Using Storytelling to Address Complex Social Issues: Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom

Jen: Everybody, welcome to the for the love podcast. We’re happy to have you. I mean, I’m serious. Like we’re happy to have you today. We just finished our interview. Like we’re both just kind of looking at each other like, yeah, you know, it’s a special day when you get to spend an hour with a brilliant thinker.

Amy: An hour that felt like five minutes and when it was over, I was like, wait, I have 18 more questions. 

Jen: Same. I wanted to hang on to her ankle and be like, I’ve got something else I want to talk to you about, her fascinating blend of academia with storytelling is so special.

I think this is why she is everywhere. We’re getting ahead of ourselves. But all I’m telling you is this is a day that you are not going to want to stop for one second. You need to listen beginning to end. And I want to remind you of something that’s kind of new that Amy and I are like super pumped about over at jenhatmaker.com.

First of all, it’s every podcast we’ve ever done. So go over there and peruse at your leisure and we’ve got links and story notes and just everything’s over there. But a new feature that we’ve just added is a audio feature where you, you can just, with the click of a button, you can leave us a message.

You can tell us a story. You can ask a question. You can respond to a prompt that we have given you. You can respond to an interview you just heard. And we’re going to, play a bunch of those. 

Amy: Yeah. Just leave a voicemail. 

Jen: We now have a feature in which you can leave me and Amy a voicemail.

And we are gonna use a bunch of those on the show. In fact, we’re gonna use those as generators for like, Hey. Sarah from Cincinnati asked us this and we’re going to play Sarah’s question and then we’re going to answer it or talk about it or whatever.

So, we would love to hear your response to this conversation you’re about to listen to. When you get to the end of this episode, pop over to jenhatmaker. com under the podcast tab, tell us what you think, tell us what you heard, tell us what you’re learning, or what was a fascinating thing for you to hear today, because I’m telling you, it’s a long list.

Amy: I went back and watched, several interviews she did with a live audience. 

Jen: Oh yeah. 

Amy: And invariably, she just says one sentence and you can hear the audience gasp. Everyone’s going to have some thoughts about this one. 

Jen: I know.

I’m energized. My brain is buzzy. I got like the energy sweats. Do you know what I mean? I have energy, sweaty armpits from such a high level conversation. Could have gone on for 12 hours. Before we get to it, because I want to save the majority of your listening time that you are so generously giving us today for this episode and for her.

So we’re just gonna do one segment today before we bring her on, which is adjacent and it’s a little Bless and Release

very adjacent to our guests area of expertise. Let’s talk about The Bless and Release feature of keeping up with the news cycle, which is now, of course, 24/7.

Amy: Yes. 

Jen: It is now entertainment news. You and I grew up with CBS, ABC, NBC, Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, news. The national news, we got 30 minutes a day and it covered the gamut of things, supposedly impartial, certainly more than today. And now we have infotainment news, and it never ends. 

Amy: It’s so hard, and I actually am in very different place than I was four years ago. 

Jen: So am I. 

Amy: Six years ago. I used to think it was my personal responsibility to educate myself every single day on what was happening. So I could talk to my kids about it. So I could talk to my neighbors about it. So we could formulate what we knew was true and what our next response was. But it’s impossible to keep up with all of it. 

Jen: Not only impossible, terrible for us. 

Amy: It’s terrible. And one of my neighbors took a step back years ago and every so often she’d say it’s so unhealthy. I was white knuckling it from a place of control and thinking that I was not doing my due diligence, my patriotic duty by not, Keeping up with what was happening. 

Jen: Like we were abdicating our responsibility to a better world if we weren’t listening to every single thing.

Amy: But what I had to acknowledge is It’s almost impossible to find, an unbiased source that isn’t rooted in entertainment.

Jen: Yeah. 

Amy: And money. 

Jen: Yeah. Sarah and Beth over at Pantsuit Politics taught me years ago, all cable news is slanted. I was like, what about the cable news shows that I like? They’re like, same sies. Yeah. Yeah. I’m like, yeah, it is. 

Amy: So I’ve, I mean, that was a hard truth to swallow. 

Jen: Totally. 

Amy: But, I did.

I follow a couple of independent journalists. Yeah. I follow Alison Gill across platforms. News with Swearing. 

Jen: Like, obviously, that’s your perfect genre. 

Amy: And then I read, people that I think I can trust and then if I learn differently, I don’t beat myself up about it. I just go try to find another voice and I really do believe in this.

I know it’s woo woo, but like collective consciousness. And if I spend all my time like nose into disaster info, then, I’m putting that into the world. 

Jen: That’s right. 

Amy: By consuming it. 

Jen: That’s the energy that you then reflect. 

Amy: Yeah. So I do think we need to spend so much more time in our real lives.

Jen: Tressie says this at the top of our interview 

Amy: Doing the good things because it matters. 

Jen: She said if you spend one hour on social spend two hours building something in God’s world. 

Amy: So I’m real sad about it. I was a news junkie, but, it’s not healthy. We need to be educated, but we don’t need to be part of the problem. And I don’t need to be the product anymore. 

Jen: That’s right. Well, there’s a neurological component to it also, because we are genuinely not neurologically built to sustain this level of constant outrage. We’ve seen all the, I’m going to get this wrong, so just don’t quote this listener, but you know, it’s something like we now consume in one day of just social media and cable news, like input what we used to consume in a month.

Oh yeah. Just information, information, outrage, bad news, hot takes. Hot takes didn’t really used to even be a thing. Not in the way that they are today. So we are not built for this. This is why we are overstimulated. Our central nervous systems are absolutely out of control. We’re unhealthy.

We’re sick. It’s not just a bad idea for how it makes us feel in our hearts. It’s how it feels in our bodies. And then ultimately, like you said, in our communities, because then we just reflect all of that chaos. I know. I have done it. I have been a mirror of chaos.

Amy: I was treating people differently. Like, if they wanted me to disengage. I would think with, righteous anger. I can’t disengage. You’re not paying attention. So I have to pay attention twice as much. 

Jen: How nice for you that you can just check out of what’s happening in the world. 

Amy: They were right. 

Jen: And that does not mean that we are disengaged from injustice at all. I’ve mentioned this several times, but I have not been back on the news, cable news, one time since November 5th. Not one time, not a single minute of a single day.

I still know absolutely everything that’s happening, that’s important. And I feel it in my bones it’s not, I feel it like tra la la, I don’t care, I’m not paying attention because you know I do, but I just feel it in a way that is not so, triggered and unhelpful because it’s all emotion, all flash, all heat.

It’s more thoughtful. A little bit more analytical we could not possibly bring you a better. leader and thinker through these big ideas than the guest that we have today. We have probably one of the sharpest minds out there. Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom, she is a cultural critic, a highly celebrated sociologist, an award winning writer and she has a rare gift of communication. Sometimes I’ve had plenty of academics on the show and, they’re very, academicy dense, and data driven, which, matters too, but she has this rare gift to blend the academic perspective with a storyteller’s communication savvy.

She’s a professor, probably, God, they must clamor to get in her classes. 

Amy: Can you imagine? 

Jen: No. I bet, I am sure. They are full on the first ten minutes they open. She’s a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill at their Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life. Her work dives into huge ideas like racial capitalism.

Like, see, I would have liked to have talked to her about that. We did not get to everything we needed. 

Amy: Next time. 

Jen: Beauty standards. She’s done a lot of work around the exploitation of higher education systems, which is fascinating, interesting work. All in a way that you and I, just ordinary Joes, can absolutely understand, and process. And connect to, and relate to. She had a groundbreaking debut called Lower Ed. Some of its biggest fans were Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. That book shined a light on how profit and debt took over american higher education Any of us with student loans or students who are heading into that are like, who will help us here?

It’s it’s a whole system that she analyzed. She has an essay collection called Thick which was a National Book Award finalist, and it’s just incredible blend of honesty and wit, she’s funny, and just powerful storytelling. And she is a New York times columnist. That’s where I see a lot of her current work. 

She’s a 2020 MacArthur fellow, which is a fancy thing for smart people. If you don’t know what that is. And her work matters right now. Her voice matters. Her leadership matters. I told her at the end of this interview, I listened to her because I believe her and I trust her and I think that you will too.

I met her on the Oprah special last year, chased her down in the hallway afterwards and told her she was the smartest person in the room. We’ve been trying to get her on the show ever since. Lucky us, and lucky you. Please enjoy this riveting and fascinating, brilliant conversation with the incredible Dr.

Tressie McMillan Cottom.

Well, I will tell you that I have been very much looking forward to having Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom the show. And I’ll tell you why. First of all, hi and welcome. 

Tressie: Hi Jen. Hey, Amy. Good to be here. 

Jen: Okay, first of all, she’s a doctor. She’s a PhD. Her credentials are as long as our arms, she has given us permission to call her Tressie, but you can put respect in your mouth. She’s got a doctor in front of it if you ever meet her out in the wild. 

Second of all. You and I were both on the Oprah special last year. 

Tressie: I know. Still not over it, frankly. 

Jen: Same. I don’t think I slept for a week. What are we doing? I don’t even remember what I said.

It was like a fever dream. I had to go home and look at it on the camera to be like, I have no idea. People are like, what’d you say? I’m like, who could know? I don’t know. I was looking deep into Oprah’s eyes and that’s all I remember. We sat in that room for three hours without a break, I heard the gamut of everybody she had invited to that conversation from various perspectives we were all bringing our different analysis to the table based on what we do. I. Okay. Ran after you after the show, you were walking down the hall with one of your friends or colleagues.

And I like in my heels, in my green heels was racing down the hill and I stopped you. And I just said, you were the smartest person in that room and I am so moved by everything you said and if it were not Oprah, I wanted you to give you my segment. I’m like, let’s let her have mine. Give her 12 more minutes.

Um, just a, a brilliant, a brilliant thinker and sociologist and analyst and leader. And so from that day, I’ve been telling my podcast team, I’m like, whatever we have to do to get her into this room, let’s please try. 

Tressie: And listen, and all it took was a, Hey, want to come on? Cause I told you that day, any time. And I meant it. 

Jen: You did. And here you are. And thank you. Thanks for being with us this morning. I’ve really been looking forward to this conversation. So let’s start here, Tressie. For our listening community, who’s new to you today, they’re, they’re meeting you for the first time. Can you talk a little bit about your story arc, um, where you came from, what, what interested you at a young age to draw you into the path that you’re now on and some of the like mega steps that you took to get here?

Tressie: Oh, that’s a great question. One that really, I think if you’d asked me that question, by the way, Jen, maybe even as recently as two or three years ago, I would have really struggled to answer it by the way. So, you know, yay for growth, uh, you know, yay for therapy and time and space for reflection. Right?

Yay for getting older, probably, so, and I’m also, I’m in, I’m in the middle of writing my first attempt at a memoir. So you also have to take this time when you’re doing that, you know, to kind of reflect in a way that life has not always afforded me the opportunity to like a lot of women.

So listen, I am today, you know, I’m a professor, I’m a researcher, a writer, a New York times I wasn’t supposed to be any of those things. Let’s just start there. I am a, I’m from North Carolina and, for anyone born outside of like the major U. S. cities, know, there’s no real understanding that you will go from like Kansas or North Carolina, whatever, to these places.

But I’m a big reader, come from a family of big readers, and I cannot overstate how much reading shifted my perspective of the scale of the world and I will always, always be so deeply grateful to my family for developing that in me. I have been told that I was a, you know, sassy mouth girl, you know? Uh, which I know you find so hard to believe. This is a great, so you can say, yeah, yeah, shocking, shocking. I know. 

And as it turns out, when you are a sassy mouth little girl who reads a lot coming along in the eighties when I was in school, eighties and nineties, they tell you, you’ve really only got like, three jobs you can do you were gonna be a lawyer. You were gonna be a teacher. They didn’t really put doctor in front of me, but it’s like, you know lawyer a teacher or something. And so that’s what I thought I would be. I went to college to become an attorney. And then did that thing that women do, right? I end up instead having this major detour I get married and you know settle down to do sort of a really traditional path for myself, that never quite fit, if I’m honest with you.

Jen: Yeah. 

Tressie: And I knew it didn’t fit, but the problem is they told sassy mouth, little girls, what job you were supposed to do, but they didn’t tell you what life to lead. 

Jen: That’s a great point. 

Tressie: And I, you know, and I just really, I struggled to figure it out in a way that I think lots of women do. so I ended up just doing what was prescribed. I got married, uh, had children, um, had a horrible birth story. And that changes my life, right? I, uh, I think every life has a trauma. So like there’s nothing really special about mine, but whatever your trauma is, you are then faced with a decision, usually. Which is, do I want to be who I was before this, or am I going to be something different?

And for me, marriage and working in corporate America, all of that, it always chafed. And so I thought, well, no, if I’m, you know, if life is being blown up, I’ll just blow it all up. And that’s the start of what I kind of call my 2. 0, my second life. I go back to college, uh, and just kind of never stop. And that’s how I ended up with a PhD. 

Jen: Sure. Listen, they’ll keep giving you degrees if you want to keep showing up to the 

 classroom, right? 

Tressie: Isn’t it amazing? My father told me one day, he said, you know, if you just keep showing up, they will give you the diploma. And I’m like, what? And as it turned out, yeah, he was right.

Jen: That’s true. 

Tressie: Uh, and discovered along the way though, that I love really hard questions. I am my happiest if I can call it happy. I’m certainly I think my most connected and joyful when I am trying to disentangle a really hard social problem that I think, if I want to be honest, I think everybody’s got wrong. I’m really attracted to those places, those things where, our beliefs are totally counterintuitive. Our gut is telling us something’s there, but the picture’s really fuzzy. And I think I’m attracted to that because, again, my path was so abnormal and so unique that I know that I wouldn’t have existed if people had just gone along with what was supposed to be and so I’m always looking at places where I think that’s happening. And that’s how I end up, you know being a writer and cultural commentator and a researcher 

Jen: That’s such a rare and specific space to occupy and not one to find easily. That’s not the job description they give to the sassy mouthed girls. You will unravel complicated social constructs. What’s that? Where’s that on a list of jobs? Like you really had to fight for that to find it. 

Tressie: When I went to undergrad, I didn’t quite know what one did in graduate school. I remember a professor having to sit me down and explain what that job even was.

And I thought, well, yeah, okay, you mean go to the library and read? I’ve been doing that my whole life. Um, but you know, learning the systematic way and doing research. And then certainly no one told me that writing was something you could do for a job. Writing, one, was for men. I thought for a long time, I remember, I thought only dead men were published. 

Jen: Dead white men. 

Tressie: Yeah. Because that’s all I’ve ever been assigned. I, I quite literally remember the first time I read something in a textbook written by a living black woman. 

Jen: Oh, right. Revolutionary. 

Tressie: And I didn’t know you could do it. I remember asking the teacher, what do you mean she’s alive? Where does she live? How was she in a book? Uh, and so I didn’t even know those were options. So much of my life has been building things that I didn’t know existed. 

Amy: Wow. 

Jen: Wow. Yeah. 

Amy: Your work often blends your personal narrative with really sharp sociological analysis. So when did you discover the power of combining those two things?

Jen: Yeah. Sometimes that’s one half of the brain or the other, but not always both. 

Tressie: Never both actually. I mean, and when you are trained to be an academic and a researcher, the first thing they really could try to, you know, condition out of you is all of that personal stuff. Right. No one wants to hear it. It’s not testable. It’s not provable. It’s not science. Um, the challenge for me was that I had come from a place where I thought, especially the women who raised me, my grandmother, my mother, I was very fortunate. I had my great grandmother for many years. I thought they sounded as intelligent as my professors. And so I really struggled with the idea that there was something counterfeit or illegitimate about them and their stories and the things I had learned from them.

And I struggled so much with the idea that you had to be one or the other. And I will tell you, Amy, what happened. I sat down one day to start writing something that was supposed to be an academic paper in that, you know, removed academic voice of God that we’re all supposed to write in. And all that would come out of me was the voice of my grandmother.

Jen: That’s so good. 

Tressie: And I wrote it mostly for myself. And this is the early days of the internet. If anybody remembers where you could post things online and not have it ruin your life. 

Jen: It was a different time. 

Tressie: It was a very different time. I put an essay to that effect. I wrote it because it had no place. I was just, you know, trying out this thing that I felt compelled to do.

I put that essay on the internet and frankly, it changes my life. Right. It early days of going viral again, when that was still a good thing. And, um, And it found an audience. And I thought, Oh! Here’s what I learned. People will read the thing that is written in an authentic voice. 

Jen: That’s right. 

Tressie: Nobody goes and reads the dissertation.

Jen: No, no. And they’re compelled by story. 

Tressie: Stories are the only things that have ever mattered in the history of the world. 

Jen: That’s right. 

Amy: Yep. 

Tressie: I truly believe that. And I thought if you give up something as powerful as storytelling, because somebody in a university told you to, then you deserve exactly what your full self gets, as my grandmother would say.

So, uh, I just started experimenting with that, and to this day, the things that I have written in that vein have had far more impact than anything I ever write as a researcher.

Jen: I want to drill in a little bit to the space in which you occupy your cultural critiques, your systemic critiques, your institutional critiques are laser focused. They’re precise. They are piercing. They uh, they take no shit. 

Tressie: Thank you. I’m super proud of that one, Jen. Thank you girl. 

Jen: You, you, you have to in the world in which you occupy. Mm-hmm . You have to have a spine of steel, as a woman, as a black woman, as an academic, using storytelling features in your work. Uh, you’ve got, you’re, you’ve gotta be the tough as flint and you are. But it’s to me, it is the precision with which your analysis digs into the crooks and crannies of a system, of a cultural standard. And it just, the way in which it rings so immediately true, even against norms, even against the prevailing powers of the day, of course, which it almost always is, is pretty stunning in its capacity.

This is such a broad question and I wish you good luck as you answer it, but I’d like to hear if you could pick maybe one of the cultural critiques that you really love to like, to drill into, to examine, to sort of turn over, to turn a page on the story, I’d like to hear maybe the arc of that process, why, why it captures your imagination, what you then do with it. All of it. I see that’s a really insane question. 

Tressie: No, that is a process question. It is so smart. Thank you. I love, first of all, process. I could talk about this stuff all day. So you stopped me when this train… 

Jen: That’s what we’re doing here. 

Tressie: I love this stuff because you know, uh, it is really the combination of, I think the best parts of how I was trained and how I was socialized and loved, which is again, you come from Southerners. We tell a story, black people love a story. 

Jen: Totally. 

Tressie: You throw all that in there. And then women, are you kidding me? The women raised me, we are storytellers. And the first thing you learn when you are a storyteller in a community is you have a responsibility to other people, right? A storyteller in the South, in the black tradition, I think even in the female tradition, the storyteller has a responsibility to the audience, right?

We can’t waste your time. We got to make it worth your attention, right? So I always feel a responsibility and I’m not sure that’s totally common among everybody who writes for the public. So I wed that with the fact that I was trained, however, to look for data. To look for places where people haven’t looked, right, where things are unclear.

So the combination of those two things, what that looks like in everyday life for me is, I’m reading something or I’m eavesdropping, if I’m honest with you. I’m out walking around, I’m eavesdropping, right? And I can hear someone telling a story or I can read an article and my gut will say, That’s not quite it.

Right? It’s not quite it. Like sometimes it’s that they wrote this like really dry piece and didn’t think of how to make this interesting for the reader. That’s the storyteller in me. And I go, what would be a good way to tell this through a story? Then on the other side, there can be a story I’ll hear people telling themselves.

That’s the thing that happens in eavesdropping a lot. Over here, people telling a story and I go, aha, but I don’t think they know what’s behind that. The data, the research, the history, right? The economics. And so something I call it my sociological Spidey sense will start tingling, right? Uh, it never fails me to look for a place where people are having a great big emotion about something. Shoutin’ about it, crying about it, complaining about it. Right. And, but they’re like using absolutely nothing concrete to talk about it. 

Jen: Just hyperbole. 

Tressie: There you go. Have you ever had, you know, when kids before they get all of their language, but they’ve got the big feelings and they come to you and they go, I’m bleeding to death, I’m dying. And you go, what? And it’s like, you know, they fell and they hit their knee. Adults still do that. And if I look for those places, there’s almost always some deeply held belief that people don’t want to examine. There’s a story they’ve been telling themselves that they know at a gut level is not quite true. Uh, and they are defensive and scared. And I go, Oh, that’s the, that’s the place I need to go first. Right. 

The best place for that, by the way, is anything about women because of the way we’ve told women’s stories in this society, we don’t tend to take seriously the things women need to tell a good story.

So like science, medical science doesn’t know anything about how and why we feel pain, for example. We have horrible data about women’s lives, but tons of lived experiences and stories. So that’s why I think it’s always I can almost always rely on something around women, around race, around beauty. 

Let me tell you something. Nothing has been more generative to me than our deeply held, unexamined beliefs about beauty to hide all that stuff. We are uncomfortable with but yeah, those are the places where like we talk a lot, but don’t have really good words about it but we got really big feelings and when I see that happen on social media or overhear it in a coffee shop or I read something, I go, yep. I gotta go there.

Jen: Mm hmm before you get to your question because this it’s fascinating to me. I am moved by data and I’m also a storyteller. You’re just in my cross section. So like, I’d love to hear you go one step further on that. So let’s just say beauty. Cause you just used that for an example, which is a big, you’ve written and spoken and taught so much around this.

Give us an example. You’re like, all right, this, there’s a lot going on here. There’s a lot of emotion in the room, a notable lack of research and science around it because women aren’t valuable in that way to the culture. Pick one thing where you go, this is a, this is an idea that I’d like us to look at differently. This is something that you’ve written about. This is something that you’ve kind of exposed in a different way. 

Tressie: Yeah. Oh, there’s, there’s no doubt that my, for, especially for young readers or new readers to me, um, a very offhanded comment I once made on Tik TOK about blonde and the history of blondes and that blonde is politics, right?

Jen: Oh, did you like light a match? Did you light a match? 

Tressie: Thought I was going to have to move. Do you hear me? 

Jen: And I actually believe it 

Tressie: As recently as a month ago, I’m standing in line to go see, it was a movie we’re all going to see, so like, maybe it might’ve been Baby Girl or something, you know, just standing in line and a woman comes up to me and she says, I just want you to know, I tried not dying my hair for a month. And I went back and I don’t care what you say. And I was like, well, hello to you too. We’re definitely strangers and I just want to remind you of that, but like, yeah, there’s still, there’s still, I was standing on a street corner in New York, New York, the center of the world. And I hear a woman behind me whisper, that’s the girl who wrote about blonde.

Jen: Crazy. It’s deep. Oh, it’s deep in the water. 

Tressie: Well that just means I’m just going to write about it till the day I die. Are you kidding me? But also this is one of those places right where I thought, Whoa, look at the response to this. Right. I saw a Tik Tok and it was a young woman talking to her mother.

Trying to get our mother to like give someone proof that she had been born blonde. Oh boy. And she was like, no ma, tell this person. She was handing her mother the phone going, tell him, tell him, I’ve been telling them and they don’t believe me. And her mom is going, what are you talking about? Yes, you were blonde, you know?

And I thought, okay, we’re just taking this at face value, but that’s actually a really odd exchange. Yeah, you’re right. Yeah. Right. What’s so powerful here that you would call your mother? Uh, to tell a third party that you have been born blonde. 

Jen: What’s under that? And then what’s under that? And then let’s go, what’s under that? Cause there’s stuff. 

Tressie: Girl, as it turns out, you could go all the way to the eighth circle of Hades on this thing. It keeps going. And so the outsized emotion there, right? The fact that we had such a neat little story, blondes have more fun. 

Jen: Sure. 

Tressie: Yeah. I like blonde. It covers my gray. Right. Okay. I’ve heard them all. And I go, all of that is true. And I like to point out the scene from, Devil Wears Prada, you know, uh, where I think it’s Miranda, she turns to her and goes, you think you chose to wear blue today? That’s right. Let me tell you why you’re wearing cerulean blue.

That’s exactly right. Well, that’s me with like, Oh, you think you just got low lights? Right. Well, let me talk to you about that. 

Jen: That’s great. 

Amy: Oh my gosh. 

Jen: Yeah. Oh, it’s so good. Oh, I could talk to you about this stuff for a hundred years. 

Tressie: You and me both. That’s the problem. Yeah. 

Amy: Mm hmm. You’ve written about how technology platforms, um, you’re on TikTok a lot, how they amplify certain inequities, particularly in marginalized communities. So how can we use these platforms, this technology, these spaces in a way to empower rather than exploit?

Jen: And talk about how that exploitation happens. 

Tressie: Oh yeah. 

Jen: Yeah. 

Tressie: You know, It said last week, for the first time publicly, and I’m going to double down on that mistake here with you all, that when you look at the arc of social media and platforms, the internet, whatever we want to call it now, the internet is social media, right? There used to be two different things, but like this, you know, this is always going on this thing. So you say social media and there was a moment and I remember it, uh, early 2010s where we really had this sense that social media could create enough cultural connections. We were really talking about things like Arab Spring and democracy and how social media made this possible especially for women across the world, that there was this like really radical potential in social media And it pains me to say but I think the evidence now is in and it’s clear that that moment was quick and it’s over. 

Where we are now with social media platforms, the internet that we have inherited, which was not the internet we had to have. These were some decisions that were made. These were political decisions. These were economic decisions. We didn’t have to have this internet, but the reality is this is the internet that we’ve got. And what that means is that every inequality in the quote unquote, real world, the offline world also exists online and online is making all of them worse. 

I mean, the data to me now are just really clear on this. I’ll have my young people who of course reject this outright, my students. Right. And they go, no, no, no. You know, I used to be depressed and I met a group of people online and they saved my life and I go, you are absolutely right, honey. And at the exact same time, social media made millions and millions of more people feel alone and led to their depression. 

Jen: That’s right. 

Tressie: And I’ll say to them now, in a world where you found your collective online and we know this other big thing is happening, let’s talk trade offs, let’s talk risk. Which of these do we want to build a world for? And these are the questions I think we’re faced with now when we know for a fact, for example, that everything we’re putting into these platforms, into these machines, they go into a big black hole. And what these platforms now know about us, what they know about children, which really scares me, allows some pretty nefarious actors.

Listen, Twitter could be great in 2010, but we can see what happens to it in 2023. 

Jen: That’s right. Yeah. 

Tressie: We’re up for sale. All that stuff we produce is up for sale. 

Jen: That’s right. The people are the product. 

Tressie: The people are the product. And what that means when things can change hands, politics can change in an instant, is that suddenly the places where vulnerable people, gay people, young trans people, poor women, women who live deeply patriarchal oppressed societies. They thought they were in a safe space online. And then overnight you’re not, right? Uh, and your data can be used against you. So what does that mean though, for the choices we make? I’m not one of these that says you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. We’re online. As you said, I mean, I’m on TikTok, right? 

We’re all implicated. So that’s my first thing I want people to know. Everybody’s implicated, even if you do good on them. That’s just what it means to live in a society, right? Your good deeds can be used against other people. What I think it means, though, is I like to say, if the genie is out of the bottle on social media, creating all of these negative consequences, we’ve got to build a bigger, meaner genie.

Amy: Oh! 

Tressie: Uh huh. I think that means then, sure use online, but maybe for every I don’t know how are you spend on that? You actually build something in the real world. 

Jen: That’s good. 

Tressie: I don’t know what that is. Is it your book club? I don’t know. Is it your gardening? I don’t know. Right. We got millions of people. There are millions of different ways to do this, but if that thing is going to exist, maybe we can create and devote twice as much of our attention, which is so valuable now and our energies to something that will build a bigger genie. So real spaces real communities, you know, I don’t mean I know this sounds ridiculous because I don’t think I could do it but you know, what if ever for every comment we left online, we actually also send somebody a letter or picked up the phone and called. 

Jen: I hear what you’re saying. It’s an imagination for a different world.

Tressie: Yes!

Jen: But we have to opt into it and that’s the tricky thing. 

Tressie: That’s the thing because we don’t have to opt in to the Tik Tok, to Facebook, right? That’s happening whether we are there or not, but for the rest of this, you do have, you have to make a choice. You have to make a decision. And that’s the hard part. Uh, but I think that the stakes now are sufficiently high. 

Jen: Yeah, I do too. 

I want to, I want to talk about that. I want to talk about stakes. Of course, unsurprisingly, your voice was tapped immediately after the election on major spaces and platforms just searching for meaning explanations for a lot of us. Is there hope? Are we doomed? You know, there’s just this collect talk about big emotion. Oh gosh. Yeah. I’m talking about big emotion. If emotion is your North star, you’re busy, your job is secure. You have job security. 

I just would like to hear you talk about the second Trump presidency. I, I want to just open this up and I want you to just say whatever you want to say, but as we are examining democracy literally at its core as certainly equity and equality, power, money, norms and the eradication of norms, that I think a lot of us probably just took for granted would always be upheld, marginalized communities and how they fit into this new Trump world. And cause the, the second Trump presidency is now some things that even alarmed centrists. The first go around from 2016 to 2020 or, um, sort of, old standard Republicans have become normalized so much over the last decade that even that is not ringing an alarm bell.

I’m throwing a thousand things at the wall but with your analytical brain, your social brain, I’d like to just hear some of your thoughts on where we’re at and where we’re going. 

Tressie: I am working so hard these days to try to get like a really good linear through line because as you point out It’s everything. So part of what’s been stunning to me and it didn’t much stunned me, I will admit about this second administration, I thought that he was the leader to win. I thought he would win. I knew and trusted that this administration would have learned this term, he would have learned the lessons from his first, he was going to be more brutally efficient. That was always a concern of mine. He now knows how it works and he knows what to get away with. Right. And I thought everything he did in the first term, whatever you thought he did it, you know, buckle in if he wins again, none of that has surprised me. Do you know what has surprised me is the complete capitulation from the other side that just collapse into the despondency when this thing was predictable.

I don’t know where our, you know, where were we in the bunkers, right? We saw this thing coming, and so I’ve thought a lot about that, and I think part of that is, as a storyteller, I do think we have a lack of a good story about what has happened, and without it, this is what I think happens to human beings when the world is complicated and they don’t have a story about it.

I think this is a perfect example of why, first of all, storytellers, Jen, like you and the people we love are so important. Without it, people actually they’re just sitting ducks. You can tell them anything. Right? That’s right. And so I’m working so hard to come up with a story and I’ll tell you what I’ve got now with the caveat that I reserve the right to revise.

Jen: Certainly. It’s early. 

Tressie: Thank you. 

First, I think it’s important for us to stop the gaslighting. It is as bad as you think it is. 

Jen: That’s good. 

Tressie: Let’s stop this. Right. I think, especially as women, we know what gaslighting does to us. And one of the things that, uh, that I’m going to use as a standard for the whole thing, cause now it’s not just Trump, right? It’s the whole, the whole ball of wax, but they have been so good at convincing you that you don’t see you see. 

Jen: That’s right. 

Tressie: If you see Elon Musk do a Nazi salute, it’s a Nazi salute. 

Jen: That’s right. It’s what it is. 

Tressie: This is the most legible overt political administration in history.

If you see it, you saw it. It’s happening. Okay. Uh, and to, the second thing I want to say is believe him. We spent so much time as first administration trying to poke holes and call, you know, find out where he was lying and all of this. No, no, no, no, no, no. What we should have learned from his first administration is that we should believe him.

Jen: That’s right.

Amy: Yes. 

Jen: It’s also a pretty simple response. 

Tressie: That’s it. All right. So no need to go wasting all of your time and energy looking for the truth, when it comes to this he is going to try to do exactly what he said. All right. So, all right, so we’ve already taken some of our time and energy back, right?

Jen: That’s good. 

Tressie: Here’s what I’d love us to do at that time and energy. I would like for us to focus less on what Donald Trump, you know, how he got away with it, how we got here and focus more on what vacuum was he filling? 

Jen: Oh, that’s a great question. What do you think? 

Tressie: Yeah. Cause this is all this is, this was the, this was the right court jester showed up at the right time to fill the vacuum.

So let’s focus on the vacuum. Here’s what I think the vacuum is. I think for a lot of us, you talked about the eradication of norms. Some people woke up and that was happening four years ago, but the truth is this has been happening for at least 20 years for some people. And there is, I think we need to, again, almost all of us are implicated here in not paying attention to how things were changing for people who are less fortunate than ourselves.

Jen: You’re right. 

Amy: Yeah. 

Tressie: The canaries in the coal mine were already there. 

Jen: You’re right. 

Tressie: The question was, why did you miss them? Why did you convince yourself it wasn’t that important? Right. Because now here’s the thing. It’s come for all of us. Right. This is self interest to care about people. We always focus on like, do you care about the less privileged because it’s the right moral thing to do? I like to focus on the fact that it is also the smart, pragmatic thing to do. Because it will come for you eventually. So it’s in your own self interest to care. 

Jen: That’s good.

Tressie: And so I think the vacuum he has filled is that there are a lot of very scared people who have experienced a total collapse of social norms and the only person telling them a story about why that has happened is Donald Trump. 

Jen: That’s so resonant. 

Tressie: He’s telling you who to blame? He’s telling you who will fix it, right?

So my challenge, and I think our collective challenge, everybody who has the ability and the privilege to do so, is to say, here’s a better story. The story is actually somebody was supposed to be watching the clock, and we let them off the hook. Even when we like them, and I’m going to hold us all accountable, listen.

You can love your Democratic representatives, but I think we need to be honest. They took their eye off the ball in some instances. And we should ask ourselves, why? Why aren’t we hearing about, I should turn on the news every night, I think, and I should hear an important story about how regular people are surviving climate change, and stagnating wages, and I should know that this thing is happening.

And when it isn’t happening, how do you hold somebody accountable for it? Because that’s the vacuum that I think Donald Trump and this administration and the shift to like really nasty politics has done. Um, and I, the other thing I would say is I don’t think it’s over. Yes. The train has left the station, but at the same time, y’all, it’s not over these things.

If you look at history, history moves slow, but when it moves, it moves real fast. You got these big slow gaps and then all of a sudden overnight, everything can change. 

Jen: You’re right. 

Tressie: And I think our challenge now is to be the people who decide what that change is going to be right now because we’re in that moment.

We’re in the moment of the rapid change. That’s right. Okay. And so our challenge is to be those people to help determine what change is going to be. And I do think there’s still a chance to win. But not if you spend all of your energy looking for the ways that, you know, Donald Trump lied or, uh, yeah. So, so what?

Jen: Yeah. Yeah. He lied. That’s what it is. Move on. Move on. You don’t need to exegete the whole thing. It’s just what it is on its face. What do we do with it? 

Tressie: It reminds me if we’ve all had the girlfriends or maybe even we’ve been the girlfriends, I’m going to be fair, who have, you know, had the horrible boyfriend and they become obsessed with litigating everything he did.

And you go, but girl, you already know he did that. Why are you still looking for proof? 

Jen: That’s a good example. 

Amy: Let it go. He’s the ex you think he is. Let’s, let’s get to work now. 

So, acknowledging what this looks like, now being honest with ourselves, what is your forecast of what this administration means to education, technology, labor, climate… 

Tressie: Climate, by the way, is I think the big– I did a, um, uh, probably ill advised, uh, Instagram live recently because I didn’t have hair, makeup, or light, but my point stood, which is I think a lot of this anxiety we have has been about the fact that we have not tackled the hard questions that climate change is bringing. 

Jen: And it’s urgent. It’s imminent. 

Tressie: You look at the research and they’ll tell us we’re already 20 years too late. 

Jen: That’s right. Exactly. 

Amy: Yeah. 

Tressie: Right. And so when you talk about things like, you know, why is the rent so high or why is it so hard to find housing? Why are wages not keeping up with the cost of living?

Almost why are people moving? People aren’t just coming to the United States because we’ve got, you know, great ambience. They’re coming because climate has pushed them out of other places. Right. And so almost everything actually that we’re talking about, everything that donald Trump is demonizing right now is a consequence of climate change, by the way.

So when you talk about like housing, you talk about inequality, you talk about, you know, uh, this like horrible return to like the patriarchal impulse in our society, I think all of that is anxiety driven by that. Um, and we do not have almost anywhere, really anybody telling us what we’re supposed to do there, except we know our individual solutions aren’t fixing it.

Yes, you should buy less and yes, we should recycle and yes, we should do those things, but we got big problems We’re gonna try to figure out And I think our next like short term step is being honest about that. We need to start telling each other the story that like yeah, you know, you think that’s about the fact that you can’t get insurance now for your house, but let me tell you how that’s about climate change and what we aren’t doing to address that, right?

I just think we need to have some really hard conversations about that and what I think is happening next. I mean, I’m actually a little, I’m not upbeat, but like, I don’t think all is lost in part because I talk to people who are activists and organizers. Of course. I talked to people who have survived it too.

You can talk to, you know, again, it’s happening to people, you know, now, but it happened in New Orleans 25 years ago. 

Jen: You’re right. Yeah. 

Tressie: And those people are still surviving, so I want to go talk to them and find out how. Right? 

Jen: You’re so right. 

Tressie: Yeah. It’s happening. 

Jen: The long story of history is, weirdly comforting when we can look in the face of our, of our in its weird way, we can look at our worst impulses and go, this isn’t the first time we have faced this level of chaos of. of inequality, of systemic injustice. It’s just our generation’s turn. 

Tressie: That’s exact. I said, it’s just your turn. That’s right. Yeah. I have to say it to myself, by the way . When I get really down and then I go, what are you talking about, Tressie? I’m a child of the civil rights movement. Okay. Me going to my office on the university campus is not a sit in. Okay. You know, and I have to keep that in mind. That’s right. It’s just my turn.

Jen: I’d love to see you turn the analytical lens on yourself because you sit at the intersection of some really powerful demographics. You are a woman, you are a black woman, you are an academic, in what is, has largely and historically in America, of course, been a man. A white man’s world. You’re in the deep South. That’s its own deal. That’s its own intersection. Um, so all of that really matters. Your identity matters to your work. It matters to your perspective.

It matters to the way in which you perceive facts and history and systems and trends. And so I’d like to hear you just talk about the genuine advantage being exactly who you are brings your work to the table. 

Tressie: I could just hug you for that. Thank you. When people usually ask me that question, they want to talk about how hard it is.

Jen: Oh, no, it’s advantage. 

Tressie: And I go, are you kidding me? It’s my superpower. 

Jen: That’s right. 

Tressie: You know, I started my academic career studying, Amy asked me about education and what’s coming, by the way, it’s not good, but we’ll survive it. But yes, I started by studying education, higher education and the high cost and student loan debt and dah, dah, dah.

And I would walk into these rooms with people, you know, from the places one comes from Harvard and Yale and Princeton, Carnegie Mellon, and they’d have impressive data and economic data and dah, dah, dah, dah. And I walk into the room and after about an hour or so, I’d ask everybody in the room, who had ever gone to college using a student loan to raise their hand.

And it would be like me and the secretary. But because that’s who I was, I could go into those rooms and go, I know what you think the data say, and I agree with you. I’m not arguing with the data, but I’m telling you that for women that is not true. Because women are going to school and they’re also taking care of children.

Right? And so, their cost of tuition includes child care. And so, when you say that college is maybe more affordable, I’m telling you it’s not because you’re only concerned about tuition. And I’m telling you that when you’re a woman and you’re responsible for children, you can’t live in the dorm.

So, you’ve got to have an apartment. That means you’re out on the open real estate market and you don’t have the job to do it, right? My questions then are very different. My mom went back to college when I was a kid. I was a kid sitting in the back of the classroom with her. I know her story was different than mine when I attended college, right?

So, who I talk to, that lens that I bring to those things, are the reasons why, you know, those same people will turn to me and go, how did you know that five years ahead? And I go, because Black women in the South already living in the future. That’s right. We’re already there. You’re right. Uh, and so no, it strengthens where I look for the truth.

It sharpens my instincts about what rings true in data. And I ask questions like, okay, solving this problem for some people, will that create inequalities for other people? 

Jen: That’s good. 

Tressie: Right? Because we can get so focused on solving problems for the middle, right? And I go, but yeah, but are we now making it worse for someone else?

And when that’s your question, as it turns out, I think you come up with very different sort of like policy solutions, very different sort of ways forward. So I mean, I would not give up for the world the things that my identity does to sharpen my analytical skills. Absolutely. 

Jen: It’s a piece of your brilliance.

This is part of the reason why the elimination right now of all the DEI initiatives is devastating. And not just, not just if you’re interested in a nation of equality, like we claim to be, or, fairness and equity. If you care about the bottom line, if you care about actually solving problems, if you care about productivity and morale, if you are fully self interested, you should want every DEI initiative, hire, space, place in your ecosystem. And so this is bad for everyone. It’s bad for everyone. 

Tressie: I could not say that better. 

When people try to separate issues of inclusion or diversity or access or mobility from issues of economics and quote unquote hard data, you’ve already told me what your belief system is, the idea that only those of us on the other side, by the way, are ideologically driven is absolutely false.

The minute you separate those two issues, you have told me that you actually aren’t serious about economic productivity. 

Jen: That’s right. 

Amy: Right. 

Tressie: Because if you were, you would know that there’s 50 years of research that says that the more diversity you have at every level of a firm, the better you are and perform in the market.

Jen: That’s right. 

Tressie: And so if you’re willing to reject that because you don’t want to have to have someone tell you how to hire, then you are ideologically driven and you’re working against your own self interest. 

Jen: You’re a damn fool and you’re bad at business and you’re bad at business. It’s the same we look at, uh, countries around the world and when they decide to educate their girls and prevent violence, the GDP just starts the uptick. So yeah, you’re ideologically driven and you’re a damn fool. 

Tressie: And I can stop listening to you, which I often do. Yeah. 

Amy: So as you look at all of these issues, big issues facing us, what is giving you hope? What’s making you dig deeper? 

Tressie: So I like to remind myself and my students and the people I work with that we think of crisis as being negative, all hard, right? Uh, but crisis usually also has to come for progress. And so I look at a moment of crisis, as much as I try to keep my eye on, don’t get me wrong, I keep my eye on the disaster capitalism, and I keep my eye on the vultures, and I keep my eye on those things, I’m also always looking in a moment of crisis for the potential.

Because that, it’s also necessary for that. And there are a few places where I find that. Um, I, did this piece, this is actually before Trump’s election, but I think really presaged it for me, by the way. I was working with, when interviewed, people who are trying to protect housing for poor people across the South.

Jen: Yeah. 

Tressie: And they were excited. 

Jen: Interesting. 

Tressie: Right? You’d think you’d go into these spaces in these, in this political moment and they’re like, again, like so many of us right now, you’d think they were like, you know, collapsed on the floor. And they said, Oh no, no, no, no. Crisis means people are willing to renegotiate the terms.

And we’re ready. We’ve been training. Yeah. They’re like, we’re ready. We’ve been training for this. It’s We get to come back to the table. so they’re asking for things about fair housing rent, collectively bargained for poor people across the South, which as it turns out, it’s also better for the government.

It’s also better for the housing market. It’s just literally better for everyone. They’re no crisis for us is an opportunity. We’re so ready. I leave something like that. And I go, well, how dare I be depressed, right? I’m going home to my house. Like, how dare I? You know, I talk to, people who are, doing a lot of work in reproductive justice and, you know, we’re living in post Roe v. Wade America, but I talk to women in Mississippi, poorest state still in the country, where, you know, historical and contemporary racism has just impeded their ability to do almost anything meaningful as a government on education and health care and all of that. And you walked into a place where they helped women travel across the country to get access to abortion care, reproductive care.

And they’re having a party. They had the music on. They’re laughing on the hotline with the woman who’s called. She said, you know what? A woman who needs our services, the day she gets us on the phone is one of the best days of her life. She’s in a great mood when she calls us. 

Jen: Oh, wow. 

Tressie: She said, our hotline is often full of people who are relieved, right? There’s something in the fact that crisis for them has made people more likely to reach out to each other because I think that’s the vacuum we had, by the way, the isolation, the individualism. And so I’m actually looking in places where you would think people would be the most depressed, the most detached. And right now they’re going, it’s our time. 

Jen: That’s amazing. 

Tressie: That gives me a lot of hope. 

Jen: God, that gives me a lot of hope. What a great way to end this interview. I love to hear that. 

Tressie: Yeah, I love it. It’s happening. It really is. 

Jen: Walking around doomsday is serving nobody, not ourselves, not our neighbors, not our country. I just think that is an incredible perspective and history upholds it. 

Tressie: Yes. Yes. I think that is really important. 

Jen: We have precedence for this. 

Tressie: Yeah, we do. 

Jen: Well, what I would like to do is hold you hostage on this podcast for the rest of the day. But I understand that you are an important person and you have work. Thank you for coming on today.

Amy: Thank you. 

Jen: Just thank you for your work in the world. It is, it means a lot to me and I learned from you and I listened to you and I trust you. I believe you. Yeah. And it matters. It just, it matters these, these outposts that people are building with honesty and integrity and story and data and hope. I think this is the answer. I think it’s the solution. You know, no one else is coming. It’s not some big outside thing. Yeah. It’s not going to happen. 

Tressie: That’s so important. Yeah. Remember I told you I’d like to reserve the right to revise a story. That’s also a big part of it. Nobody else is coming y’all. They’re not. They’re not.

 It’s us. And guess what? That’s actually the good news because we’re more prepared than we think we are. Right. Thank you, Jen, for reminding us that and I swear to you, I could just hug you for this conversation. Thank you. 

Jen: Same, same, same. Thank you. Thank you. Um, we’re listening. We’re cheering you on. Keep going. There’s so many of us behind you. Yeah. So many of us in that march. And so, um, until next time, until I can talk you into another hour.

Tressie: I will take that call just like I took this one. Anytime y’all. Thank you. 

Jen: All right, you guys, like we have said, I guess. 10 times now, we had more that we wanted to talk about. She is such a deep well of wisdom and information and thought and analysis. And so I say all that to say, you’re going to want to follow her. So let us round this up for you. Go over to jenhatmaker. com under the podcast tab, and we’ll have Tressie’s everything. Her social handles, her spaces, links to her books and her work. I will just tell you, I think now more than ever, it matters who we choose to listen to. It matters. This is a really good time to quiet some of the noises that are just like, well, a clanging symbol, you know, like the Bible said, and really time to tune into these people with really thoughtful, sober minded perspectives on our world and our role in it right now. And she is a hundred percent one of them. 

Don’t forget also while you’re over there on the website, we’ve got the new feature where you can leave us a message and you can ask a question. You can leave a comment. You can, add to the story, whatever it is, that’s, we’re really excited about that. We’re really excited, not just to hear from you, but to actually play your messages on the show. So you’ll see that over there under the podcast tab when over to jenhatmaker.com. All right. Well, that was a good one today. 

Amy: That was a good one. Thank you all for listening. 

Jen: Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next week.

 

 

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

 

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Pantsuit Politics

Allison Gill 

The Daily Beans | News with Swearing

Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy by Tressie McMillan Cottom

Thick: And Other Essays by Tressie McMillan Cottom

Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom’s New York Times newsletter

Tressie’s MacArthur Fellowship

Oprah + Weight Watchers: Making the Shift special