Sociologist and professor Tressie McMillan Cottom makes her case for why we should all be paying attention to the South in this pivotal election year. She delves into the cultural nuances and power structures that shape Southern politics and offers compelling insights into its enduring relevance on the national stage.
Listen or subscribe on Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
On today’s episode
Our host
Errin Haines is The 19th’s editor-at-large and writer of The Amendment newsletter. An award-winning journalist with nearly two decades of experience, Errin was previously a national writer on race for the Associated Press. She’s also worked at the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post.
Follow Errin on Instagram @emarvelous and X @errinhaines.
Today’s guest
Tressie McMillan Cottom is a professor with the Center for Information, Technology and Public Life at UNC-Chapel Hill, a New York Times columnist, and 2020 MacArthur Fellow.
Follow Tressie on Instagram @tressiemcphd and X @tressiemcphd.
Episode transcript
Errin:
Hey y’all. Welcome to the Amendment, a weekly conversation about gender, politics, and power from The 19th News and Wonder Media Network. I’m your host, Errin Haines. On this show, we’re adding an asterisk to America’s most pressing political conversations, asking questions that center the perspectives of women, folks, and people of color. We’re doing that by bringing you one conversation each week with an elected official, a cultural icon, some of the nation’s brightest reporters, but all with a goal of reframing your perspective and deepening your understanding of the week’s news. Hopefully, together we can learn more about our political landscape, understand what’s working and what’s not, and get clear on the unfinished work of our democracy. Today, I’m so excited. We are joined by my sister southerner Tressie McMillan Cottom. Tressie is an award-winning writer, sociologist, and professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She’s also one of my favorite cultural critics, y’all. So who knows, we may be talking about democracy. We may be talking about Dolly Parton, I don’t know, but we’re gonna get her takes on technology, culture, higher education, and inequality. Tressie, thank you for joining us on the Amendment.
Tressie:
Thank you for having me, Errin. First of all, how much do I love seeing you? I love it a lot. And how much do I love the framing of the show? Love it a lot. So it’s a real pleasure to be here.
Errin:
The timing could not be better and the topic could not be better because look, one of the beautiful things that we do have in common is being Black women from the South.
Tressie:
That’s right.
Errin:
And we’re no strangers to the way that people like to hate on the South. So I wanna start by kind of giving the South some love and asking you, tell me one of your favorite things about the region of the country that we come from.
Tressie:
Oh goodness. One of my favorite things about the South is.
Errin:
I know. Pick one. I know it’s hard
Tressie:
That’s what I was saying. One, I love being from the South, which I think is surprising, especially in the circles that we now find ourselves in. But there’s this way that you can move through life where you encounter liberal circles, by and large, are the ones that I am in where sort of latent assumption that being from the South, “Ooh, I’m, I hope y’all are all right. Ooh, you’re okay.” You know, really worried about us. And I like being very upfront about the fact that I like being from the South. I choose to be here. I could be anywhere in the country – most places in the world – and I choose to be in the South because I enjoy the experience.
Tressie:
So on a personal level, and I like to say to people when they’re confused about that, I exist in the South. I am legible as a person in the South. And what that means for me in my daily life is that when I walk around, there are people who can see the fullness of me. They can see race and class and gender and sexuality and religion and all of those complexities, those sort of shades of gray that happens with multifaceted identities. I’m just legible. And so being legible is much better than walking around like a ghost where people look through you and can’t see the fullness of you, or they only understand you in one context. And you know what? I have a lot of expertise in the South, in southernness, and I don’t wanna give that up. I am culturally fluent in the ways of the South, and it’s nice to be expert in a culture. I like that too.
Errin:
Yeah. I plus one to all of that. And for those of you who are not southerners, “bless your heart” is really what I have for folks who try to derive the part of the country that we are from. Listen, I’m with you. Not only does it make us legible, I think it gives us really such a unique, and frankly, clarifying lens with which to look at this country. Being from the South does inform the way that I approach journalism, the way that I think about our democracy. You know, I think so much of what we understand about how this country works is really in your face in that part of the country
Errin:
I do wonder, just as much as we know about the importance of the region that we come from, that we were raised in, that you are now privileged to be back in; why do you think that the South is still portrayed the way it is? How is political journalism even contributing to what we get wrong about the South and and why does that matter for our democracy?
Tressie:
Yeah. I wanna shout out the fact that I do think that there are plenty – there are many people, I won’t say plenty ’cause I don’t know that there’s such a thing as too many and I certainly wouldn’t say it’s like a critical mass or a majority of people who make the media about the South, especially in political journalism. But there are some real notable exceptions to that and I’m always really proud when I see us out there in those spaces. One, because like you, I know what that means to do that work. And two, I think it’s better than it has been historically. But that’s not saying a lot, right? I mean, ’cause it has, I think, been historically bad, meaning the national depiction of the South as a collection of characters that just play out this never ending theater of the lost cause as if, you know, the South can be written off and that would leave anything redeemable or functional about the rest of this country.
Tressie:
We still sort of do that narrative construction of the South in national media for a few reasons. I think there’s a structural reason, which is it is very hard to be a journalist, a writer, a thinker, an academic, any of those things that produces narratives about a place, especially empirical stories about a place. It really privileges wealthy people. This is increasingly true, by the way, as media continues to just be gutted by financial structure and attacked by a reactionary political environment. It is very hard for people who do not come from privilege to do this work. And the South remains not just racially diverse but class diverse. And so people who are more inclined to tell really complex stories about the South tend not to have the privilege to pursue these types of careers.
Tressie:
Low pay, you have to move, you’ve got to have family money, connections, institutional access, go to the right colleges, all of that stuff that we know goes into reproducing privilege in the field. So it makes it easy to write these really broad characters about the South because there’s nobody from the South in the room with you when you do it. There’s nobody to sort of roll their eyes and, and say, “bless your heart” and to correct the record. And then I think there’s this cultural thing which I’m really intrigued by. There are these people who write about the way this country romanticizes the South, and the role that plays. People really like to take a vacation in their mind in the South. I think it makes them feel better in a way about where they do live. Like no matter how bad, for example, the politics are, or the weather is in say, a Wisconsin, one of the things that people rely on is being able to say, “Well, at least it’s not Mississippi. “ No matter how much conflict is happening in California, people really love to go, “Well, hey, at least we’re not Georgia.”
Tressie:
We become this sort of escape valve for the other parts of the country to excuse the severity of their own political crises and challenges. And it makes it easy to do that because the South is still deeply entwined with the way this country feels about Black people. We also can’t get around that. The South has a high concentration of African Americans and it makes it really easy then to not just disenfranchise the South politically, which we do, but to sort of disenfranchise it culturally to write it off because you don’t value the people who live there.
Errin:
Some of our biggest capital T truths about who we are as a country can be told when we tell the truth about what the South is. That is why it matters. That is why people it’s important for people who come from our part of the country weigh in on where our democracy is and what that means. And obviously the good news is headed into this election will, I guess good or bad depending on your perspective, is that the South is really the epicenter of American politics right now. You’ve written about that. I continue to beat that drum. You are somebody that follows the South in American politics so closely. I’d love for you to talk to our listeners about your perspective on why the South is such a focal point in our politics right now and our culture and the specific factors that are really kinda contributing to the South’s unique influence on American political dynamics right now.
Tressie:
Easy questions. And right after this, we will then solve the climate change problem. Easy things, Errin. Thank you. <laughs> We can’t get around the fact that the United States is part of what’s happening across the globe, which is you’ve got these reactionary political movements happening, but in the United States, that reactionary movement is drawing from the political fissures, the economic inequality and fissures and the history of the South. That’s just the structure of like the political imaginary in the United States of America. Meaning if you want to be a white reactionary in the United States, you have to go through the South, right? Those reactionary politics have to travel through the South. It has to make sense in the context of the South. And you have this treasure trove of these really powerful images and narratives to draw from.
Tressie:
So if you want to be a Donald Trump, if you want to be a Christopher Rufo, if you want to be a Steve Bannon; you would go to the epicenter of this nation’s racial identity crisis, and that remains the South. It is really stunning to me when you see something like January 6th, and we now know so much about the demographics of the Insurrectionists that participated in January 6th. They were upper middle class White Americans, not disproportionately from the South, in fact. And yet when you look at the imagery from that day it was like all these Confederate flags and all of this lost cause iconography, right? You can see it even globally, where you’ll see a Confederate flag flying in Germany or these massive disconnects between the geography and the images that they use when they want to assert White racial identity politics.
Tressie:
That’s because in the South it’s still very much alive, the images still really work to mobilize people’s emotions and feelings. The South is important right now culturally to national politics because national politics needs the South for its White reactionary campaign. And the South is important because of some demographic reasons and changes. So all of the most pressing national issues we can talk about like the quote unquote border crisis – which I think is really a crisis of climate change – we can talk about immigration, we can talk about climate change. Those are all issues where you can see the fault lines of power and social movement and change, and the pressure that’s putting on national politics and state governance really clearly in the South. So I think there’s a reason why those ideas are really powerful in the South.
Tressie:
You have such strong anti-immigration sentiment, for example, because what’s happening economically within the South makes it a really powerful story to tell people that, “your problems are because of immigrants, your problems are because we won’t defend the border.” Those stories become really powerful to mobilize – and this is all about mobilizing a base. It works extremely well to mobilize a base across the South because those stories seem so familiar to so many southerners. So the nationalization of politics hasn’t made the South less important. It has made the South more important because of the things that are used to mobilize the reactionary right, and really mainstream Republicans too, are the narratives from southern politics and southern history. So in a weird way, the nationalization that has happened is a nationalization of the South. Everybody’s a lot more southern in national politics. They have inherited, whether they know it or not, all of our longstanding battles, enemies, stories about superiority. The South is really important right now.
Errin:
Tressie, what you’re saying is so important and even listening to you right now, it really is so clear that that as we look at 2024, as we look at where our democracy is and where it’s going, so much of that is about the myths and the realities of the South colliding in this moment with the myths and the realities that we tell ourselves about this country right now. I wanna talk to you about the South Carolina of it all because South Carolina played this huge role in 2020 after President Biden won there. That was his Lazarus moment. He was resurrected and then he marched through the South on Super Tuesday and pretty much locked it up.
Errin:
South Carolina has often been seen as this barometer for candidate viability or electability and connecting with diverse voter groups. But when it comes to one group of diverse voters, Black women, we’ve seen how we are often taken for granted. That is something that we’re already seeing shaping up in 2024 where we have a narrative that is attempting to maybe even blame Black people, specifically Black men, but also saying, “what are Black women going to do?” as if we do not know exactly what Black women are gonna do. By the way, it’s what they have always done in every election. But why is that narrative persisting even in this year? What do we gain by really taking Black women’s perspectives, viewpoints, input, and output seriously?
Tressie:
I think we always gain a better level of analysis. I stake my whole career on the single idea that if you assume that Black women are rational, you will become smarter. That’s literally my whole thing. Not that we’re always right, not that we aren’t fallible, not that we don’t have the same human impulses, but that we are driven by the same rationality. Which is a way of saying that we are human and that if you believe that you will always be smarter, your analysis will always be crisper, it will always be sharper. The South Carolina primary is an example of that. One of the reasons why the South Carolina primary is so important is as the first time where the candidates have to deal with the Black vote in a significant bloc. They have to move out of this universal narrative that they are able to usually play at that point in the primary when they go through New Hampshire and et cetera.
Tressie:
By the time they get to South Carolina is when they have to start talking about particularities. It’s when you can’t keep saying the story of, well, the economy is going great when you get to South Carolina. No, you’ve gotta face the reality that the economy isn’t going great for everyone. Now you have to start talking about race and class and gender and ability, and you have to do it with a voting bloc that is very aware of their material conditions. That’s why the South Carolina primary is so important and why it is so vexing for political candidates. Because a lot of their political magic making starts to fall apart when they have to consider Black women voters, Black voters, significant southern blocs of voters. It gets a lot more complicated then to character the “us against them” narrative once you get to the South.
Tressie:
If you can come through the South and can convince Black voters in the South, particularly Black women voters in the South of the viability of your policy positions, that your policy positions are better. Because once you leave South Carolina and you start talking to and pivoting to the rest of the country, you are dealing with multi-racial, multi-class coalition that is the United States voter. Going through South Carolina is a real important test. We tend to be a little condescending about the South Carolina primary, this idea that Black people vote in lockstep.
Tressie:
That as long as you go and you do the performance of going to the Black church and you say the right song and dance and kiss the ring, the Democrats in particular can just kind of write off South Carolina. And I don’t actually think that’s true. Anybody who’s ever been on the ground for South Carolina politics will tell you it is a dog fight from local all the way up the ticket. The voters are demanding as they should be. The local structure there is very aware of the place that they hold in the primary structure and how important that is. And I think one of the problems that we have with South Carolina is that we just don’t like who has that power at that point in the process. We don’t like that we have this sort of multi-racial power block there in South Carolina where you have to do serious politicking and they can hold you accountable for it. And we owe that to a pretty sophisticated South Carolina electorate, of which a significant proportion of them are Black voters.
Errin:
You are making such a good point about the idea of the stress test that starts in South Carolina and really continues south through the South. The idea that we shift from a conversation about electability that really is about the electorate.
Tressie:
I love that. That’s exactly right.
Errin:
Whether the electorate thinks that you are electable as opposed to you thinking you’re defining your electability to the electorate. You do such a good job of framing the power of Black womenand I appreciate that because I’m just really kind of over everybody asking again, “what are Black women gonna do in this election?” I do think one of the most pertinent questions of this election cycle, given everything that we know, is what are White women gonna do this cycle? How are they gonna vote this year? And southern White women in particular because of what we know about the post Dobbs reality and everything that’s happened in terms of bodily autonomy. Why is this not a question? What about White women?
Tressie:
I think the cynical answer is we already know. We already know what they’re gonna do. In the way that we already kind of know what Black women voters are gonna do, but we don’t like what they do. We know what White women voters are gonna do and we’ve accepted it. And I think that says more about the media class than it says about the voters themselves. We just accept that White women voters are going to fall along partisan lines in a way that for many of them will contradict their own economic and democratic sovereignty and agency. I think we know that it feels like a taken for granted story and in our media environment, we don’t like straightforward stories. I think we especially don’t like straightforward stories that appear to blame women for patriarchal decision making.
Tressie:
But the thing is, when you talk about structure, patriarchal problems is a structural thing that both men and women perpetuate. So it isn’t to blame women for the bad decisions that men make. It is to say men get away with making bad decisions, in part because some women benefit from those bad decisions. We know that we are taking it for granted. Then you have to look at the composition of the media class. It would be like asking people to write about themselves and to write about their mothers.We saw this during the Trump presidency around issues of class, for example, and political partisanship. People really struggled with thinking of themselves as having a political stake in their reporting. I think it is easier when you think about the composition of the media class for them to point out the limitations of what Black women voters do because they don’t feel like that as a political position.
Tressie:
They think it feels objective because it isn’t their mother, it isn’t their sister, it’s not them. It doesn’t feel like a reflection on them and so it gets this sort of veneer of objectivity when it’s aimed at Black women. But that’s why you see such a different level of analysis when Black women political analysts are at the table. I sometimes pay attention to some of the Sunday news shows and the different kind of takeaway you get about exactly that question based on the composition of who’s around that table is always stunning to me. You can see the differences there when people give Black women the same sort of grace that is extended to White women voters to say, “there’s a reason to vote your economic interest, and there is a reason to consider your relationship to racial inequality ata local level.” We may not necessarily always like what that leads to, but it’s perfectly reasonable and rational given the political incentives. When that is extended to Black women, it’s always shocking how much clearer the analysis is and it’s also shocking that it is not the norm.
Errin:
More grace for us and more scrutiny for them.
Tressie:
Yes. I think that’s only fair.
Errin:
I agree. So can we talk about TikTok because look, especially in this like digital society, you’ve got these social media platforms that are playing a central role in shaping public discourse. You and your TikTok included. How do you think about how TikTok has changed how conversation happens. Do you think that TikTok has really kind of forced people to take Black women voters more seriously? Does TikTok force us to kind of consider Black women more?
Tressie:
Yes, and it’s unsettled whether that’s necessarily positive or negative, but one thing that does seem to be clear is that when you are dealing in digital medias, you are dealing with Black women’s cultural production. It’s one of the reasons I think that we have a political backlash against taking those media seriously. It is because we may not be the statistical majority, but when it comes to cultural power, social media platforms owe usually their entire reason for existing to Black women’s cultures and queer youth cultures When you talk about something like TikTok, which is this really interesting iteration of social media. My colleagues and I work at a center actually in the university where we study technology and public life and politics. This is an interesting year for us because it’s gonna be the year of the TikTok platform and TikTok political discourse, which I think is really scary for those of us who have been doing this kind of work for a little while because we owned Twitter.
Tressie:
We understood Twitter’s intervention in the political discourse. We don’t know yet what TikTok’s intervention is. I can tell you that we’re starting to get a taste of it. The extent to which political influencers on TikTok are shaping a counter narrative in the media about everything from whether or not we are in a recession, despite the macroeconomic data, it is TikTok political influencers who said, “Hey, there’s still people out here struggling and you can’t say that the economy has recovered when food is still high or when housing costs are still high.” We’re seeing it around the conflict in Israel and Gaza where political influencers have completely interjected a counter frame to the dominant media narrative about that conflict. And it has caught elected politicians by surprise. The speed with which that can happen, the counter framing that can happen, driven not just by Black women’s discourse on there as influencers, but by what Black women make meaningful as the stakes of the debate.
Tressie:
Black women on TikTok may not always benefit from being the biggest influencers, and there are questions about whether that’s the algorithm, whether that’s about racial and gendered biases among the people who watch the TikToks and they don’t like it as much when it’s Blackwomen influencers. But despite that, what Black women decide is important to talk about, shapes what the other influencers talk about. And that is a really big deal. So one of the things I’m paying attention to with the primaries, I will be interested to see how the coverage in mainstream traditional media differs from the coverage on TikTok and how much that influences the youth vote. We now know among young voters they get the majority of their political news from social media platforms and trust the political influences more than they do mainstream journalists. And that’s a challenge not just for politicians, but by those of us who think we can kind of control the media narrative.
Errin:
That’s such a good point. For journalists not being so arrogant as to think that there’s not something that we can learn from what is happening on TikTok. There are storylines that are unfolding on TikTok that we could pay attention to and there is this the small “d” democratization of our politics that is happening, it feels like on TikTok each and every day. I don’t know, Tressie, you may have convinced me to go from lurker to participant.
Tressie:
Oh, I wouldn’t go that far <laugh> because I do think it’s the wild, wild West on there. I will say <laugh> it is not for the weak.
Errin:
Good to know.
Tressie:
That is definitely the case. I do think it’s worth watching, however, I do say to my colleagues and my peers that it is worth watching. Maybe sometimes turn on the news network that isn’t your favorite because you kind of need to know what’s going on over there. I think TikTok has matured to that point where, if you’re gonna consider yourself an informed person, you need some awareness of what the top line stories, as you said, those narratives that are being written, what those are. I think it’s gonna be important to how this election is covered.
Errin:
You know I always listen to you, Tressie and I will certainly listen to you on that note. Oh my gosh, this has been so fun. I, as usual, have enjoyed talking all things southern with you and am just really happy that we get to kind of share the text thread with our Amendment audience. Thank you so much for hanging out with us here and let’s stay in touch as we continue to watch what happens in 2024 and see what the South has to say about this country.
Tressie:
Absolutely. It is always my pleasure, and I think there’s gonna be a lot to say. So we should probably keep that text thread going. Thanks for having me.
Errin:
So now I wanna introduce you guys to a part of the program called The Asterisk. Uh, if you’re new to The 19th, you may have seen our logo. We are named for the 19th Amendment, but there is an asterisk at the end of our logo. And that asterisk is in recognition of the Black women who were frankly thrown under the bus when the 19th Amendment was passed in 1920. And White women literally stepped over us to get their access to the franchise. So the asterisk denotes that omission, but it is also kind of a North Star for us to think about who remains unseen and unheard in our democracy. The questions that we still are not asking, the things that we still are not thinking about. It’s kind of our shorthand for, uh, trying to capture all those things so that we are leaving behind a more honest and accurate record of who and where we are as a country. So on The Amendment, we’re gonna use this time to talk about something that I’m thinking about that has been left out in our conversation, uh, from the previous week. That could be stories that are lacking a lens on race or gender. And there are many. It could be an undercovered story because Lord knows there are enough of those. And then maybe stuff that you’ve seen even in my social media that I want to kind of point out and amplify.
So for this week’s asterisk, I think what I wanna get into is the Black women who are attempting to hold former President Donald Trump accountable, and the headlines that they were and were not making last week. So you had former President Trump back in a courtroom in New York where he was facing charges of fraud brought by Attorney General Tish James. And then down in Georgia you had a hearing related to the election interference case that was brought by Fani Willis, the District Attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, who is prosecuting Trump and a variety of people who are accused of helping him try to pull off a scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election. And so as part of that case, the attorneys for one of the defendants in the Georgia case accused Fani Willis of an improper relationship with the special prosecutor in that case, saying that she financially benefited from appointing this prosecutor who she had a romantic relationship with.
So while both of these, you know, kind of legal proceedings were going on in these two different cases and in these two different states, there was one that got a lot of attention, and there was one that frankly I felt like barely got any attention. For those of you who were following along, I’m sure you saw on social media, kind of the play-by-play of Fani Willis’ explosive testimony in a Georgia courtroom as she attempted to clear her name.
In the same week you had, in the New York case, a verdict for hundreds of millions of dollars against former President Trump in a case brought by Tish James that, you know, was effective in holding the former president accountable that really hardly got any coverage and certainly was not nearly as salacious or filled with kind of bombshell quotes or headlines, but was nonetheless pretty consequential in terms of the legal consequences and ramifications for the former president. And yet, it seemed like the media was much more interested in kind of, uh, this explosive testimony from Fani Willis about her personal life, even as she is trying to kind of prosecute this case, than they were about recognizing that this Black woman prosecutor in New York had actually been successful at holding the former President accountable. Even thinking about, you know, Trump’s civil trial in New York with E. Jean Carroll, you know, trying to hold Trump accountable for sexually assaulting her. And he was found civilly liable for that. But there was a lot of praise for E. Jean Carroll, and rightly so, as you know, kind of a brave person who was a survivor. You know, she was recognized for that. Her attorney, Robbie Kaplan, a woman, was recognized for her brilliant kind of legal strategy that ultimately was able to hold Trump accountable.
Tish James is not really being discussed in the same way, and at least at this point there, there’s a lot of lot more focus on Fani Willis’s personal life than her professional acumen. I mean, even bringing a RICO case and getting the plea deals that she’s already gotten and seeing the case that she put together that got a grand jury to at least think that this is a case that should go to trial. I mean, these are professional accomplishments that I don’t think are getting attention to the same degree as we gave to kind of the more sordid details of her personal life that really, you know, are gonna have more bearing in the court of public opinion than they will in an actual courtroom.
You have Fani Willis even saying in her own words, you know, telling one of the defense attorneys at one point, “You think I’m on trial here. I’m not the one that’s on trial. These defendants are on trial for attempting to steal the 2020 election.” And really kind of refocusing the hearing to what this entire case is really about. But I think it also relates to, you know, the case that Tish James brought despite whatever attacks the former president attempted to kind of lob against her — particularly personalized attacks on her as a Black woman, attempting to say that these allegations against him made him the victim of racism over and over again. I just wonder if there’s not a way to cover both, you know, Fani Willis and Tish James and their prosecution of the former President in a way that gives us a glimpse into who they are as people, but also who they are as prosecutors and their leadership as these Black women in really these pretty rare in history — potentially history-making — roles. So that’s my asterisk: Tish James and Fannie Willis, both very much making Black history this month.
Thank you for listening. For the 19th News and Wonder Media Network. I’m Errin Haines. Talk to you again next week.
