of us who like to think that he is,

Speaker 2 you know, unsophisticated and uncultured.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's such a good point. If he didn't care about, if he didn't know the power, he wouldn't be working so hard to erase all of it.

Speaker 2 He wants to get up there in the Smithsonian's board.

Speaker 2 He wants to be in charge because he knows something like, you know, or at the Kennedy Center, I should say, the Kennedy Honors is a way that the country still,

Speaker 2 you know, because they show them on broadcast television. It is a way that the country still convenes about, oh, these are the people who matter.

Speaker 2 This is the art that mattered. These are the artists that mattered, right? These are the cultural workers who matter.
He thinks that is so powerful that he wants to co-opt it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, fascists are always doing that because it's like art is the same as sex. In like, there are certain realms that power can't really directly get to.

Speaker 2 And that drives them insane. It does.

Speaker 1 It does. Like, they want to be in bed with us.
They're like, that's the sexuality, the desire in their bodies is something we can't scare them out of.

Speaker 1 So we have to try because inner power, like the that desire and joy and love of community are so effing powerful. Those are the things that actually could take them down.

Speaker 1 And of course, that's what you're seeing try to be scared out of us.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think that's exactly right.

Speaker 2 And I, and I really like putting together, I do think the creative energies, I mean, arguably both sex and art are the same spectrum, you know, on the same spectrum of that.

Speaker 2 There is something that I have found

Speaker 2 that people, you know, and not just people who like are inclined towards authoritarianism, but even people who are just self-interested or deeply unafraid or uncurious and therefore make what I think are some horrific individual choices.

Speaker 2 Something that is common among all of them is how much they resent

Speaker 2 artists and how much they resent people that make them feel desire.

Speaker 2 They resent it.

Speaker 2 And I think there's something to wanting to put forward a, you know, this administration and this cultural regime wanting to put forward a future for us where we won't have any real human interactions.

Speaker 2 They'll all be with an automated AI

Speaker 2 version of intimacy while they starve us of the means of having actual intimacy with each other.

Speaker 2 I think they are so afraid of it and so resentful of it because they can't own it, can't completely capture it, can't control it. Desire and creativity really resists power.

Speaker 2 It's very resistant to power. It's not impervious, totally impervious, but it is resistant.
And I think they just find that really threatening.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 at the end of the day, if what it essentially means to be a human and to have a life

Speaker 1 and to and what you would do to defend that if you really got to the bones of it, your own desire, your own passion, your own connection, your like that's stuff people die for.

Speaker 1 That's stuff people live for. Right.
And so if you were to put that against any kind of hierarchy of power, any kind of threat or fear,

Speaker 1 you know, your basis of humanity is going to win every time. And they know that.
So they have to kill the hunger for that. Because if you kill your hunger to remain a human, you'll fall for anything.

Speaker 2 That's right. That's right.
You will replace everything that makes you feel alive with things that are just tracking you, surveilling you, and selling you things.

Speaker 2 If they can, yes, get rid of what really are our basic human desires. We, you know, we only have a handful.
And it is,

Speaker 2 you know, to be intimate with each other physically and intellectually. It is to tell stories, seems to be a basic one, to tell stories and to imagine the future.

Speaker 2 We just got those basic desires. And if you can't, you know, beat that out of people, make people too afraid to experience them, they are much easier to control.

Speaker 2 And yeah, that's a reason why art and desire and intimacy are always considered an enemy of the people who want to use the state to control us, which is what we're living with now.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I find they're like, they really hate books. Yeah, they hate them.

Speaker 2 And I find that so fascinating. Almost, I mean, not just like I don't read, but it's like a disdain for the idea

Speaker 2 of writing a book or painting a a picture.

Speaker 2 How, like, they just, I've been in rooms with like these really sometimes powerful people, but they have that same sort of like, you know, Silicon Valley libertarian ideology and they hate it.

Speaker 2 They hate art. They hate literature so much.

Speaker 1 It's too human. I mean, doesn't Theo actually use the term post-human? He just uses that term to describe what he believes in, his vision.

Speaker 1 Post-human.

Speaker 1 Tressie, is there anything else that you want to leave us with? You are, I'm just so grateful for you.

Speaker 2 Oh, well, thank you very much for that.

Speaker 2 You know, I have been taken to task on occasion by readers who say, well, you know, you did a good job diagnosing the problem, but, you know, now I just feel hopeless on top of everything, you know, overwhelmed on top of everything else.

Speaker 2 And, you know. That is usually followed by, you know, a plaintiff, you know,

Speaker 2 plea to please tell them what to do.

Speaker 2 And then the thing is, it isn't that i there isn't uh

Speaker 2 you know an agenda for what to do that there isn't a blueprint it is that there are so many right there's so many

Speaker 2 and increasingly what i'm telling people is actually it's very simple that doesn't mean it's easy but it is very simple

Speaker 2 every day you get up try to do something try to do something with other people and then the next day do it again

Speaker 2 do something do something with other people and do it again

Speaker 2 I think that can be everything from whatever your issue is going to be. Truly, you've got to pick,

Speaker 2 you've got your choice, a range of 50, any of which could topple an authoritarian government at any time or moment. One of the things that people who study like social movements

Speaker 2 believe is that you can have all of the elements for revolutionary change. And yet it won't happen.
It won't coalesce into a moment.

Speaker 2 It won't coalesce into like a Vietnam War protest or, you know, the civil rights movement or March on Washington or Tiananmen Square.

Speaker 2 Like, and they're like, what is it about those moments that make it spark? This is the thing. You can't predict them.

Speaker 2 What happened in those moments is people had been showing up at that square, at that bridge

Speaker 2 for like 30 years. You just may not have known it, but people had just kept.
And then one day, one day, something will just, you know, lightning strikes.

Speaker 2 Our work is to be there when the lightning strikes. It may end up being that it was the community who hit on some solution for garbage.

Speaker 2 It may be, it may end up coming out of a food justice movement. It may be urban farmers markets, honey.
It may be reproductive justice. It may be, all of those things matter.

Speaker 2 They all have your values, but we don't know. But the people who show up to keep it alive until lightning strikes, those are the people doing the work that matters.

Speaker 2 And you just got to trust that the lightning does eventually eventually strike. And it really does.
Yeah. The question is:

Speaker 2 Am I creating the right environment for it? So just get up, do something, do something with other people. We are only human when we are human together.

Speaker 2 And if it threatens people and power this much, that means you need to do more of it.

Speaker 2 So just keep doing it. And then you just got to keep doing it.
You just got to keep doing it.

Speaker 1 Thank you, Tressie.

Speaker 1 Agrio. Thank you.

Speaker 2 It was a real pleasure to be here with y'all. And I mean this, you ever in Chapel Hill again, you let me know you're here.
I'd love to see you.

Speaker 1 I will do that.

Speaker 2 All right. All right.

Speaker 1 Thank you so much for everything you do for the world.

Speaker 2 Grateful.

Speaker 1 All right. Go out.
Keep working. So when the lightning strikes, you get to be one of the ones who celebrate.
And if you don't, you don't get to be.

Speaker 2 That's right.

Speaker 1 If you don't, the lightning will strike you.

Speaker 2 There you go. You don't get to then let her say we were the witches who survived if you didn't burn it down.

Speaker 2 You don't get to do that, people.

Speaker 1 Plus, it'll be so much more fun.

Speaker 1 And that's the thing. If you get into it with other people, this is not, this is either, oh, damn it, we have to, or it's a, we get to.
We get to be the ones who defended this place from this tyranny.

Speaker 1 That's what we get to do. That's true.
And we get to do it together.

Speaker 2 That's it. It's our turn.
That's all this is. It's history doing what history does.
It's just our turn. That's right.
Let's go. We get to do it.
It's our turn.

Speaker 1 All right. Let's go.

Speaker 1 You heard it here, Pod Squad.

Speaker 2 After a nap.

Speaker 2 I'm definitely in it. I am definitely in it, though.

Speaker 2 Maybe a little brunch.

Speaker 1 And some hormones. And definitely.

Speaker 1 Get your patches on, bitches. We're going.

Speaker 2 Patches. Patches.
Get it easy.

Speaker 2 Hand me a magnesium and whatever else they're selling right now. And then I'm totally in it.
I'm ready to go. We will burn it down.

Speaker 2 I'm ready.

Speaker 1 God bless you and

Speaker 1 trust me. God bless you.

Speaker 2 See you next time.

Speaker 1 We Can Do Hard Things is an independent production podcast brought to you by Treat Media. Treat Media makes art for humans who want to stay human.

Speaker 1 And you can follow us at We Can Do Hard Things on Instagram and at We Can Do Hard Things Show on TikTok.