A Masterclass in Connecting Status, Power, & the Economy with Tressie McMillan Cottom

Summary

Summary of "A Masterclass in Connecting Status, Power, & the Economy with Tressie McMillan Cottom" The Money with Katie Show, Episode Released on June 25, 2025

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Introduction

In this episode of The Money with Katie Show, host Katie Gattytasan engages in an illuminating 90-minute conversation with Tressie McMillan Cottom, a renowned sociologist, New York Times opinion columnist, and MacArthur Fellow. The discussion delves deep into the intricate intersections of status, power, class, race, and gender within the framework of modern capitalism. Through their dialogue, they explore how economic indicators, cultural phenomena, and political narratives shape personal finance and societal structures.

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Understanding Economic Perceptions Beyond GDP

Tressie challenges the conventional reliance on Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as the sole indicator of economic well-being. She emphasizes that while GDP might show growth, it doesn't necessarily translate to increased personal security or wealth for the average American.

Tressie McMillan Cottom [00:49]: "Regular Americans look at the GDP and understand intuitively that they, however, are not richer, they are not more secure."

She argues that people perceive their economic conditions not through abstract numbers but through tangible, everyday experiences and symbols of status, such as driving a G wagon instead of a minivan. This visceral understanding highlights the disconnect between macroeconomic indicators and individual financial realities.

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Folk Economics and the Disconnect from Reality

Tressie introduces the concept of "folk economics," where simplistic and often misleading beliefs about how the economy operates influence public perception and political discourse.

Tressie McMillan Cottom [12:14]: "Folk economics, our need to understand our world, we come up with this system of fairy tales."

She criticizes the political narrative that portrays the economy as similar to a household budget, a metaphor she deems erroneous. This misrepresentation facilitates political motivations but obscures the true complexities of economic systems, leading to policies that don't address the real economic friction experienced by individuals.

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The Bama Rush Phenomenon as a Cultural and Economic Indicator

Katie brings up the viral phenomenon of Bama Rush on TikTok, which documents sorority recruitment at the University of Alabama. Tressie explains how this trend reflects broader societal values and economic aspirations, particularly among young women.

Tressie McMillan Cottom [23:06]: "Performance of femininity, of being the right kind of woman... is weighed down with some of the baggage that you have in the Northeast."

She connects Bama Rush to the internal contradictions of white liberal feminism and neoliberalism, suggesting that the obsession with traditional femininity and economic competitiveness signifies deeper societal issues. The allure of status symbols within this context points to an accommodationist approach towards capitalism, where personal success is narrowly defined by adherence to specific social norms.

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Beauty Standards as a Tool of Power and Control

A significant portion of the conversation revolves around beauty standards and their role in perpetuating power dynamics. Tressie posits that beauty is one of the few legitimate avenues women have to exert power, albeit without ownership or control.

Tressie McMillan Cottom [48:03]: "Beauty is about power. Beauty is the only power that women are allowed to legitimately use but never own."

She critiques the commodification of beauty, arguing that it's manipulated by patriarchal structures to maintain control over women's bodies and societal roles. This manipulation extends to the influence of social media trends like "Skinny Talk," where the pursuit of certain body ideals is framed as empowering while fundamentally reinforcing oppressive norms.

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Intersectionality: Race, Class, and Gender

Tressie provides a nuanced analysis of how race, class, and gender intersect within American capitalism. She emphasizes that these dimensions cannot be viewed in isolation, as they collectively shape individuals' experiences and opportunities.

Tressie McMillan Cottom [82:28]: "Capitalism and its American strain cannot be disentangled from race, class, and gender because we were the basic unit of American capitalism."

Her discussion highlights the global implications of American capitalism, illustrating how local phenomena like Bama Rush are interconnected with broader economic and social systems. This intersectional perspective underscores the complexity of addressing economic disparities and social injustices in a deeply stratified society.

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Political Implications and the Role of Leadership

The conversation touches on the influence of political leaders like Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) in shaping public discourse around economics and social issues. Tressie critiques how leaders utilize personal branding and cultural signals to gain and maintain power, often at the expense of substantive policy changes.

Tressie McMillan Cottom [74:18]: "It's not that the other side doesn't know. There's a certain amount of naivete."

She argues that political movements often fail to mobilize collective action effectively, instead relying on symbolic gestures and emotional appeals. This approach, she suggests, perpetuates existing power structures rather than challenging them fundamentally.

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The Cycle of Status Performance and Institutional Power

Tressie discusses the cyclical nature of status performance, where individuals adapt their behavior and appearance to align with prevailing power structures. This adaptation often serves to reinforce rather than dismantle oppressive systems.

Tressie McMillan Cottom [56:24]: "You can be in something and not of it."

She explains how individuals navigate institutional power by conforming to or resisting cultural norms, highlighting the personal and social costs involved in such negotiations. This dynamic is exemplified in political theater and media representations, where authenticity is often a facade for deeper manipulations.

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Conclusion: Navigating Power and Economic Systems

In wrapping up the conversation, Tressie emphasizes the importance of understanding the multifaceted nature of power within economic systems. She advocates for a more informed and critical engagement with the structures that shape our lives, urging listeners to recognize the interplay of race, class, and gender in perpetuating economic and social inequalities.

Tressie McMillan Cottom [84:23]: "There are no good or bad guys. That's all. That's the part we're all struggling with."

Her insights call for a collective and nuanced approach to addressing the challenges posed by modern capitalism, moving beyond simplistic binaries to foster genuine social and economic reforms.

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Notable Quotes

• Tressie McMillan Cottom [00:49]: "Regular Americans look at the GDP and understand intuitively that they, however, are not richer, they are not more secure."

• Tressie McMillan Cottom [12:14]: "Folk economics, our need to understand our world, we come up with this system of fairy tales."

• Tressie McMillan Cottom [48:03]: "Beauty is about power. Beauty is the only power that women are allowed to legitimately use but never own."

• Tressie McMillan Cottom [82:28]: "Capitalism and its American strain cannot be disentangled from race, class, and gender because we were the basic unit of American capitalism."

• Tressie McMillan Cottom [84:23]: "There are no good or bad guys. That's all. That's the part we're all struggling with."

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This comprehensive discussion between Katie Gattytasan and Tressie McMillan Cottom offers profound insights into the ways economic indicators, cultural norms, and political strategies intersect to shape individual lives and societal structures. Through critical analysis and thoughtful dialogue, the episode underscores the necessity of moving beyond superficial metrics and narratives to address the deep-seated issues of inequality and power dynamics in contemporary capitalism.

Transcript

[Hannah]

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[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

So regular Americans look at the GDP and understand intuitively that they, however, are not richer, they are not more secure. Let me tell you what they do understand on a visceral level that if I have the right David and can snag one of the 20 year olds in the advanced MBA program at my elite college, I will still be driving my kids to school every day as a wife and a mother, but it'll be in a G wagon instead of a minivan. They understand that you can see these things in popular culture. I think that our emphasis on politics being something that is erudite and is just about electoral politics, really blinds us to how real people, regular people, interpret politics. We live our politics out in the crap we buy and the stuff we perform. That's political too.

[Katie Gattytasan]

Welcome back to the Money with Katie Show. I'm Katie Gadytosan and I am joined Today by Tressi McMillan Cottam, a woman I have quoted countless times on this show. Tressy is one of America's foremost sociologists, a professor at UNC Chapel Hill, a 2020 MacArthur fellow. So this is the first institutionally sanctioned genius that we have ever had on the show. A New York Times opinion columnist and the author of three Thicke and other essays, a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award. Selfishly, as a longtime fan of Tressy's work, there were so many things that I wanted to talk to her about, so I decided to approach this episode a little bit differently than I usually do. I don't have an overarching theme here beyond the desire to get inside Tressy's head, and she was extremely generous to spend 90 minutes with us. We ping ponged around a lot of different topics all of which kind of ended up tracing back to the themes of status, power, class, you know, the usual. All refracted through the lens of everyone from Kristi Noem and El Salvador to Bama Rush. So before we get to the interview, I wanted to read an excerpt that I originally wanted Tressy to read on air when we were together, but we ran out of time because we talk too much. This is from her essay called the Price of Fabulousness. Respectability Rewards are a crapshoot, but we do what we can within the limits of the constraints imposed by a complex set of structural and social interactions designed to limit access to status, wealth and power. I do not know how much my mother spent on her camel colored cape or knee high boots, but I know that whatever she paid was returned, turned in hard to measure dividends. How do you put a price on the double take of a clerk at the welfare office who decides you might not be like those other trifling women in the waiting room and provides an extra bit of information about completing a form that you would not have known to ask about? What is the retail value of a school principal who defers a bit more to your child because your mother's presentation of self signals that she might unleash the bureaucratic savvy of middle class parents to advocate for her child? I didn't know the price of these critical engagements with organizations and gatekeepers relative to our poverty when I was growing up, but I am living proof of its investment yield. At the heart of incredulous statements about the poor decisions poor people make is a belief that we, the hard working, sensible, not poor, would never be like them. We know better. We would know to save our money, eschew status symbols, cut coupons, practice puritanical sacrifice to amass a million dollars. If you change the conditions of your not poor status, you change everything you know as a result of being not poor. You have no idea what you would do if you were poor until you are poor and not intermittently poor or formerly not poor but born poor, expected to be poor and treated by bureaucracies, gatekeepers and well meaning respectability authorities as inherently poor. Then and only then will you understand the relative value of a ridiculous status symbol to someone who intuits that they cannot afford to not have it. So without further ado, please enjoy this conversation with the one, the only Tressi McMillan Cottam Tressi, it is my pleasure to welcome you to the Money with Katie Show. Thank you so much for being here.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

It's a real pleasure to be here.

[Katie Gattytasan]

Katie finally, there are almost too many things that I want to ask you about today.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

We could talk about anything, just so you know, whatever you want. Although talking about money tends to be fun because people think that because of what I do, and I think I'm very clear about, like, what my beliefs are. I think they think that I, like, don't have any interest in money. And I'm like, no, you don't become who I am because you ignore the whole money piece. It is precisely because I figured out how money works that I think these things. But anyway, so, yeah, anything you want.

[Katie Gattytasan]

I feel that. I think there's, like, an interesting moral purity or, like, political purity to the idea that if you are a leftist or if you believe that the world should be different, that, like, opting out of the world as it is now is even, like, a live option, and it's just not.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

Girl, let me just tell you, a lot of that is the performance of privilege, because so many people who are professional leftists have a lot of privilege to be professional leftists. That's not a job that, like, working class people can get. Very often these are people who have left very expensive educations and very expensive backgrounds. And there's a bit of personal rebellion in them being on the political left. And so they want to reject all of the symbols of that. And I go, you know what? Good on you. Not everybody has the privilege of being that sort of politically pure. And so I don't even pretend to be.

[Katie Gattytasan]

Do you think that growing up the way that you did without kind of the silver spoon, I mean, you bring a different perspective to that work then? Because I think that that is kind of like a trope in. I don't know, you're a columnist for the New York Times. Like, yeah, a coastal elite vibe that goes along with people that work for these elite newspapers. Because typically, if you're, like, as a professional in media or, you know, you're working in magazines, that's a really hard gig to get. Unless you're willing to work for, like, next to nothing and live in places like D.C. and New York. And so often that means people's family money is supporting them during that time. How do you feel like that kind of changes the way that you approach the work?

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

Oh, gosh. It's difficult to overstate how much it shapes how I approach the work. Listen, I think. I mean, I haven't done the numbers, but I feel pretty confident in saying I am probably the only person, maybe not at the entire New York Times, but certainly in my Division of it, which is the opinion department that did not go to an elite university. I know for a fact I might be the only one who's going to an historically black college. And then when you take out like a Spelman or Morehouse or Howard, which are considered the elite HBCUs of which I did not attend, I think I'm about the only person of my humble educational and economic background at the New York Times. It shapes everything. It shapes my perspective on status, on power, on how those things matter. It shapes my perspective on what the discourse is supposed to be doing for people. I don't think I'm there so that our typical New York Times reader feels heard. There are a lot of people who can make those people feel heard. I like to think I'm there for the people who for years have read elite media and been the object of the news, but have rarely been the subject or the actor of the news. Meaning how does this matter to you if you are not born on third base, as the saying goes, like, why does this news matter to you? How is your perspective just as important, just as valuable as an economist from Harvard? It shapes everything. So on the one hand, I own the fact that I'm absolutely. You don't take the job. I tell people, don't let them pay you if you're going to be ashamed of working somewhere. So I took the job. I work at the New York Times. Right. It is what it is, but it doesn't change the fact. I mean, I get there at 45, 46 years old. I had 40 years of not being of the New York Times before I got there. And nothing about that changes my perspective. I like to think it makes it better, but I leave that up to the readers. But I'm definitely coming from a different point of view.

[Katie Gattytasan]

Wow. I noticed the phrase folk economics came up a couple of times in a few of your pieces.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

Yeah.

[Katie Gattytasan]

And there was one in particular that kind of captured the mood toward the end of 2023, which was peak vibe session for those who. Who maybe have like, repressed this period of. Of media discourse. This was the period when all the economic indicators that the powers that be will typically look to, to say things are good. Right. GDP growth, low unemployment, oh, there's real wage growth at the bottom. Inflation is back down, it's under control, Things are good. And yet economic sentiment is so poor. You write this op ed that essentially says, yes, people are earning more, they are also working more.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

Yeah.

[Katie Gattytasan]

And the industries that largely support all of the invisible labor that makes Life possible, A, cost more now and B, are harder and more inconvenient to access. And so you're kind of pointing to these maybe like softer indicators, like customer service being worse, for example, and that essentially all this culminates to make the friction in people's daily lives harder. And I read that the other day again from the 2025 vantage point where I'm going, okay, the economy is now like infinitely more precarious than it was even just two years ago. And I thought about a video that you posted after the election about the power of language and how people really only have the language that you give them to describe what's happening. And so if you keep saying it's inflation, then people are going to say, well, inflation is why my life is hard.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

That's right.

[Katie Gattytasan]

Inflation becomes the name for this broader set of factors that create this economic precarity. And that that story is very important. And so I'm dying to ask you, A, why you got in trouble for that op ed and B, what do you think the prevailing story should be?

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

So, first of all, I gotta say one of my favorite pieces to have written, which should have signaled to me that it was gonna get me in trouble. Cause if I'm having fun writing it, it usually means it's because I'm going after somebody's deeply held beliefs. You did such a bang up job of summarizing that piece. There are a couple things that actually tie in to your previous question. Folk economics and these folk beliefs about how the world works. It's like a thing, it's something that economists have talked about. Maybe not as much as they should, but here's the reality, right? Our economic world is so complicated. I think we're seeing that now as we try to explain to everyday people what tariffs are. Right. And why this matters. We are actually, however, not meant to understand all of the minutiae of a complex global economy, right? This is why you elect people. This is why some people go on to specialize. This is why we have a whole professional bureaucracy of government workers, right? Regular people actually aren't supposed to hold all of that. But here's what happens. Every four years, people run for office and you've got to tell the American people that you are going to take care of the economy. Big the economy. And so what we do politically is we reinforce their beliefs that, oh, the American budget works just like your household budget. How many times do we tell people, you know, the kitchen table issues, we'll balance our checkbook just like you balance your Checkbook. It's nonsense. That's not at all actually how the economy works. But for a few months every four years, we need people to believe that so that we can motivate them politically. And I think that what happens there is that over time, people need to understand why their lives work the way their lives work. But in America, we don't talk about class. And so there's this whole language we don't have to help us understand our world. What we have filled in with are all of these nonsense statements about fiscal responsibility and a deficit being morally wrong, or that, yeah, China needs to be paying as much as we like. None of that is how geopolitics works. But our folk economics, our need to understand our world, we come up with this system of fairy tales. So, like, on the one hand, it's not to say that the American people don't understand how the economy works. It's to say that the people who do understand how the economy works benefit when the regular American doesn't understand it. There's a political benefit to having them think it works like a checkbook. Then you can convince them that Democrats spend money recklessly because we run a deficit taking care of social welfare. The government's not supposed to work like your household. The United States treasury prints money. That's a very different relationship to your paycheck that you have to your household budget. But it's also true, and this is really important to me because of where I come from, that people aren't crazy or stupid when they use these folk beliefs. And in fact, often they are capturing something that the economic indicators don't capture. They just maybe don't have the right prescription, the right diagnosis. But in that moment, I understood that people were having real economic friction. They were calling it inflation, right? They were talking about the high cost of living because that's all we've given them. They don't have a language to talk about. Well, the middle class is atrophied and why that is. We can't talk to them about wage stagnation because we haven't really explained it or used that language. There's a way war on poor people and working class people. And as long as they can buy cheap goods to feel middle class, we can convince them that they are not being attacked. And so we've done that politically. But people, I thought, were having a pretty accurate experience of the economy, and I thought that we were doing something very cruel, especially on the left, by basically saying to them they were imagining it. The people I love and care about are actually not that crazy. They may not be sophisticated about economic theory, but they know that life feels coarser this year than it did four years earlier. And I think the Democrats paid a price for that. They went out there and told the American people, you're imagining it. The economy is great, the media has misled you. And people were going, I don't know. I'm on a nine month waiting list to get my kid an appointment with a pediatrician and this is why I got in trouble. Right. So I was perceived, I think, as rejecting the winds of a growing labor movement and the center left of bidenomics. A lot of people who had worked very hard on it. And I get it. But I also can't let you call millions of poor and working class Americans stupid.

[Katie Gattytasan]

Yeah. Yeah, dude.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

Wow. That's who my allegiance is ultimately with. And I also thought we were ignoring the experiences of women because a lot of what is has a lot of friction in the economy are things that impact women. Childcare, the high cost of transportation because we're taking kids to drop off lanes and driving them around town in a minivan because there are no buses. Right. Women have absorbed so much of that friction that I thought it was really easy to diminish those experiences as being hysterical.

[Katie Gattytasan]

I love how you sweetly smile as you deliver that line.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

I like to think it helps. I don't know if it does, but thanks, Katie.

[Katie Gattytasan]

I know what you're doing. I've been there. I'm like, we should seize the means of production. Bat's eyelashes.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

Here'S a cupcake.

[Katie Gattytasan]

So cute. I know, so cute and sweet. I think you're right. I think that people, even people who don't understand or have never taken an interest in the capital E economy from a economic indicator standpoint, can intuit that something is wrong. I think people are perceiving that exploitation is built into the fabric of how things work. And so the one that gets me the most is when we see headlines that essentially reject the idea that anything is wrong because GDP is going up. And I'm like, dude, GDP doesn't mean shit to the average person because the way that our economy distributes the spoils of that growth is so grossly unequal.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

That like, that's right.

[Katie Gattytasan]

The fact that GDP has been ripping and the stock market has been ripping for decades has not translated to gains for real people. And I think that there is like a real sense of being gaslit.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

Yes.

[Katie Gattytasan]

By these ideas. And I think that it did create that vacuum. I read something the other day. That was really interesting. It was basically talking about how right wing populism sometimes has echoes of progressive economic ideas, but that the key difference, he called it capitalist nationalism. It was like, they're not upset that the system requires winners and losers. That's not the problem. They just think the wrong people have been losing.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

That's exactly right.

[Katie Gattytasan]

They want someone else to lose.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

Yeah.

[Katie Gattytasan]

Even that interpretation is like not even quite all the way there because I think that like the people that they would love to see losing have been losing for a long time, but they don't. Those that find that messaging really powerful see themselves as somehow separate from or like, well, I should be a winner too.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

That's exactly right.

[Katie Gattytasan]

Yeah, I should be a winner. And in this system I'm not a winner. And there's this man on my television who tells me he's going to make me a winner.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

That's right.

[Katie Gattytasan]

And so I'm going to go vote for him. And it really, I mean it's quite simple. It actually makes a lot of sense. We'll get back to my conversation with Tressi after a quick break. Paid non client views may not be representative. See reviews at the App Store and Google Play. Learn [e-mail] moneywithkatie Investing involves risk. Performance is not guaranteed. I don't need to be the one to tell you, especially now that the stock market can experience significant fluctuations. And while you can't avoid market volatility altogether, you can take proactive steps to manage your money and financial needs during market downturns, staying focused on your long term goals. The thoughtful investment strategy can pay dividends literally in the future. And Betterment is here to make complex investing strategies available to everyday investors. Their automated tools and expert built globally diversified portfolios do the hard work for you. Work like automatically rebalancing your portfolio and helping you maximize your post tax returns by saving you more on taxes. Smart investing doesn't have to feel like a second job. Make your money hustle with Betterment. Get [e-mail] moneywithkatie that's betterment.com moneywithkatie I want to talk about Bama Rush with you.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

Oh okay.

[Katie Gattytasan]

Because this is another thing where like you wrote it a couple years ago and now I'm like whoa, this is feeling. That was very prescient. So for those who are not terminally online who have preserved their mental health, Bama Rush is a phenomenon that went viral on TikTok in fall 2021 for the first time documenting Sorority Rush at my alma Mater at the University of Alabama. And Tressy, you wrote this op ed in 2023.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

Yeah.

[Katie Gattytasan]

On this subject. And when I reread it the other day, something really clicked for me. You said, Bama Rush talk is counter programming to the northeastern elite university brand culture. And Bama Rush, that version of college, that vision of the world is quote, wholesome, non threatening traditional femininity. And we have talked a lot on the show this year about this weird resurgence of gender role orthodoxy and how it's so tied up with economic precarity.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

Yes, yes.

[Katie Gattytasan]

And so in your piece you're talking about how this peak neo antebellum white southern culture is a culture which assigns a lot of social capital to those who abide by these traditional gender roles. And I think part of the reason that it hit differently for me now is that your analysis really illuminated that the, the proximity to wealth that those videos capture and reflect really presents this, I think, like unconscious correlation between successfully performing traditional femininity and access to economic power.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

Oh yeah.

[Katie Gattytasan]

And now I'm like, do you think in retrospect that the country becoming enthralled with Fama rush in 2021 was kind of a canary in the coal mine for where things were headed?

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

Yes. I mean, if I could get my fellow well educated, I guess I'll say my, you know, cultural elite colleagues to take popular culture seriously as economic indicators, I wouldn't have a job. This is me going, okay, so regular Americans look at the GDP and understand intuitively that they, however, are not richer, they are not more secure. Let me tell you what they do understand on a visceral level, that if I have the right David Yurman stack and can snag one of the 20 year olds in the advanced MBA program at my elite college, I will still be driving my kids to school every day as a wife and a mother, but it'll be in a G wagon instead of a minivan. They understand that you can see these things in popular culture. I think that our emphasis on politics being something that is erudite and is just about electoral politics really blinds us to how real people, regular people, interpret politics. We live our politics out in the crap we buy and the stuff we perform, that's political too. And so when I see young women who are the beneficiaries of white liberal feminism, three decades of it, they can do things that their grandmothers could not imagine. Right? Choosing instead to continue to pursue what we would have at one time called an Mrs. Degree. The only thing that has changed there is that Status competition, the competition for a dwindling pool of accessible goods and status goods has gotten so competitive that young women now need to also actually earn their degree. But that's not winning, right? So what used to happen, your grandmother would go, oh, I've got a man. I can drop out of college now, right? I got my mrs, so I don't need my BS is what we used to say. Today's young woman needs both the bs, her own MBA and a man with an mba. Now, that may feel like winning to some people, but to me, it seemed to point out the internal contradictions of white liberal feminism accommodating neoliberalism. And I think all of this boiled down to looking at young, able bodied, beautiful, overwhelmingly very blonde white girls across the American south who are less conscious about performing their status. Now, the same kind of status stuff happens in the Northeast. It's just that in the south, the performance of femininity, of being the right kind of woman, the right kind of girl, is not weighed down with some of the baggage that you have in the Northeast. And I thought it was interesting that Bama Rush was tapping into, I think, some latent aspirations among a lot of my female colleagues, because I was getting Bama Rush from my friends, okay? The TikToks. They weren't on my. Listen, I'm a. I'm a black woman. I wasn't getting it. I had no idea.

[Katie Gattytasan]

Your algorithm's like, we'll spare her enough. She's not gonna like this. This isn't for her.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

That's exactly right. My algorithm was all Glorilla. I didn't know anything about the rest of this, okay? This was coming from my white girlfriends who have PhDs. These were academic and economists and think tankists and researchers. And I thought, why are you so tapped into Bama Rush? What has the algorithm figured out about you? The same thing that romance novels figured out about women, which is that if you can make capitalism sexy. Right. That our ultimate romantic fantasy is for capitalism to be safe and sexy. And the more a woman is involved in the economy, earning her own money, understanding how competitive and brutal it is, the more she fantasizes about a capitalism that will be a billionaire, a 6 foot 5 billionaire banker who will save her from all of this.

[Katie Gattytasan]

Man in finance.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

Yes, a man in finance. That was it. That may be even more than Bama Rush, I would say those two Trends together on TikTok, the 6:1 blue eyes, that thing when capitalism gets really hostile for all these complicated reasons that people can't quite Parse and understand. Because this is just about geopolitical conflict. This is about the rise of China, the rise of maybe India's economy. There are all these really complex things. This is about how the Internet has completely transformed financial systems. But what people say is, I don't get all that. But I know that if I can get a man who's got a finance degree, I am willing to make some trade offs. So all of this suggested to me that there was a conservatism out there even amongst professed liberals and especially among women. And then I see the returns to how a lot of young people voted during the last election and I go, yeah, if you were watching TikTok and you saw how obsessed everybody was with Bama Rush and a finance guy, I'm not sure you would have been as surprised as some people were.

[Katie Gattytasan]

It almost feels like there is a kind of an inherent acceptance that capitalism is unchangeable, that it is, well, that's never going to go away. So the best thing that we can do is make it tolerable.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

That's right.

[Katie Gattytasan]

And I saw this. I don't. I wish I knew who said this quote, fascism is capitalism's rear guard. That when things become so untenable that there is a risk of people kind of seeing through it. That that's when you start to experience some of the things that we're experiencing now. And so I think that there's like a little bit of a feeling of like living through a cliche. Having gone through Bama Rush and having been in that world, it was interesting to watch it become so sort of romanticized and for the fun and the glee and happiness that it's hard to overstate how dark it felt to actually be in that world. I have a lot of empathy now for my 19 year old self who at the time didn't have the language for the things that I was feeling and experiencing.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

Oh yeah. Did you watch the documentary by the way? There are a couple of glimmers in that documentary that I think speak to what you are saying, which is some of the young women felt it.

[Katie Gattytasan]

Oh yeah.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

And it was clear they didn't have the language. Like you said, there were a couple. They felt it. They knew there was something beneath the surface of the thing. Like, yeah, I'm setting myself up for life. All that stuff they tell you when you rush, right. This is going to be your sisterhood for life. This is the beginning of a network that's going to take you through to all these wonderful places. They, however, I Think felt beneath that, a sense of urgency that felt dangerous. And you could kind of see a couple of them grappling with what it meant, didn't have the language. And more importantly, there is a strong counterweight to them exploring that their sisterhood would just foreclose on that. So I thought that documentary was interesting in a way it didn't intend to be interesting if you paid attention to what was happening I think beneath the surface, which was this, what looked like shiny, happy people. That documentary about the Duggars. Right. They're supposed to be so shiny. But there's something about the juxtaposition of seeing some of their more complicated emotions flicker across their faces. And I gotta say, seeing it in young women, I think is especially interesting and important because I do think that young women are living with the contradictions of liberal capitalism in a way that young men are not. Mostly because young women are expected to have babies. And I think all of the contradiction of capitalism right now comes to a head when it's time to give birth, to choose to have children. That's why I think gender has played such an important role in this era of fascism. That's because all of those contradictions. Wait a minute. We can't have both social mobility and the reproduction of an elite in an economy where there's this much friction and the margins are this narrow. All of that becomes real concrete to you when you've gotta decide whether or not to have a baby. And I think young women are living all of capitalism's contradictions right now. And the cruelty of us not giving them the language for it and then also gaslighting them when they act on what their gut tells them is true. It is really hard to be a young woman right now. And then all we wanna talk about is how lonely young men are. Let's add insult to injury, okay. Women are walking around in signal trying to figure out where to get a pap smear. And yet we are worried that young men are lonely.

[Katie Gattytasan]

Man. I think about that a lot. Kind of the way that these issues are interconnected, and we've talked about this on the show in the past, how capitalism and gender hierarchy also makes a lot of promises to young men. And the thing about patriarchy is that it's not great for most men. It's good for a few men.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

Yeah.

[Katie Gattytasan]

But like, for most men, what you have to offer those men in order to make up for the fact that they don't have any real power in this system is a wife whom they can have power over. And I think that that is like the underlying kind of game that's being played. And I think that that's why there's now so much hand wringing. I would also say that the hand wringing was interestingly timed considering it became a very popular conversation leading up to the election when a woman is running for president. I was like, okay, well that's kind of obvious what's happening here. But all the hand wringing about young men falling behind, it's very reactionary. It's a reaction to the fact that there is a perception of women gaining consciousness and being less down to maybe play that role. Or so we thought. I think that that's maybe what's been the concerning thing about some of these trends, whether it be Bama trad wives, just this kind of cultural shift. I'm not sure if you saw the poll. I think it was actually in a. There was like a guest columnist in the Times that wrote it, but there was some poll that said since 2020, two Republican men reported believing that women should like return to their natural place. It like doubled. It's like one in two men and.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

Growing among 18 to 22 year olds, which I think is particularly disturbing. But yes, yes.

[Katie Gattytasan]

Yeah, yeah. I get frustrated with it because it feels like we are so close. It's like, God, we're so close to the truth here. We're so. People are so disillusioned and so angry and they should be.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

Idea that we're so close yet so far away is really interesting to me because it. This ties into me, I think, of one of the poverties of our discourse and our political imagination. And one of the things that has been maybe the most challenging for me personally as my life changed and I enter into these spaces, into these rooms, which is that it is not that the other side doesn't know. There's a certain amount of naivete. You become sort of an intellectual in the organic way, which is you just read all this stuff and you think, oh no, you know what it is? The Democrats or liberals or whatever, they just don't know. And then to enter the rooms and go, no, they know just fine. Right? They know exactly what's happening. And in fact that it is. It is worse than that. It is more cynical than that, which is. There was nobody confused during this last election at the top about the role that gender and sexism and patriarchy were playing both in the economy and into our limited economic prescriptions. What is worse to accept is that there are people who are paid not to know, and as the saying goes, you cannot convince a man to know what he is paid not to understand. There was nobody who should have been surprised. Anybody who looked at any fine grained polling data understood that yes, sexism and patriarchy was playing a significant role in how the electorate was understanding Kamala Harris. But it was also true that the Democrats were not putting forward the best economic prescriptions in putting out the best messaging because they are upholding also some of these inconvenient truths about our political system. The reality is that unless we shift to a climate sensitive democratic socialism, we are not going to survive as a multiracial representative democracy or republic. It's just not going to happen. Okay? We can't do enough fracking, we can't buy enough crap on TikTok. Katie. There's nothing that is going to bandage over the fact that there is just a major global transition happening around natural resources and the price we pay for them. And nobody wants to tell Americans the truth about that. And if you are going to be a hypocrite about that, you're going to get somebody like Donald Trump who doesn't mind puncturing your hypocrisy for personal gain. And well, there we are.

[Katie Gattytasan]

Now you've opened the socialism door. And I'm like, do I want to just walk through that door? I kind of do.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

Then let's go.

[Katie Gattytasan]

So AOC and Bernie, okay, Fighting the oligarchy tour.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

So listen, on the one hand, listen, I have said that you better go out there in our current media environment and you better play freaking ball. Meaning you can't be too cute and too good to be a meme. You can't be too cute to get on Instagram Live. You gotta meet people where they are. And AOC has not only been willing to do that one because I think she's of the generation, but she's also a generational talent, political talent. And I think it's really important to acknowledge that the girl is good and understands intuitively, I think, the rhythms of today's media and information environment. And in a way that frankly, Donald Trump does too. And so I'm always really happy when I see her out there showing that you can do this as a Democrat and as a young politician. And it also makes sense for her to be partnered with Bernie. They share a couple of things structurally, which was that both of them are in extremely safe districts. And that's what you've got to be as a left Democrat, right? You have got to bring a base to that party or else the Democrats will not allow you to exist and you've got to make some deals with the Democratic establishment to stay, which is what both AOC and Bernie have done, which is why they now get in trouble with some of the more left wing part of the party. But you just can't do electoral politics in a two party system and not make those deals. I'm not nearly as tied to the political purism as some other people are. Having said all of that, I don't understand this tour, not one little single bit. Let me tell you why. You got some other Chris Murphy doing it too. And again, I think that there is a period for sort of the political mourning that people went through after Donald Trump was reelected. Yeah, I mean, I didn't feel it, but I know I'm not normal. So that was okay. I kind of stepped back. I understood that a lot of people's political dreams like a sense of betrayal and that that was all real. But I also feel like things are far too urgent and important for us to be in mourning clothes too long. And some of the grand touring around to me feels like an extended wake. Let's put the body in the ground. I'm from the south, let's have our repast and let's move on, people. We gotta move on. So I think the tone of this is that there are a lot of self satisfied centrists and Democrats who just want to feel like that emotional release of we were betrayed, we are morally right, how could this happen to us? But that's a horrible political space to be in. I don't think that this tour is organizing or mobilizing people. I think it's a bit like a tent revival. People come to feel absolved of their sins, they have a big emotional release and then they go home. I'm still looking for the vehicle that turns people's grief and outrage and despondency into collective political action. Now, I'm not saying that can't happen from this tour. I'm just not presently seeing it. And if you don't get that from Bernie and aoc, my concern is you're not going to get it anywhere else in the Democratic Party. That's your best shot. Yeah. I'm also concerned that they're not coming to the South. Now. I want to beat my personal drum here. The Democrats cannot win without us. They've never won without us. The Democratic Party of today hates that reality because the south is hard and it has a lot of black people and increasingly a lot of Hispanic people. And we are hard to organize because racism is hard, but they cannot win without us. And I am not interested, frankly, in your tours that only go to what you think are the real battleground states, Ohio and Pennsylvania. If I don't see you in South Carolina, in Mississippi, in Alabama, I don't pay you any attention. And that's just real. Okay, so there's also that.

[Katie Gattytasan]

Oh, man. Yeah. I just moved to the. The very blue haven of Denver, Colorado, and I, I walk, walk down the street and I see the. The signs in the front yard in this house, we believe. And I'm like, yeah, baby, let's live out, let's go.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

That's it.

[Katie Gattytasan]

But big crowds for Bernie and AOC here. And so I've been joining some of the worker organizing stuff on the ground, which has been really cool. In Denver, there is a strong DSA chapter. There isn't a strong DSA chapter in Charlottesville, Virginia. There is a certain benefit of living in a place that does have that presence. But I've been thinking about what that purpose of the tour is, and I guess I thought about it more as, like, is this Bernie's subtle way of getting all the Bernie Bros to be like, this is the future. She's. I'm essentially like, publicly endorsing that. Like, this is the person that y' all are gonna need to be voting for. Yes, Symbolically.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

Absolutely. The passing of the torch. And they need some hand holding because they have been cruel and myopic on that side when it comes to aoc, frankly, when it comes to any woman or person of color. Listen, the same thing. I've paid historically my dues to dsa and I have, because I think you have to join something.

[Katie Gattytasan]

Right. You need a political home of some kind.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

That's right. Just choose something, give it your time, energy, move on. And because of that, I think I have paid enough dues to say without paying too much of a cost, that, you know, they are extremely hostile to the very idea that race and place and gender matter. And so it was going to take Bernie Sanders quite literally, hand holding with AOC out in public, I think, to make that possible. And I think you're right. He is not a young man, et cetera. Right. That there's a role for a Bernie Sanders figure in the Democratic Party that has to be filled. I think AOC absolutely makes sense. I think we're gonna look up in 20 years in a. Is going to be a Democratic power broker. I think that she has looked at like Nancy or something. I absolutely. I think she has those political instincts and right now it looks like that's kind of where she's headed. Having said all of that, that's important, but I'm not sure that that is the sort of political change to your point of not having like maybe a comparatively thriving DSA chapter in a place like Charlottesville, Virginia. A DSA chapter in a place like Denver is only as strong as its weakest presence in a place like Charlottesville. I just don't know unless they've got a solution or an answer or a real good faith engagement with how they're gonna build that power in the South. I just don't understand why I should be emotionally invested.

[Katie Gattytasan]

There's even like a meta narrative there of I check myself pinning all my hopes on AOC and be like, oh, you're doing it again though. You're doing the thing where it's like a top down. There's going to be the one person who changes it and fixes it. And I think even that is pretty antithetical to the idea of collective action because you do need leaders. But I think that the two party system in America has really trained us to think about the person who is in that executive leadership role as like, oh well, that's all you have. You have to get your person in that office and then you don't have to worry about anything else.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

That's right. Get back to life. That's right.

[Katie Gattytasan]

We will continue my conversation with Tressy after a quick break. Unless you live under a rock, you know AI is one of the hottest topics in, well, just about everything. It was only a matter of time until it made it to to the finance world. And with growing expectations for real time visibility and control, there's a huge opportunity for AI enabled tools in the financial sphere. Blackline empowers CFOs with solutions that deliver transparency and audit ready accuracy at scale. Now they're embracing the future of finance by incorporating AI into Blackline's Studio360 platform. That means you can drive efficiency and smarter decision making by automating manual finance processes that slow down growth. Eliminate grunt work so your team can focus on strategy. Because seriously, who would prefer to do grunt work? To learn more, visit blackline.com money that's blackline.com money There are some businesses people call when they need help fast. Like a plumber. If no one picks up, that potential customer isn't going to wait around while water drips through their ceiling. They're calling someone else. If you run a business, you know that every missed call is money left on the table. OpenPhone helps you connect with every customer that reaches out to you. With OpenPhone, your team can share one phone number through an app or on your computer, collaborate on customer calls and texts with a shared inbox, and say goodbye to voicemail with an AI agent that can handle calls after hours. OpenPhone is offering my listeners 20% off your first six months at openphone.com moneywithkati that's O P E N P H O-N-E.com moneywithkatie and if you have existing numbers with another service, OpenPhone will port them over at no extra charge. OpenPhone. No missed calls, no missed customers. We've kind of touched on class performance. And the original reason that I wanted to bring you on the show back in January was because we were doing a series on GLP1s.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

Oh yeah, yeah.

[Katie Gattytasan]

And your essay about GLP1s, I thought was the best that I had found. That really captured the layers of complexity of that conversation. That was one of the hardest series I've ever worked on because there was really no binary conclusion that I felt like I, I could come to. And there was something that you said in your op ed that really stuck with me, which was that you were paying for concierge medicine. Yeah, it was just a very expensive and kind of high status way to access medical care. And that part of what you realized the doctor was doing in one of your sessions was acculturating you to the body befitting of your socioeconomic status. And so even though you actually did not need to lose weight for health reasons, that minimizing weight stigma was the medical service you hadn't realized that you may have been paying for.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

That's exactly it. Yes.

[Katie Gattytasan]

I think that we often think about these ideals of thinness or you know, an insert other industrialized beauty norm here, that this is about preference. Like, oh, I just prefer myself this way or I just prefer myself. And you've written in that piece and in others about the fact that beauty is not about preference, that beauty is about something else. So what is beauty about?

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

Beauty is about power. Beauty is the only power that women are allowed to legitimately use but never own. It's the only political power we are allowed to pursue without being stigmatized, but we can never control is about power. And I became a started powerlifting about two years ago and really love it. I or I love it. You know, I don't know if I'm ever going to like exercising, but I certainly kiss something out of it. I keep going, I keep showing up. And I understand that that's a preference I have. So I'm not saying that you don't have something you like. I like things. The difficult thing for people to hold on to, as you point out, is that this is not binary. There is no good moral choice in a system of power where your body is the only capital you are allowed to use without sanction. There's no good beauty. There's beauty that's more or less painful. And that's not beauty's fault. Beauty is actually supposed to be naturally available to all of us, as bell hooks once pointed out. Right? There is a natural component of beauty. The sky's beautiful, nature's beautiful, and that should be freely available art, all of that. But the reality is that's not the world we build. The world we built makes everything from beautiful art to beautiful people a commodity. And so your preferences are always operating within the limits of the commodity of beauty. And that's hard for people to accept because the last safe place for us to be ruthlessly racist, sexist, classist and ableist is when it comes to bodies, you can get the most dyed in the wool Radical leftists you've ever met and they want to blow up everything. Okay, they're going to throw a Molotov cocktail into Wall Street. They were at Occupy, they broke down the statue of the Black Lives Matter protest. And everybody they've ever dated has been blonde. And they will look you dead in your face.

[Katie Gattytasan]

Another subtweet to the Bernie Bros will.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

Look you dead in your face and tell you that those two political realities have nothing to do with each other. Some of my favorite research is from the data sets from dating websites because it so brilliantly punctures exactly this hypocrisy of that. You know, all these people have all these signifiers for social justice in their bios and then you'll get beneath it on the data. Yeah, but they only respond to 19 year olds, blonde white girls who weigh less than 128 pounds. Those are your politics too. That's all I want people to understand. Those are also your politics. That's not to say that you should be sexually attracted to everybody, but also that what you're sexually attracted to is not just natural. There's tons of research about the fact that really what we find beautiful is an average of the things we've been exposed to. So the residential segregation, the school segregation that puts you in classroom with people who look just like you has shaped what you think is a natural desire that you have. And I want us to understand our intimate lives and our intimate relationship with our bodies as being political, because when we don't, it becomes really easy to tap into those preferences and make them political difference. That is what Donald Trump excels at. He came out and said, I'm not ashamed of only wanting blondes. I'm not ashamed of the Miss Universe pageant. And in fact, it's ridiculous that you're ashamed of it, that this is what women should look like, and I will own it. And the reason why that can work for him politically is because we've got a latent, unexamined political belief that is the exact same, and we're uncomfortable with that. Everybody doesn't just like tall men. People told you that tall men were better. So, yeah, preferences matter, but they don't matter more than power. And what we prefer is very political. And there's a lot of systems that will shape that for you. I'm sitting in that doctor's office one day and realize the assumptions that she was making about me based on my economic position, which, listen, blew my mind. I'm not used to getting the benefit of economic privilege. On the one hand, people paying a lot of money for that. On the other hand, it made me really uncomfortable about what that was saying about who my people are and what I value. And I'm not sure I made great decisions coming out of that. I still ended up changing my body. I just didn't do it through a GLB one, but I did end up changing my body. I'm not really comfortable with how much people, like, want to talk about it, but I also have to own the fact that it's a political choice. And I think that's what we don't like to do. We don't want to own the political reality of the choices we make.

[Katie Gattytasan]

Do you know Jessica Defino? She just writes really powerfully about beauty norms, beauty standards. I know she's a really big fan of yours. And she said something on this show that I will never forget, which is that we can't confuse what makes us feel powerful with being empowering.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

Yes.

[Katie Gattytasan]

And so there's a lot of that, like, empowerment language around.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

That's right.

[Katie Gattytasan]

Botox and filler and body modification, and you should do what makes you feel good, and that's empowering. And she was like, just because these things confer power in a system where power means you are adhering very closely to this, like, Eurocentric narrow idea of what beauty is. Oh, yeah, of course. The more you adhere to that the more power you will have, but that. That's not feminist. If your definition of feminism is collective liberation from gender oppression, I think that that word power and empowering, it can become so slippery in the marketing of these things. And of course it feels good to believe that these things are empowering because, like, well, great, then I don't have to feel bad about doing them. But she was kind of like, not every choice that you make has to be a feminist choice. You can wear makeup.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

That's right.

[Katie Gattytasan]

Just don't say it's a feminist choice.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

That's exactly right. Just don't call it your feminism. Yeah, just don't call your crop top feminist activism. I mean, some of this is about when I was talking earlier about how Americans don't have a language for class. And while I certainly am a. I'm a materialist, I believe material conditions matter. But I'm also a black woman. I think race matters and is a material condition. I don't want to like, separate out these two things. One of the reasons we don't talk about race any better than we do is because we don't have the language about class. And the reason why we can't talk about gender any better is because we don't have a language about class. Right. Because what's beneath that is that the only thing that is ultimately powerful is the power to wield the power. The power to wield it. To define the terms of something. Anything that you are doing as an accommodation by definition means you can't control it, you can't confer it, you cannot wield it. That actually can't be feminist. It cannot be anti racist. And I love my folks, but. But there's a black empowerment version of this about, you know, embodying sort of natural beauty as some sort of type of performance of power. All of that is an accommodation. All of it is accommodationist. And the reason why I think we fall into that uniquely as Americans is because we have channeled all of our political aspirations into consumption.

[Katie Gattytasan]

The phrase I originally wrote down was beauty is the only power that women are allowed to use but never own.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

That's it.

[Katie Gattytasan]

And that ownership, I think, is the.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

That's it.

[Katie Gattytasan]

The key power to wield the power, accommodating power.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

That's it. It's still owned by Procter and Gamble, which is still disproportionately men on the board. We've all seen the charts of the, you know, of monopolies and the consolidation of monopolistic power. And they're like Four supernational firms that pretty much own every brand that we think of as differentiated. Unilever owns beauty, honey. And it is my favorite scene from the Devil Wears Prada. Miranda Priestley is like, you think you chose a blue sweater?

[Katie Gattytasan]

Yeah.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

You think you chose a blue sweater? Mama, I want to tell Nene and the housewives. You think you chose that nose? That nose was chosen for you. You think you chose those lowlights? Honey, that was chosen for you. Okay? Anytime that's the case, you don't own it. You don't own it. We're all just accommodating, and there's a certain amount of survival in accommodating, but we cannot not confuse survival with liberation or freedom.

[Katie Gattytasan]

So thoughts on Skinny Talk? You up on Skinny Talk?

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

Yes, I am. So one of the things that happens when you have maybe written about blondes and bodies, I didn't anticipate being this person. People send me every TikTok trend.

[Katie Gattytasan]

The TikTok algorithm's like politics of beauty.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

Yeah, I get it all I speak with Christiana Namu is a co host of a podcast with Trevor. Noah has become a really good friend, and she and I talk about this a lot. This is one of our personal favorite things to DM about is the transformation of feminism in these trends that we can see online. So it started with the attacks on Lizzo. I just want to shout out Lizzo here, who I think took on the lion's share of the collapse of the political economy of fat positivity. We just projected it all onto that poor girl and almost broke her. And we owe her so much. It was so unfair. But what Lizzo, I think, represented, it was at the. Just as this approach to, like, gender essentialism was taking up, getting traction in the manosphere, and was making that transition into mainstream political discourse. It was the idea that a diversity of bodies had gone too far.

[Katie Gattytasan]

Yeah.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

If a fat black woman didn't pay a penalty for being fat and black in public, that meant that white men had lost some of their power to control women. That's all it was about. That's what Lizzo represented. And I don't even know if that poor girl knows that. I'd love to tell her if she does. Had nothing to do with her. It had to do with the fact that she was evidence that there was some softening around men's power to determine the value of women. And as a black woman, that meant she had absolutely no protection. And so she was a very convenient target for it, as is often the case. Right. Black Women get the most of that hate because there's nobody to protect us structurally and institutionally. But that was the beginning. And I would say it starts with Lizzo and ends with Skinny Talk. Skinny Talk is women saying, we pretending for a while to accept these accommodations. But now that liberal feminism is showing its weakness, there is no space for my economic aspirations. I'm going back to accommodating men's desire and projection of desirability onto me. One of the things I talked about in this essay I wrote ages ago about beauty is that what can be considered beautiful at any point in time in history can change. And it changes to accommodate what the political economy needs. In the 1930s, wide hips and a small waist on a woman was considered desirable, not because we were more feminist or pro women, but because it was harder to get nutritious food and it was just evidence of status. To have wider hips, you get a more athletic build and thinner, skinnier women when the economics of access to food and privilege changes. Right? So beauty norms can change, but they only change to protect men's power and privilege. And this was men saying, we are reclaiming our power to determine what is attractive. Women are accommodating it, and Skinny Talk is them trying to make it over as feminist. They're now going to make it empowering to discipline your body. We've been through this cycle over and over again. It is just really easy to see it in our social media world where, like, all of that is packaged up for us so neatly. Me and Christiana say. I mean, we called it with the Lizzo thing. We were like, yeah, we're a couple years out from being back to low waist jeans and removing a rib for your abs to be flat. And sure enough, here we are at Skinny Talk.

[Katie Gattytasan]

Yeah, I mean, your body, my choice. That's the.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

That's it.

[Katie Gattytasan]

The rallying cry of, yeah. Well, you know what's funny is I'm working on an episode about Skinny Talk for Diabolical Lies. So I love it. Have been thinking about and reading a lot of the coverage of Liv Schmidt and kind of like why people are fans and why they say they like her. And something that jumped out at me about a lot of that coverage was, like, essentially people saying, at least she's honest. At least she's honest about what we're all trying to do here. Of course, we've just been trying to get skinny the entire time. The language may have changed around. I wanna be fit, I wanna be toned. But, like, let's just call it what it is like, this is what we were trying to do. And she's being honest about what it takes, which is starving yourself. It kind of gives me, like, tonally, that same reactionary feeling that I get when people, like, kind of like the backlash to wokeness. It's like, well, at least now we can be honest about what we all want and how we all really feel. And I think that part of the reason that it's become so successful and has become, like, acceptable again, to speak that way and to think that way is because I look at this and I'm like, I just don't think that this ever went away.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

It didn't.

[Katie Gattytasan]

I don't think that the benefits that accrue to those who meet those norms, I don't think that those rewards ever changed.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

They did not.

[Katie Gattytasan]

I don't think that fatphobia ever really changed. So, of course, now we're seeing the resurgence, because I think that a lot of the. A lot of the progress was so nascent and, like, rhetorical in some ways.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

There you go. It was discursive. This is what happens when we push all of our diversity and all the difference into just the discursive space. This was Twitter, honey. This was never real. This was never real. I mean, I can't. I can't say this enough. There was never a good time to be a fat woman. There was never a change in the makeup of women who run Fortune 500 companies or women who are elected to office or women who. There was never any meaningful change. What you saw was a sense of there being some social capital that especially, I think, progressives could pursue. This was during the height of the Obama diversity coalition. Being diverse and embracing diversity and all its definitions just came with some social capital. It never came with economic capital. Yeah. There's never been any economic capital to diversity and diversity of bodies. This is only social capital, a little bit of cultural capital. And so what happens when branding changes, but the material basis doesn't change is that, yeah, people still believe it. They just go underground with their beliefs. And then when somebody comes out and they're racist and sexist and ableist. Right, Right. Hello, a Donald Trump. Hello, a Live. Their honesty about their biases feels like authenticity.

[Katie Gattytasan]

Yeah. It feels subversive when it's like you're saying the most basic, basic I've ever heard.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

Yeah, it's good to be skinny. No Sherlock.

[Katie Gattytasan]

Like, oh, my God, a revolutionary in our midst.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

I know. But it's our own hypocrisy that makes their.

[Katie Gattytasan]

Makes it possible.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

Them feel Transgressive. Donald Trump was only transgressive if you've been lying to yourself about yourself, your own prejudices. Power only feels subversive to you if you've lied to yourself about how much you desire that power.

[Katie Gattytasan]

There's like an institutional side of this too, which I noticed when I was reading all the Wall Street Journal had it first and then three days later the New York Times is on it. And then. And then give it five months. And ev magazines like punished for being honest.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

That's right.

[Katie Gattytasan]

But something I, I was thinking about is, you know, now that the Cut published that piece about they went behind the paywall and actually were like, no, here's how d dark this shit really is. This isn't about censorship. This is about 15 year olds that are like, oh, I'm gonna be the skinniest girl at prom.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

That's right.

[Katie Gattytasan]

It sounds as though Meta has now demonetized her and elite models have dropped her. And I'm like, oh, how convenient for these two institutions who are effectively wielding her very stance for as much profit as they can possibly extract, have the nerve to like publicly demonetize and try to kind of get the like snaps for being like, yeah, we're taking a stance on this. It's like, this is how you make money.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

That's right.

[Katie Gattytasan]

We have become so comfortable and so quick to punish the individual without really like, we just let the power structures disown her. And I'm like, she's a product of you.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

That's exactly right.

[Katie Gattytasan]

You created her.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

She was only able to make money because she intuited what the algorithm had already systematized. That's it. Many of us do this. We sort of backend our way into like some pattern in the algorithm. But the algorithm predates us and will just backfill with another person. There'll just be another one of her who figures out how to tweak that and figure out how to win at that brand. And the next time there won't be as much political outcry and they'll be able to get away with it longer. Right. This is the cycle of the attention economy. This is the thing that I like to point out about this. Me too. I'm not interested in these individual avatars of the rise and fall of our political beliefs and who's right and who's wrong. What I care about is that there is no way to be right in the given structure of the media, of social media, of the information economy. There's no way to be right that to me is what matters. And it is indicative, I think of this larger problem where you can have like a two party political system. In the same way we think we have a choice between say Facebook and TikTok. That is no real choice beneath it. The economics of these things are always going to be conservative, small C conservative, which is that they reduce us to our individual traits, network them to make it feel collective, but makes us all individually poorer. That to me is like the political project of how we do everything. And the, the hubris of us thinking that choice is powerful enough to overcome that is one of the greatest delusions of western privilege sickness of just thinking that we can do with choice what they are doing with power. Only power meets power, honey. You need like a million lives and then it won't matter whether or not she wants to be skinny. That's what I think. You know, that should be the goal. Not trying to have the power of deciding which body is the right body. But nobody having that power power, nobody share that power. Like let live be skinny if she wants to. But she shouldn't have the power to brand it and market it. Which means not worrying about Liv. It means worry about Facebook.

[Katie Gattytasan]

Yeah, yes, exactly. That's, that's I think the thing that I was just. Yeah, I was like, God, it's so typical for, for the avatar to become.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

The symbol, especially a woman.

[Katie Gattytasan]

Yes. To the symbol. Then to become the whole thing.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

Yeah.

[Katie Gattytasan]

And it's like, yeah, you've whack a mole this one person, but the power structure, the institutional power that created and enabled that is just going to churn out another one. On that note, let's talk about Kristi Noem. A couple years ago you wrote about Kirsten Sinema. You know, you talk about how she has this very like decidedly middle class fashion presentation in this piece and you kind of contrast her with a Nancy Pelosi who you call preternaturally turned out, which is a great phrase. And then like all these fashion choices are very much political stagecraft. They're trying to send a message. And again I'm like, damn. Pretty prescient. You know, I'm watching the video, Kirsty Noem Warcroft Tomb Raider down in El Salvador and I'm like, holy moly.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

She's a cross between like Dora the explorer and she just puts on this costume to go out and do the most horrific shit imaginable. Isn't it something?

[Katie Gattytasan]

Well, there was a really good piece that this guy, his name's Jeff Charlotte. The piece was called that's bait. He has some pictures in there of behind the scenes shots of that day that I just found, so. Oh, God. I was like, oh, my God. I didn't realize that this is what was happening here. Basically, everyone else that she's with on this tour of this prison camp, everyone's wearing suits. She's the only one that's in, like, this kind of sexy little Kim Possible get up. And I was like, well, that's a little strange. And then there's a shot of her walking into the room where they're gonna do the photo shoot and all the men behind her are clothed.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

Yeah.

[Katie Gattytasan]

And then you get to the video and everyone's shirtless. And I was like, oh, my God. They literally made these people take their clothes off for this piece of political theater. And I think that that was a very eye opening. Like, okay, they know exactly what they're doing. There's no longer plausible deniability here. About, like, maybe she just likes wearing cargo pants. Like, this was very intentional. And I think that she is a very interesting example on the New right of how overt a lot of this has become. Subtlety, nuance, it's dead. Right. There is this very stunning physical transformation that she undergoes. We know it takes a tremendous amount of labor and money and that typically with. With things like plastic surgery, with aesthetic performance as a woman, there is like a bit of a game that you're playing where you want it to look natural enough. Right. Like, if you are.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

That's a liberal game, though, not a conservative one. That's right.

[Katie Gattytasan]

If you are upper class.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

Yeah.

[Katie Gattytasan]

Your work should be so good that people wonder. And I think the overtness she's putting on is the point. The detectability is the point.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

Yes, it is.

[Katie Gattytasan]

But she's signaling, I'm willing to do the work.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

That's right. I can be shaped. Which is the ultimate achievement of allowable womanhood. Allowable femininity, the safest femininity is to say that you are a willing participant in being shaped by the male gaze and its expectation. I will conform. I will conform. One of my favorite studies is about the power of makeup. And they did a study, they, like, measure people's response to women who wear makeup in the workplace. And one of my favorite conclusions there is that even when women's makeup is bad, meaning super obvious, not flattering. Right. They still get a bump in likability from the person judging them, because at least they tried.

[Katie Gattytasan]

Yeah.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

What women are judged on is their effort to conform. Then it is. You don't even have to be. You don't actually have to be attractive. That is actually one of the reasons that the whole fat positivity moment was considered such an assault to a deeply held conservative value. Because even if you are, you can be fat, you can be unattractive, but as long as you look like you are trying to not be fat. And the fat positivity moment was about embracing giving up the competition and not try so hard, that is the threat. This conservative, both small C and capital C conservative moment, which is now two, just inseparable from Trumpism. I always like to point that out because people want to act like he's an aberration and he's not. He's just a stop on a continuum of where conservatism has been going is that the. That women like Christie have to show the effort to be deemed valuable. That's why it's so literal. We keep trying to figure out, like, why does the work look so bad? Why does the hair look so bad? Why the clothes? Because it signifies the effort. It needs to be easily read. It needs to be literal. If it looks natural, we don't know if it was effort or. Or you are just genetically lucky. And what we are judging women on right now to allow them back into the fold is how much effort are you willing to expend? And someone like Trump really values that effort, by the way. He likes the vulnerability of the effort and the power it gives him. That's why judging a beauty contest was a perfect training ground for someone like him and his political brand, judging which women are attractive based on their visible efforts of beauty. The women who surround Donald Trump are fascinating to me because in many different ways, in many different iterations, they have figured out how to signal that to him so that they can get closer to power. It's about not just about the hair, but it's about the rhetoric they're willing to perform. It's about how much they are willing to flatter his form of really garish declasse. Very. In its own way, really kind of. He has a very working class interpretation of beauty and art and aesthetics. But how willing they have been to use that and embody it. In an age when, like you said, so much of social media and the Internet, performance is supposed to be about making things look natural and effortless. These women have gone the other way because they accurately read that what Trump values is effortless. And that's why we couldn't reconcile it. We're like, surely people are going to see how horrible they look. And in the age of performance as politics, they're going to get. They're going to take a political hit for that. And no, because really what always matters is how close are you to power. And Donald Trump understood that if I get enough power, I can get people to reject all these things that they said they believed in looking natural, being a good person, believing in diversity. Everybody gave that up immediately when he became president because all that matters is power. And Donald Trump proves that. And women like Christy make a career out of being able to accurately decipher what powerful men want and give it to them.

[Katie Gattytasan]

All these preferences are fungible. I think Kate Manne calls it conspicuous compliance.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

She sure does. I love Kate. Love her work. Love her.

[Katie Gattytasan]

Yeah, I love that phrase. I think that it perfectly captures what's going on there.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

It really captures it. Yeah. Yeah.

[Katie Gattytasan]

I think what's been funny about all this is the efforts by Kristi Noem's team to try to play the, like, Hillary Clinton pantsuit playbook, where they're like, it's actually anti feminist for you to be commenting on Christie's fillers. Yeah. You can't talk about. I'm like, the fuck? I can't talk about Christine Nome.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

Okay. This was my thing with the Kyrsten Sinema thing. She was getting over. I argue this is why this started. It ended up becoming a series because it pissed her off. And then I was like, well, I'll just be petty and keep writing about it. But here's the thing. The first time I wrote about it, what I was trying to demonstrate, I think I even said it very. I was very clear. I said, the liberal feminist belief that you should never talk about bodies ever is giving political cover to people's bad politics.

[Katie Gattytasan]

Boom.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

And that it is going to come back to haunt us if we cannot figure out how to critique the embodied performance of power and autocracy when it comes in a female body. Because then all the other side has to do is get a woman like Christie, prop her up, and send her out there to do exactly what she's doing, and then say, oh, you can't talk about women.

[Katie Gattytasan]

There you go.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

Remember, no critiquing of bodies. And feminists got so pissed at me about this, and I thought to myself, okay, it didn't take us 24 months to get to the logical conclusion of.

[Katie Gattytasan]

That embodied performance of power.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

If you can't talk about that, then if I want to outplay you politically, then I will use that. I will use it. And that's exactly what they did. And now we're here, stuck saying, you cannot critique Kristi Noem's embodied performance of power. Are you kidding me? And if feminists can't do it, well, nobody can do it. And so I go onto this piece to say, okay, I'm going to try to demonstrate to the best of my ability that you can do this without being sexist. You can focus on the class symbolism and what people decide to wear. If a woman wants to step into power in a unfair system, hierarchical system, you cannot say that she is excused from being judged for how she uses that power. That's just ridiculous. How could that ever be feminist? Well, it's only feminist if you think feminism is accommodationist. And I don't. I think feminism is about power. Power.

[Katie Gattytasan]

There is a passage from an essay that I read in the introduction of this episode before we spoke, and I really like it because I think it elegantly weaves together and then subverts a couple of threads that I think are often hard to parse. Again, I think because we don't have the language for these things. Like you said, those threads are race, class, and gender. So you're kind of gesturing at the trope of the welfare queen, without really naming it explicitly, of course. This is the trope that Ronald Reagan introduced to the American imagination to really hit all the notes of respectability politics. You have this avatar who is black. She is a woman. She has children out of wedlock. She is assumed to be unproductive in society. And so you're kind of triggering all these things that we've been trained to think about as negative. And I have a weird question for you about the way that you think about these structures, and we've been talking about these structures this whole conversation, race, gender, and class, respectively, in your brain and in, like, the information architecture of your brain. And the way that you see these things as being connected to one another, do you see them as laterally interrelated and kind of, like, equally powerful and supportive of one another? Or do you see these systems as being interconnected in a different way, where maybe one supersedes the others and the other two are kind of in service of that because it feels like they often are showing up together? And I'm just curious, when you think about these things, if there is kind of like a final boss here.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

I realize people can't see me. I'm literally drawing this out on my notepad here. It's a great question. It is a deep, hard question. It's a really good one. Here's what I'M going to try to explain and lay it out. So I think it's important here, when we talk about race, class and gender, to understand there are two different ways. What I would call, in my world, a level of abstraction. There's a way we can think about this in the distinctly American way that we have structured these things, given them so much power. And then because we are the United States of America in a global economy, what we do ends up impacting the rest of the world. So there's this thing that is just uniquely American, and that is because we start with slavery and we quite literally take capitalism and we put it in black women's bodies. Black women reproduced the surplus labor that upheld the slave economy. There's a way, then, that capitalism and its American strain cannot be disentangled from race, class and gender because we were the basic unit of American capitalism. That means every ideology that stems from that, every interpretation of citizenship that we get, every battle over inclusion, is fundamentally them about black women's bodies and what it can do, this quite literal social reproduction of capitalism. Having said that, if you look at our current moment, there is a global system where, for example, you can go into, I'm going to say, Indonesia, and you can say, well, there's no. There are no black women here. So what does race, class and gender have to do with this? And I'll go, well, yeah, except capitalism is global. It is now vertically integrated to a certain extent. I, a black woman in Atlanta, which is the greatest place to be a black consumer in the world, by the way. You can buy anything you want as a black woman in Atlanta. And that's why it's so hard for us to leave Atlanta. I can go into a beauty supply store on a corner in Atlanta and I can buy hair extensions that have been harvested from a poor woman from the global South. I am the global economy in Atlanta. So you can't say that race, class and gender do not operate in both spaces. What we can say is that the context matters. So the first two questions I always ask when I'm trying to figure out, where is race, class and gender in this equation and how does it matter is I have to understand that it's not always going to matter the same way in every context, but it is always present. It is always present. And that in some contexts, being a black American female consumer, for example, is actually the power position in that exchange. This is the part we're uncomfortable with. And in the original articulation of intersectionality, it was quite clear that being black female in America was not always on the losing side of power, that there would be context where our American citizenship gave us power over other people. We don't like that articulation, but it was always there. I'm gonna send people back to the original text. So the way I think of this is that there is a global system of difference. Difference exists everywhere in the world. The question is, when you're standing in that place in the world, what is its relationship to the West? Because that to me is the fundamental axis of difference. And then what is the relationship between race, class and gender on one side of the power equation versus the other other? There's always an answer to that. So race, class and gender built up American capitalism, gave it its location at the center of globalization. And then within that, there is always a relationship between capitalism, race, class and gender. But sometimes nationalism shifts our expectations of the balance of that power in ways that are uncomfortable for our low status in America. But America is not the world. It just shapes the world, but it is not the world. And so I think of it that way. Where am I standing? Where's the problem that I'm trying to analyze? Where is it located then? What is its relationship to these exchanges across the globe? And then how did race, class and gender give us our language and our boundaries to understand them?

[Katie Gattytasan]

That was amazing. That was so good. And I'm just taking copious notes as you were speaking. Kind of got the impression of. Yes, something like three dimensional dynamic shifting. How these different. I asked it or framed the question in a way that was very flat and static. And you kind of brought it to life for us.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

No, it's not. That's the way our language works. I love that actually, that interplay with like, what tools do we have with language? Because what we can understand of the world is just really constrained by like, what we can use to describe it. But then like, okay, if I put that in this language, like, really complex ecosystem. There are these 3D puzzles I do with my stepdaughter that helps me visualize this, which is, there's always a center, but whether or not it's the center of your world depends on where you're standing.

[Katie Gattytasan]

That's a good analogy. Yeah. Because I think, like, the. The reason I was curious about it is just because I think I am very fascinated by capitalism. I am very fascinated in all the ways that capitalism shapes culture.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

Me too.

[Katie Gattytasan]

And so I guess in that sense I'm like the dread. The dreaded cultural Marxist.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

I know, I know. Welcome to the camp.

[Katie Gattytasan]

It's just endlessly interesting to me. And I think that's why your work just grabbed me from, from the first time that I read it.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

But thanks, Katie.

[Katie Gattytasan]

You're so welcome.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

You know what it is? There are no good or bad guys. That's all. That's the part we're all struggling with. Mark Scott, love him, gave us some wonderful binaries, and we need them. They help us get some clarity. They do not, however, explain the complexity of everyday life. They're a great starting point. But here's what we struggle with. There are no good guys and there are no bad guys.

[Katie Gattytasan]

In my world of just kind of looking at the capitalism of it all, I kind of see everything as downstream of that. And then I have to be like, well, capitalism's only like 400 years old. These other systems are actually much older. So it's not cause and effect. It's not as simple as I think. My, like, heuristic will automatically kind of jump to like, oh, well, obviously that's because of capitalism. And it's like, oh, it's really not.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

Yeah. I have this argument. My, my partner Same's a materialist. We meet on the. In that space. But sometimes I'll have to push him on this. I was like, yes, darling class, but hold on a second. And he's, well, I mean, listen, this is a guy who was a student of bell hooks. He gets it. But there's a sort of libidinal quality to everything being reduced to the, you know, the simplest Marxist terms of capitalism. That's why I think it endures. Not only does it help us explain the world in a really powerful way, but I think it endures precisely because the heuristic invites us into binaries that the human mind just loves. Human mind loves binaries. And so it's perfect for that. It is not so good, however, at understanding a world where capitalism has survived and managed its contradictions by constantly moving around the location of race, class and gender. And one of the struggles we're having right now is that it is really struggling to find a new place to locate it right now. That's why I think we're seeing all of this rightward turn among across advanced economies right now, because capitalism is really struggling to find a new place to move its race, class and gender to obscure it from us. And nobody wants to be left holding that bag. Nobody wants to be the new black woman in capitalism. So, like, everybody's moving and fighting and moving the bag.

[Katie Gattytasan]

All right?

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

But race, class engenders how a capitalism manages its contradictions might be actually an even more simple way to say that.

[Katie Gattytasan]

Oh, that's a really good way to put it. What's occurring to me now, too, is that, like, to bring it full circle to the bama rush of it all.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

Love it.

[Katie Gattytasan]

How there is a sense of, like, how are you going to metabolize all those contradictions? And I think some of us move toward the, well, if I can. If I can just be the best at performing this, if I can be. If I can be the person that embodies it best, then I will be safe. And then I think there are other people where for me, the way that I metabolize it and try to digest it is I just want to understand it. Like, I can see that something is wrong here and I want to make sense of it. I want to pull it apart and deconstruct it.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

Yeah, that's me. For the record, I am like you. I want to pull the thing apart. I'm with you on that.

[Katie Gattytasan]

But I guess I'm also kind of the bama rush, though, because I literally did bama rush. So I'm like, I know she's in there. She is in there, and I know she's in there.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

She is. Well, the reason I think you probably end up who you are, though, is because there's a certain perspective of having access to a thing, getting it, and then it not fitting quite as comfortably as you thought it would. So, like my version of this, I'm absolutely groomed at some point to be a part of the black talented 10th. Right. Which is just the black class analog of bama rush. I go to a black college, I pledge a sorority. I'm supposed to marry a good black man TM and produce beautiful content on TikTok about black love. And I'm supposed to do. Yeah, I'm supposed to put on a suit for the democratic party and I'm supposed to do. There is a thing. And there's something about being really close to that vision, getting there, trying it on and realizing this fits. Weird.

[Katie Gattytasan]

Why?

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

Why?

[Katie Gattytasan]

It's funny, too, because I remember in retrospect going through rush. I'm from Cincinnati, and so northern girls typically don't do as well at rush or they didn't used to.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

Yeah, not surprised.

[Katie Gattytasan]

Definitely more of like an old money Alabama thing where you. Mountain brook, Vestavia hills. There are a couple neighborhoods in particular that, you know, you kind of become like a top girl. I felt like an outsider, and I was like, God, I'm so far from the ideal and now looking Back on it, I'm like, you were the ideal. You were thin, white. You were the ideal able bodied, blonde. You had good grades. You could talk to people, could turn on the charm. I. It's like. But I think that there was such an interesting anthropological approach that even at 18, I was like, picking up on these dynamics and being like, okay, that neighborhood's better than that. And the. Oh, oh. It's not just a binary of like, are you in a sorority or not? Not. It's which sorority are you on in? Because there's a caste system of the sorority.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

That's right. And are you legacy or are you new?

[Katie Gattytasan]

Yes. And when you're in the sorority, that was the trippiest thing, was getting into the old row sorority and being like, holy shit, I did it. I broke through. And I think that this is like some big accomplishment.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

And then you're still not of it from day one.

[Katie Gattytasan]

Nope. You are not you. I recognized Pressy the first pledge meeting. I was like, oh, there is a hierarchy of power in this house. There is an in group of power in this house, and I am not in it.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

That's right.

[Katie Gattytasan]

I can pay to be here. They'll let me be here, but I'm not in it.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

That's right. You can be in something and not of it.

[Katie Gattytasan]

Yes.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

And I tell people that probably one of the most powerful analytical positions a person can be in is to be in something and not of it. You're both inside and outside at the same time. And that's the spark, that's the friction between those two positions, being able to hold them, if you can figure out how to hold both of them at the same time. And it is tough. And there are a lot of consequences to doing that. Right. You pay a lot of social costs. But God isn't powerful. God is such a powerful place to be in, to be able to see it, not be of it. So you're not beholden to upholding it. You've got a certain amount of autonomy and choice you can exercise.

[Katie Gattytasan]

Is that how you feel?

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

Yeah, I think I'm gonna say so. Oh, yeah? Yeah. I mean, nobody likes that person. I'll be honest with. Nobody inside likes that person. But everybody needs that person. Everybody needs that person. Yeah. It's that person who does the translational work. And you pay a cost of never being fully included. But what I like to tell people is you were never going to be fully included anyway, Katie. You hadn't been born to the right family. It didn't matter. It didn't matter, honey, you made the best out of something. Where there were lots of other options. I think you chose the best one, which is, hey, become a powerful observer of power and translate it for everybody else. That's the best place.

[Katie Gattytasan]

I love your brain. I think your mind is like an X ray machine to all of these systems and I just value it so much. Thank you so much for being here today.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

This has been a blast. I've been looking forward to it. It totally outstripped my every positive expectation. We should do it again anytime you want. And thanks for having me.

[Katie Gattytasan]

Our show is a production of Morning Brew and is produced by Henna Velez and me, Katie Gattytasian with our audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is president of Morning Brew. Content and additional fact checking comes from Scott Wilson.

[Tressi McMillan Cottam]

It.