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The stories we tell ourselves about America
00:32:45
Tressie McMillan Cottom says the second Trump administration has revealed uncomfortable truths about power in America. She talks with Geoff Bennett about trust in institutions and how to keep your sense of purpose in an onslaught of news.
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- [00:00]
A
Hey, I'm Jeff Bennett, and welcome to Settle In. Our guest today is sociologist, professor, writer, MacArthur fellow, and New York Times opinion columnist Tressie McMillan Cottam. We talk about the collapse of the public's faith in institutions, how class shaped her path in life, the stories we tell ourselves, what they tell us, and why they stick her surprising prescription for feeling exhausted by the onslaught of bad news, and how to find hope for a better future off the Internet. So settle in as I Talk with Tressy McMillan Cottam. Tressie McMillan Cotton, thanks so much for making time and for speaking with us.
- [00:41]
B
It is an absolute pleasure to be with you.
- [00:44]
A
You are a sociologist, you're a writer, you're a professor, you're a New York Times opinion columnist. Your work lives outside the academy, in public spaces. When did you realize that your work wasn't just academic, it was civic?
- [01:01]
B
Oh, my goodness. You know, from the outset, I was developing my academic expertise in the shadow of just a real intellectual love affair with early 20th century sociologists. So someone like a WB Du Bois was very inspirational to me. And so I had to grapple very early on with the question of who is my work for? For. And historically black academics, black cultural workers, have never really had the choice of not engaging with the civic problems of things like citizenship, our legal inclusion in the Constitution. And so, almost from the outset, I felt compelled to decide, to whom am I speaking and for whom am I speaking? And I took a lot of comfort in the fact that people I consider the greatest intellectual sort of our time never made a decision between the academy and the people. And in speaking to the people, their work was actually much more strident, much more focused. I think it was sharper. But, you know, someone like a Du Bois was writing novels at the same time that he was producing, arguably, I would say defensibly, some of the most important sociology ever done in the American academy. So I thought. Not that I think I'm Du Bois, but I certainly thought that I had an intellectual hero to model myself after.
- [02:22]
A
What does carrying that responsibility feel like?
- [02:26]
B
Well, it depends on the day. All right, I'll be honest here. Some days it feels like a tremendous gift to be able to do this kind of work as the person that I am with my history. You know, my family is from eastern North Carolina, which means probably what it sounds like. It means, you know, a poor region of the American South. The idea that I would grow up and be a person who. Who weighs in in public on issues that are of great public importance just was not something that went without saying. Right. So the idea that I get to write and think and research and teach for a living is a phenomenal gift. On the other hand, I would be remiss if I did not admit that there are many days that I wish the work did not feel so pressing and so urgent and so directly applicable to our everyday life. There's this point at which the work feels cyclical instead of progressive, that we are still debating issues about federal versus state, that we're still in many ways, fighting the Civil War and reliving the failures of Reconstruction, that we continue to have conversations about who is included in the public and at what cost. Those things can feel very weighty and very heavy. I like to say to my students, we joke quite a bit. You know, I was not promised interesting times, and we are living not just in unprecedented times, but in interesting ones. And that does make the work sharper, more important, but it also makes it weightier.
- [03:58]
A
Well, let's talk about that, because you have argued for years that many American institutions aren't broken, that they're working exactly as designed. And in the Trump era, that idea has felt less abstract and more visible. What has this moment revealed about who our institutions are actually built to serve?
- [04:20]
B
Oh, gosh, that's a great question. I think that for a very long time, coming certainly out of World War II, the illusion of sort of linear social progress got taken for granted. Right. That the future would always be more equal, more just more diverse than the present and certainly more so than the past. And that sort of scaling belief did not always align with reality. Right. So, for example, you can say that the 1990s were a time of great economic prosperity, but at the same time, we were building this, truly, at the time, technologically advanced system of surveillance of poor and black people across the country. Right. Those things were happening simultaneously, but the idea of social progress blinded us to, I think, the dangers and the rigors of the places in our institutions that were absolutely capturing wholesale communities for the purpose of prisons, for the purpose of cheap or enslaved labor. Institutions that were designed to exclude some people from the workings of our democratic institutions. What has happened under Trump is that the gap between our illusion about social progress and how institutions function has collapsed. So in some ways, I think what we're seeing is a baldly honest version of institutions. Certainly how institutions have worked for poor people in this country for generations, how they have worked for minorities, for immigrants, to a certain extent, for women in this country, for sexual minorities, and that more people are now able to see it because they are now vulnerable to it. There's a certain amount of bald honesty in that because we have wholesale abdicated the idea that social progress is not just desirable, but that it is inevitable. So, for example, you are seeing a full cell retreat from the idea of publicness in public education, right? As we continue to see the massive privatization of K through 12 in this country, or you are seeing what it looks like when prisons need to be filled with people. And then our idea that we don't want crime starts to fall apart, because obviously we do, we are creating crime. Something, for example, progressives have said for a long time is what happens. But it now becomes, I think, very to argue that that is not the case now. That is a brutal thing to have to reckon with, particularly if it was your first time encountering that. But I also think it is an opportunity for us to be honest about the systems that we have built. And if there is going to be a chance of reclaiming any promise of this country, I think we're going to have to reckon with the reality of that.
- [07:03]
A
It's interesting, given that institutions tell stories so that people keep believing in them. And in this moment, these stories have really fallen apart. To your point about there is this bald honesty that people are able to see how the system really works.
- [07:21]
B
I think about stories a lot. I love that you frame it that way because one of the things that we are struggling with here is that there is not a prevailing story of the future right now that does not depend on us going back in time. I think one of the reasons why people are struggling with. We know what's happening, can see it. Why aren't we coalescing around a call to arms? Right? Where are the Democrats? Where is Congress? Right? You see these sort of public appeals of frustration. Part of what I think is happening there is that we can't come up with a story about the future that is not, at its heart, a story about how we need to return to the 2000s or return to the 1990s. The problem with that is that during those times, institutions were failing lots of people. And so people pipe up and they go, well, no, I don't want to return to the super predator criminal justice system of the 1990s. Going backward, actually, then to some people, does not feel like progress. Our challenge here is certainly that the GOP in the right and what I would call the Trumpist iteration of the GOP has figured out a clear story about who this country is that appeals to a past that enough of their core supporters believe in while on the Other side, we have not come up with a story about the future. And in lieu of that, people will write their own sort of fictions about what matters. And that is going to be a really. And that becomes a challenge, I think, for organizing people, for political participation.
- [08:56]
A
Yeah. And with those stories, there are matters of gender, there are matters of race, and there are also matters of class. And you have said that class operates almost like the weather, something that shapes our lives whether we acknowledge it or not. When did you first realize how much class was shaping our path collectively?
- [09:16]
B
On a personal level, a lot of that was about my own discovery. As you move through life and your own social position changes and you start to experience these challenges that I didn't feel prepared for in so many ways. I was prepared when I went to college, for example, to deal with sexism. And in so many ways, I was prepared when I was going out into the work world to be prepared for racism. I did not have nearly enough preparation for how social class was going to shape my sense of opportunity and possibility in this country. Some of that is because we talk about class mostly by talking about race, and those issues get conflated. And some of it is because there's a lot of shame, I think, with people who leave working class or poor communities and somehow make it out right. They don't want to talk about how class shaped their sense of what was possible. And so we don't have a story about, hey, you know, it's kind of odd that people want me to lose my Southern accent now that I have a college degree. Or, hey, it's a little strange the way that everybody at my new job comes from the same set of three or four colleges. Right. Well, that's class operating in our everyday life. So it happened to me personally, intellectually, that was developing at the same time, which is America has a really poor history of developing a language around class that serves wealthy interests. By the way, the less that we talk about class, the more power those with economic power gain over us. I think for some of the same reasons that I experience individually, there's a lot of shame attached to talking about your social class and your origins and what it means to your everyday life. And I think CLAS convicts us in a way that talking about gender and race don't necessarily convict us. No matter where you live in this country, class is operating even if race or gender in some ways is not operating as visibly. And so I think class makes us feel responsible for changing the way that we behave, and so we would rather not Develop a language around it, but that does not mean it isn't operating.
- [11:28]
A
And how does that operate in higher education? This idea that universities stop being ladders and start becoming, in some ways, sorting machines.
- [11:39]
B
Yeah. That is where we are. And now, to be clear, this has been a long historical trajectory of higher education becoming this mechanism for reproducing the class hierarchy in our country. What we also had, however, was a historical anomaly of the mid 20th century where we had this idea, this notion that, okay, elite institutions are supposed to reproduce at the time, you know, the livelihoods of the sons of wealthy people. Right. There's that social reproduction part of it. But what we came up with was this idea that there could be this whole other part of higher education, Community colleges, historically black colleges, minority serving institutions, working class, accessible institutions that would provide opportunity for people to participate in this growing new world of the middle class that was happening in this country. Right. The thing is, that moment in time became so large in our cultural imagination that we started to think that it was naturally occurring. That as long as we had colleges, then we were providing economic opportunity. But the colleges themselves are not the economic opportunity. They are partners in alignment with the labor market. It has to work alongside social policy. Higher education can only be a pathway to upward social mobility if there is upward social mobility. The problem that higher education is having right now is not that we have become so conservative. It's not that we are teaching feminism. It's not that we're so focused on racism and that we're not teaching math and science. The problem is that we have abdicated our responsibility for creating the conditions for a middle class. And you don't need educational opportunity if there is no middle class. And so that makes higher education weak on the social policy front. The challenge there is that higher education can't fix that by itself.
- [13:40]
A
I was going to ask you that. It's not a problem that higher education in and of itself created.
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B
That's right.
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A
It's not really in a position to provide the solution.
- [13:48]
B
That is exactly right. But telling that story right to people whose students are and their children and young adults, you know, doe eyed and wanting a chance. Right. You can't sit them down and say, listen, I can teach you the liberal arts curriculum, I can teach you how to code, I can teach you how to think like a millionaire. We can do all of those things, but we cannot create entry level jobs. We cannot create a social compact that will guarantee you a career ladder. We can't guarantee you a retirement plan. We cannot guarantee those things Right. Education has always needed that partnership. And I think that we forgot that because it worked so well, so long, that we thought that as long as we produce the educational opportunity, the economic social policy would follow, when in fact is the exact opposite.
- [14:39]
A
You've also written about merit, this idea of a meritocracy, and you write about it not as fact, but as narrative. Why is this idea of meritocracy so powerful? I mean, one of the things you heard from the MAGA wing of the Republican Party in this push to dismantle DEI is that, you know, people will be judged on merit alone. As if. As if we don't know the history of our own country.
- [15:05]
B
Right, right. And as if having a discernible identity is at odds with the idea of merit, which is, of course, downhill from their argument because it is not. It's not a good faith argument. Right. So let's just. Let's just get that off of the table. But it is. The idea of merit and how it functions in our culture is fascinating to me, because meritocracy actually starts out as satire, right? This was not a real concept. It was thought of as being so ridiculous that a novelist coins meritocracy in its first iteration as a satire of the idea that in a deeply unequal society that somehow. That if you just worked hard that you would get ahead. This sort of gets lifted as a universal truth, I think particularly in the American idea of freedom and equality, because it serves a really important role. It says that when you see someone with maybe a grotesque amount of wealth, or you see someone in a position that holds a lot of power over you, that by virtue of them having the position, they also have merit, therefore they deserve it. Right. Meritocracy then becomes a sort of religious belief system, and it becomes a secular religion in our culture that those with power and money have it because they deserve it. And because of it, they deserve greater access to the rewards of the commons. Right. That idea does a lot of work to get people to discipline themselves. Right? To sacrifice, to go to college, to delay getting married or even having a good time in your 20s. All of those things have to have something to encourage you to take on those behaviors. But it also justifies a brutally unequal system. And when you take it to its logical ends, as I think Trump ideology of meritocracy does, you see what was beneath meritocracy. You see why it starts out as satire. That is because power always matters and ultimately will matter more than merit. But if you can convince people that the people in charge are there because they are somehow uniquely better and deserving, they will be far easier to control, even to their own personal detriment.
- [17:19]
A
What's required to tell a story that takes hold. So everything that we've been talking about so far about meritocracies and institutions and class all derive from stories that we tell ourselves, and those stories stick. What's required in creating a new story?
- [17:38]
B
Well, you can write any story you like. You certainly, I think, see right now in the political discourse, everybody taking a stab at writing a story of what is happening to us, for good or for ill. The stories, however, that tend to stick, the stories that matter, which is what I think we're really trying to get out there, which is how can we tell a story that will move people in the direction that we want them to move? I'm not sure people are going to like this. That's because, fundamentally, the stories have to offer some chance for redemption and hope. People do not like a story that forecloses on the future. I would argue that's one of the reasons why something like artificial intelligence and AI is struggling to convince people that it is the great unknown and that everybody needs to get on board with it. It is not telling a fundamentally hopeful vision of the future. And at its heart, what people want to know is, if I buy into this story, will it explain some part of my life that I have trouble explaining? Right. Will it explain why I work so hard, yet I still struggle to pay my monthly bills? Right. People want something that will explain their lives to them, and then they also need the option for hope. That fundamentally, is what the promise of education was. It provided the idea that there was a future, a hopeful future, with that sort of crumbling happening. The only other story out there right now that gives some opportunity of the future is if I follow a strongman leader, he will make the future safe for me. That is actually a very compelling story, whether we like the way it then convinces people to act or not. And any story that will win over that story has got to give people a sense that something better is possible, if not for them, then certainly for their children.
- [19:32]
A
Is that part of the reason why our politics feel so bleak right now, because we're devoid of this notion of hope?
- [19:40]
B
Yes, in part because we are obsessed with diagnosing what is happening to us. And there is a lot to be gained in trying to get people to be angry about what they see. And certainly anger can be a first step in getting people awake, to awaken people to their conditions. But anger is not A sustaining emotion. It just isn't. It is a precondition. Right. But at the end of the day, once someone is awakened to what is happening to them, you have got to tell them what is is possible for them. And so our obsession right now with diagnosing, with polling, with measuring, that sort of technocratic response to the failures of institutions feels wholly inadequate to the scale of people's fear and disconnection. Right. When you say to someone, I understand that you are having trouble getting your health care. You can't find a pediatrician for your kid, the cost of groceries is going up, you can't afford your rent. There's no hope anymore of you owning your own home. And your children are going to also maybe live with you forever, because college doesn't seem like the same payoff for them as it once was for you. Or at least it comes at a much higher cost. You can get them angry, right? But then once they are angry, you've got to tell them what they are supposed to do. And polling is by definition about measuring what has already happened. Right. It doesn't do a great job of predicting the future. And I think our politics now feels bleak in part because the times are bleak, but also because they are still far more to be gained in the short term for politicians, for the industry of idea and policy making to diagnose problems, than there is a reward for solving problems. And we simply are going to have to change those incentives.
- [21:31]
A
How much of our political dysfunction is actually an attention problem? And how much has the media economy reshaped? What kinds of stories and people get rewarded?
- [21:44]
B
Yeah, I think there is something to the fact that obviously our attention has been monetized in a way that is really antithetical to how, like, human curiosity has worked for millennia. But I do think we overstate that fact because it kind of sounds like when you start talking about, you know, so many things are competing for our attention and so we just can't capture people long enough to tell them what matters. Right. And to move them politically. I think there's a bit of a cop out. Right. It is true that it is hard to compete with TikTok and it is difficult to compete with memes. And it is absolutely true that the media ecosystem now rewards the production of cheap, emotion driven content over meaningful information and news. But it is also the case that that is not naturally occurring. That too was a political choice. It is a political choice not to regulate technology companies. It was a political choice. I would point out that both the Democrats, the Republicans have had an opportunity to do and have failed to do so. No one has shown a political appetite, real strong political appetite for regulating technology companies, because at the root of that is what I would argue is the real problem, which is extreme wealth inequality and the extent to which money has infiltrated our systems of governance and certainly campaign financing. And so we have been willing to. To cede our attention in the name of money, but that was a political choice. And now we find ourselves reckoning with the fact that attention cannot be captured long enough to tell people the truth, the objective truth, about what is happening to them. But that is, again, a lesson about what happens when one side has more power than the other. I don't think that is a foregone conclusion. However, it is absolutely a political choice to say that our media ecosystem needs to have a civic core to it. Right. It is not a foregone conclusion that we all need to just accept artificial intelligence is here and we need to turn over our privacy and our citizenship rights to it. Those are choices. Right. And I think that when we focus too much on whether or not people spend too much time on TikTok, it lets a lot of political actors off the hook.
- [24:10]
A
Amid the sense of exhaustion. What does renewal look like when it's not that people are apathetic, it's just that people are tired, they're worn out?
- [24:21]
B
Yeah, there is a lot of exhaustion. I would argue, though, that much in the way that we sort of have misconstrued the idea of taking care of ourselves and taking care of each other as, you know, self care, you know, solve your problems with a bubble bath. We kind of have that problem writ large with politics. Right. That if you are exhausted and overwhelmed by the onslaught of negative news that you sort of need to retreat. Right. And you need to withdraw. When in fact, everything from research to history to art will tell you is the exact opposite. That sometimes we aren't exhausted because we are aware of too much. We are exhausted because we are doing too little. The antidote, I think, to political exhaustion, the type that we are talking about, is that we are getting so much passive information and we have so few opportunities to act. We are tired then not from doing too much, but from doing too little. People who feel agentic aren't as tired. They are not as easily overwhelmed. So if you are exhausted by the onslaught of bad news, go to a protest. If you are exhausted by social policy that is demonizing children, start teaching children how to read. The more time you spend doing something, whatever, it is possible for you to do in your space in the world, the less exhausted you are by the onslaught of information. That really wins when it can convince you that the only thing you can do is watch what is happening to you. Wow.
- [25:57]
A
What's the hardest belief you've had to unlearn as you do this work? Beliefs about power progress? About your own proximity to some of the systems that you critique?
- [26:10]
B
Oh, that's a great question. I do have to convict myself often. Listen, I grew up, I like to say to people, I grew up in Bill Clinton's America in a post Cosby black fever dream of upward social mobility. I thought the world would be my oyster. And perversely it's worked out for me quite a bit. But what I had to understand and what I constantly have to convict myself in is that the very sense of possibility for me came at the expense of opportunity for others. And that in fact the closer I get to the seat of power, whether that is in academia or media or whatever it is, what that usually means is that a lot of people behind me were denied an opportunity. So I have to live with the sort of duality of my personal success and comfort come comes quite often at the expense of collective possibility for people I care a great deal about and for whom I think my well being is inextricably linked. And so the challenge there for me is to always have a bit of distrust about the systems. What is the idiom? You know, I don't trust any group who would have me as a member. I think that's Mark Twain. Right. The minute I'm there, I start to become very doubtful about the well being of this institution. So I try to hold both of those ideas at the same time. And I talk to young people about this, that you are supposed to do the best you can and you should be hopeful. But I think you should also always be attuned to the fact that your success, the opportunity that you have is part of this larger social fabric. And in the greater story of who we want to be, who I want to be. Right. I have to keep in mind that sometimes that will come at my personal expense. And I try to keep both of.
- [28:03]
A
Those ideas is it's funny when you talk about being a member of sort of the post Cosby generation, I am too. I would say I'm sort of post a different world generation.
- [28:14]
B
Oh, that's actually far more accurate. You are right.
- [28:17]
A
But you know, it strikes me the golden age of black sitcoms in the 1990s, the idea that black comedy in particular can be and has been a vehicle for social change. How important were those shows and how important were black comedians in expanding the idea of who we are as people listen?
- [28:40]
B
Popular culture, which is too often, I think, denigrated by serious thinkers and academics like myself, is, however, the playground for regular people to work out the possible future that the, you know, the social world has not made real to them. Right? We go to popular culture to say, hey, what do we think about this, like interracial dating thing? Right? And so we work that out in a sitcom, or hey, what do we think about women's right to vote? And we work that out in movies, right? It is then a very important playground. And so for me, as I think for millions of people of our age and generation, that era of which it was. It was such a rich era of popular culture, there were multiple ways of being black being explored across film, sitcoms, comedy, as you point out. And it was hugely important in a moment where we were told everything was possible for us, but we didn't know what that looked like. What does everything mean? What choices am I supposed to make? And so we do play that out by attending Hillman in our imagination, or we play it out by watching Martin, or we play it out through a critic rock joke. And in fact, one of the things that I'm interested in in this moment is where in our cultural. Our popular cultural imagination, are we working out the possibilities of the future? Because historically has been greatly important for. And complicated. Listen, don't get me wrong, you know, we have to deal with the consequences of Bill Cosby's legacy, for example, or we have to deal with the consequences of a lot of black upper class content being aspirational in a way that could be denigrating to working class black people at same time, again, that is a safe space for to. For us to work those things out. And I think it's important that we have them and that we have a real critical but welcoming orientation to doing so.
- [30:40]
A
Yeah. As we wrap up our conversation for people who are listening right now, watching right now, especially people who feel locked out of power and possibility, what do you want them to understand differently? After listening to our discussion, I hope.
- [30:57]
B
They understand that there is an entire world outside of the Internet first and foremost, and that in fact, the more you participate in that world, the more exposure you will have to possible versions of the future that feel far more hopeful than the political narratives of control and domination and exclusion and oppression are selling you. Listen, when I leave the house and I go out and I talk to know poor disabled tenants who are forming a tenants union in the belly of the American South. I know that there is a version of the future that people are willing to fight for that I'm not getting on social media or in my political discourse when I go out and there is a standing protest of one man on a corner in almost every place in this country who says, I know that I'm not necessarily plugged in right to the progressive movement or I'm not in a D.C. or in a New York. But it matters to me that I let my small local community know where I stand on these issues. When you can go out and people are doing literacy programs in their communities because their schools have become too dangerous, because ICE will will break down the doors, right? Those things can seem scary at first. But I promise you, what I want people to know is that I promise you, you will feel more hopeful, you will feel more human, and you will feel more possible the more you expose yourself to that world. And it is out there. It is happening. There are of reasons to be hopeful.
- [32:31]
A
Trustee McMillan Cotton, it is a privilege and a pleasure to speak with you. Thanks for making time.
- [32:36]
B
Thank you for having me. Lunch was great, but this traffic is awful. Can we stop at a bathroom? Are you all right? I keep having stomach issues after eating like diarrhea, gas and bloating, abdominal pain.
- [32:58]
C
And sometimes oily stools.
- [33:00]
B
Sound familiar? Those stomach issues may actually be a pancreas issue called exocrine pancreatic insufficiency, or epi. Creon may help manage epi. Creon is a prescription medicine used to treat people who can't digest food normally because their pancreas doesn't make enough enzymes.
- [33:16]
C
Creon may increase your chance of fibrosing colonopathy, a rare bowel disorder. Tell your doctor if you have a history of intestinal blockage or scarring or thickening of your bowel wall, if you are allergic to port, or if you have gout, kidney problems or worsening of painful swollen joints. Call your doctor if you have any unusual or severe gastrointestinal symptoms or allergic reactions. Take CRE is directed by your doctor and always with food. Do not chew capsules, as this may cause mouth irritation. Other side effects may include blood sugar changes, gas, dizziness, sore throat and cough. These are not all the side effects of Creon. Call 863-9110 or visit creoninfo.com to learn more. That's C R E O N info. Com.
- [33:44]
B
I'm asking my doctor about EPI and if Creon could help.