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

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Sometimes you encounter a person whose brain is such an effective X-Ray for the world that you can’t help but spend 90 minutes working through a backlog of all the topics you’ve ever wanted to ask her about.

Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom is one of America’s foremost sociologists, a 2020 MacArthur Genius, a New York Times columnist, and author of Thick: And Other Essays. I hope you enjoy listening to this conversation as much as I enjoyed having it.

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Mentioned in the Episode

• This Economy Has Bigger Problems Than ‘Bad Vibes’

• Ozempic Can’t Fix What Our Culture Has Broken

• What Bama Rush Reveals About the South

• How Kyrsten Sinema Uses Clothing to Signal Her Social Class

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Tressie McMillan Cottom:

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-Wagen 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 grinds 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 Gatti Tassin:

Welcome back to The Money with Katie Show. I’m Katie Gatti Tassin and I am joined today by Tressie McMillan Cottom, a woman I have quoted countless times on this show. Tressie 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 Thick: And Other Essays, a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award.

Selfishly, as a longtime fan of Tressie’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 Tressie’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, class, the usual, all refracted through the lens of everyone from Kristi Noem in El Salvador to Bama Rush.

So before we get to the interview, I wanted to read an excerpt that I originally wanted Tressie to read on air when we were together, but we ran out of time because we talked 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 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 the hardworking, 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 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 Tressie McMillan Cottom. Tressie, it is my pleasure to welcome you to The Money with Katie Show. Thank you so much for being here.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

It’s a real pleasure to be here, Katie. Finally,

Katie Gatti Tassin:

There are almost too many things that I want to ask you about today.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

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 what my political beliefs are, I think they think that I don’t have any interest in money, and I’m like, no, you don’t become who I am because you ignored 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 Gatti Tassin:

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

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

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 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 Gatti Tassin:

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 thing? I think that that is kind of like a trope in, I don’t know, you’re a columnist for the New York Times, a coastal elite vibe, but that goes along with people that work for these elite newspapers because typically if you’re as a professional in media or you’re working in magazines, that’s a really hard gig to get unless you’re willing to work for next to nothing and live in places like DC 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?

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

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 gone to an historically Black college, and then when you take out 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 that 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 a third base, as the saying goes, 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 ’em pay you if you’re going to be ashamed of working somewhere. So I took the job, I work at the New York Times, 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 Gatti Tassin:

Wow. I noticed the phrase “folk economics” came up a couple times in a few of your pieces, and there was one in particular that kind of captured the mood toward the end of 2023, which was peak vibecession. For those who maybe have repressed this period of media discourse, this was the period when all the economic indicators that the powers that be will typically look to say things are good, right? GDP growth, low unemployment, oh, there’s real wage growth at the bottom, inflation is backed 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’re also working more, 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 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 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.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

That’s right.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

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?

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

So first of all, I got to say one of my favorite pieces to have written, which should have signaled to me that it was going to get me in trouble. If I’m having fun writing it, it usually means it’s because I’m going after somebody’s deeply held beliefs. And also you did such a bang up job of summarizing that piece.

There were a couple things that actually tie in to your previous question, folk economics and these folk beliefs about how the world works. It’s not 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 are seeing that now as we try to explain to everyday people what tariffs are and why this matters. We are actually, however, not meant to understand all of the minutiae of a complex global economy.

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. 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. 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 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 all of these nonsense statements about fiscal responsibility and a deficit being morally wrong or that China needs to be paying as much as we do. None of that is how geopolitics works. But our folk economics, our need to understand our world would come up with this system of fairytales.

So on the one hand, that’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. 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 war on poor people and working class people, and as long as they can buy cheap goods to fill 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. So I was perceived, I think, as rejecting the wind of a growing labor movement and the center left of omics, 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 Gatti Tassin:

Yeah. Yeah. Dude, wow.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

That’s who my allegiance is ultimately with. I also thought we were ignoring the experiences of women because a lot of what has a lot of friction in the economy or things that impact women, childcare, the high cost of transportation, 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 Gatti Tassin:

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

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

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

Katie Gatti Tassin:

I know what you’re doing. I’ve been there. I’m like, we should seize the means of production. Bats eyelashes. So cute and sweet.

I think you’re right. I think that even people who don’t understand or have never taken an interest in the capital E economy from an 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.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

That’s right.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

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 a real sense of being gaslit 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. He 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.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

That’s exactly right.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

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

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

That’s exactly right. Yeah.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

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.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

That’s right.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

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 Tressie after a quick break.

I want to talk about Bama Rush with you. This is another thing where 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 Tressie, you wrote this op-ed in 2023 on this subject. And when I reread it the other day, something really clicked for me. You said, Bama Rushtok is counter programming to the Northeastern Elite University brand culture, and Bama Rush, that version of college, that vision of the world is 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.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

Yes, yes.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

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 proximity to wealth that those videos capture and reflect really presents this, I think, unconscious correlation between successfully performing traditional femininity and access to economic power.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

Oh, yeah.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

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

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

Yes. I mean, if I could get my fellow, I guess I’ll say, my 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-Wagen 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 choosing instead to continue to pursue what we would have at one time called a 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. 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. I was getting Bama Rush from my friends. Okay, the TikToks, they weren’t on my, listen, I’m a Black woman. I wasn’t getting it. I had no idea. Your algorithm’s like, we’ll, spare her enough. She’s not going to like this.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

This isn’t for her.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

That’s exactly right. My algorithm was all GloRilla. I didn’t know anything about the rest of this. This was coming from my white girlfriends who have PhDs. These were academics and economists and think tankers and researchers. And I thought, why are you so tapped into Bama Rush? What is 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, 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 six foot five billionaire banker who will save her from all of this—

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Man in finance.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

Yes, A man in, 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, 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’ve been as surprised as some people were.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

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 thing that we can do is make it tolerable.

And I saw this, 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 a little bit of a feeling of 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 clean and happiness. 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.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

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 Gatti Tassin:

Oh, yeah.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

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. Yeah, I’m setting myself up for life and all that stuff. They tell you when you’re rushed, right? This is going to be your sisterhood for life. This is the beginning of a network that’s going to take you 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 got to 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 this narrow. All of that becomes real concrete to you when you’ve got to 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 want to 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. Man..

Katie Gatti Tassin:

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, but 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.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

That’s right.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

And I think that that is the underlying 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 Rush, trad wives, just this kind of cultural shift. I’m not sure if you saw the poll. I think it was actually in, there was a guest columnist in the Times that wrote it, but there was some poll that said, since 2022, Republican men reported believing that women should return to their natural place, it doubled. It’s like one in two men.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

And growing among 18 to 22 year olds, which I think is particularly disturbing, but yes. Yeah.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

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. People are so disillusioned and so angry, and they should be.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

The idea that we are so close, yet so far away is really interesting to me because this ties into me, I think of one of the poverty 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. They know exactly what’s happening. And in fact that 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 we’re 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 grain 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 and 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 Gatti Tassin:

Now you’ve opened the socialism door, and I’m like, do I want to just walk through that door? I kind of do. So AOC and Bernie, okay Fighting Oligarchy tour.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

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 fricking 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 got to meet people where they are. And SOC 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 that I think is 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 am 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. 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 was all real. But I also feel like things are far too urgent and important for us to be in mourning clothes too long. 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 got to move on.

So I think the tone of this is that there are a lot of self-satisfied centrist and Democrats who just want to feel like that emotional release of we were betrayed. We are morally, 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.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Yeah.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

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 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 and Mississippi and Alabama, I don’t pay you any attention. And that’s just real. Okay. So there’s also that,

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Oh man, yeah. I just moved to the very blue haven of Denver, Colorado, and I walked down the street and I see the signs in the front yard, “In this house, we believe.” And I’m like, yeah, baby, let’s lib out. Let’s go. That’s it. 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, I must say, essentially publicly endorsing that this is the person that y’all are going to need to be voting for.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

Yes, symbolically. Absolutely. The passing of the torch, and they need some handholding 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 Gatti Tassin:

Right? You need a political home of some kind.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

That’s right. Just choose something, give it your time and energy, move on. And because of that, I think I have paid enough dues to say without paying too much of a cost, that 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 handholding 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, 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 going to look up in 20 years, and AOC is going to be a democratic power broker. I think that she has looked at Nancy or something. 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 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, how they’re going to build that power in the South, I just don’t understand why I should be emotionally invested.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

There’s even 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 don’t have to get your person in that office, and then you don’t have to worry about anything else.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

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

Katie Gatti Tassin:

We will continue my conversation with Tressy after a quick break.

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 GLP-1s.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

And your essay about GLP-1s 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 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, which is 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.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

That’s exactly it. Yes.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

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

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

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 it. It is about power. And I started power lifting about two years ago and really love it—or love it. I dunno 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 onto 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 is beautiful, nature’s beautiful, and that should be freely available, art, all of that.

But the reality is that’s not the world we built. 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 classes 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 with the Black Lives Matter protest, and everybody they’ve ever dated has been blonde. And they will look you dead in your face, will 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 all of these people will have all these signifiers for social justice in their bios, and then you’ll get beneath it on the data. And yet, but they only respond to 19-year-old 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 classrooms 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 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 are 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,h listen, blew my mind. I am 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 GLP-1. But I did end up changing my body. I’m not really comfortable with how much people 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 Gatti Tassin:

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. And so there’s a lot of that empowerment language around—

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

That’s right.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

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 Eurocentric narrow idea of what beauty is. Oh, yeah. Of course. The more you adhere to that, the more power you’ll have. But 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 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.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

That’s right.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

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

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

That’s exactly right. Just don’t call it your, 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, 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 separate out these two things.

One of the reasons we don’t talk about race any better than we do is we don’t have a 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. 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 be feminist. It cannot be anti-racist. And I love my folks, but there’s a black empowerment version of this about 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 Gatti Tassin:

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

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

That’s it.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

And that ownership, I think is the, that’s it. The key power to wield the power, accommodating power.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

That’s it. It’s still owned by Proctor and Gamble, which is still disproportionately men on the board. We’ve all seen the charts 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 Priestly is like, you think you chose a blue sweater? 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 low lights, 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 confuse survival with liberation or freedom.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

So thoughts on SkinnyTok. You up on SkinnyTok?

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

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, the TikTok algorithms like politics and beauty. Yeah, I get it all.

I speak with Christiana Nama 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. It’s 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 just as this approach to 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.

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 that 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 doesn’t 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 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 SkinnyTok.

SkinnyTok is women saying, we pretended 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 in 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. 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 SkinnyTok 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 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 SkinnyTok.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Yeah. I mean, your body, my choice.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

That’s it.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

The rallying cry of, yeah. Well, what’s funny is I am working on an episode about SkinnyTok for Diabolical Lies.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

Love it.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

And I have been thinking about and reading a lot of the coverage of Liv Schmidt and 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 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 want to be fit. I want to be toned, but let’s just call it what it is. 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 tonally that same reactionary feeling that I get when people kind of 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 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. I don’t think that the benefits that accrue to those who meet those norms, I don’t think that those rewards ever changed.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

They did not.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

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

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

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 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.

There has 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, people still believe it. They just go underground with their beliefs and then when somebody comes out and the racist and sexist beliefs, right? Hello Donald Trump. Hello, a Liv. Their honesty about their biases feels like authenticity.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Yeah. It feels subversive when it’s like you’re saying the most fucking basic ass basic shit I’ve ever heard. Yeah, it’s good to be skinny. No shit. My god. A revolutionary in our midst.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

I know, but it’s our own hypocrisy that makes it possible. Makes them feel transgressive. Donald Trump was only transgressive if you’ve been lying to yourself about your own prejudices. Power only feels subversive to you if you’ve lied to yourself about how much you desire that power.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

There’s 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 give it five months and Evie Magazine’s, “Punished for being honest?”

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

That’s right.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

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

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

That’s right.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

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 publicly demonetize and try to get the snaps for being like, yeah, we’re taking a stance on this. It’s like this is how you make money.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

That’s right.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

We have become so comfortable and so quick to punish the individual without really, we just let the power structures disown her and I’m like, she’s a product of you. That’s exactly right. You created her.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

She was only able to make money because she intuited with the algorithm had already systematized. That’s it. Many of us do this. We sort of backend our way into 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. This is the cycle of the attention economy. This is a thing that I like to point out about this. 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 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 the political project of how we do everything and 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 a million lives and then it won’t matter whether or not she wants to be skinny. That’s what I think. That should be the goal, not trying to have the power of deciding which body is the right body, but nobody having that power. Nobody shut that power, 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 live, it means worry about Facebook.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Yeah. Yes, exactly. I think the thing that I was just like, God, it’s so typical for the avatar to become the symbol.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

Especially a woman.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Yes. So the symbol then to become the whole thing. It’s like, yeah, you’ve whack-a-moled 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 of years ago, you wrote about Kyrsten Sinema, you talk about how she has this very decidedly middle-class fashion presentation in this piece, and you kind of contrast her with Nancy Pelosi, who you call “preternaturally turned out”, which is a great phrase, and then all these fashion choices are very much political stagecraft. They’re trying to send a message. And again, I’m like, damn, pretty prescient. I’m watching the video of Kristi Noem, as Lara Croft Tomb Raider down in El Salvador, and I’m like, holy moly.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

She’s a cross between Dora the Explorer, and she just puts on this costume to go out and do the most horrific shit imaginable. It’s something.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

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 this kind of sexy little Kim Possible getup, 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 going to do the photo shoot and all the men behind her are clothed 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 maybe she just likes wearing cargo pants. 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 things like plastic surgery with aesthetic performance as a woman, there is a bit of a game that you’re playing where you want it to look natural enough. Right.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

That’s a lberal game though, not a conservative one. That’s right.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

If you are upper class, 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.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

Yes, it is.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

That she’s signaling I’m willing to do the work.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

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 in its expectation. I will conform. I will conform.

One of my favorite studies is about the power of makeup and they do a study, they 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

What women are judged on is their effort to conform. Then 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, the not try so hard.

That is the threat, this conservative both small C and capital C conservative moment, which is now 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. It is that women like Kristi have to show the effort to be deemed valuable.

That’s why it’s so literal. We keep trying to figure out why does the work look so bad? Why does the hair look so bad? Why does the quote, 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 you are just genetically lucky and what we are judging women 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 effort 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’re willing to flatter his form of really garish, declasse, in its own way really. 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 effort, 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 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 Kristi make a career out of being able to accurately decipher what powerful men want and give it to them.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

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

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

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

Katie Gatti Tassin:

I love that phrase. I think that it perfectly captures what’s going on there.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

It really captures it. Yeah.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

I think what’s been funny about all this is the efforts by Kristi Noem’s team to try to play the Hillary Clinton pantsuit playbook where they’re like, it’s actually anti-feminist for you to be commenting on Kristi’s fillers. You can’t talk about what my—the fuck I can’t talk about Kristi Noem’s work.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

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 Gatti Tassin:

Boom.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

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 Kristi, 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. There you go. 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 that.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Embodied performance of power.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

If you can’t talk about that, then if I want to outplay you politically, then I will use that. I will use that. 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 an 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, I think feminism is about power.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

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 up 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 has 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 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 equally powerful and supportive 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? 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 a final boss here?

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

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 American 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 in 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 then about Black women’s bodies and what it can do. That’s 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 could say, well, 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 context, being a Black American female consumer for example, is actually the power 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 going to 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 access of difference. And then what is the relationship between race, class, and gender on one side of the power equation versus the 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 and 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 Gatti Tassin:

That was amazing. That was so good. 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.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

No, it’s not. That’s the way our language works. I love that actually that interplay with what tools do we have with language? Because what we can understand of the world, it’s just really constrained by what we can use to describe it. But then, okay, if I put that in this 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 the center of your world depends on where you’re standing.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

That’s a good analogy. Yeah, I think 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.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

Me too.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

And so I guess in that sense, I’m like the dreaded cultural Marxist.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

I know. Welcome to the camp.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

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

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

Thanks, Katie. You’re so welcome. You know what it is. There are no good or bad guys. That’s, that’s the part we’re all struggling with. Marx, God 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. There are great starting point, but here’s what we struggle with. There are no good guys and there are no bad guys,

Katie Gatti Tassin:

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 400 years old. These other systems are actually much older.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

Much older. Yeah.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

It’s not cause and effect. It’s not as simple as I think my heuristic will automatically jump to like, oh, well, obviously that’s because of capitalism, and it’s like, oh, it’s really not though.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

Yeah, I have this argument. My partner, same as a materialist, we meet 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 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 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 everybody’s moving and fighting and moving the bag around. But race, class and gender is how capitalism manages its contradictions might be actually an even more simple way to say that.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Oh, that’s a really good way to put it. What’s occurring to me now too is that to bring it full circle to the Bama Rush of it all, how there is a sense of how are you going to metabolize all those contradictions? And I think some of us move toward the, well, if I can just be the best at performing this, if I can be the person that embodies it best, then I’ll 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. 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.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

Yeah, that’s me for the record. I am like you. I want to pull the thing apart with you on that.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

But I guess I’m also kind of the Bama Rush though. 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.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

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 my version of this, I’m absolutely groomed at some point to be a part of the Black Talented Tenth, 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 ManTM 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. Why? Why?

Katie Gatti Tassin:

It’s funny too, 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 use to.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

Not surprised.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Definitely more of an old money Alabama thing where, Mountain Brook, Vestavia Hills. There are a couple neighborhoods in particular that you kind of become 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, bitch, you were the ideal. You were thin, white.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

You were the ideal.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Able-bodied blonde. You had good grades. You could talk to people, could turn on the charm. It’s like, but I think that there was such an interesting anthropological approach that even at 18, I was picking up on these dynamics and being like, okay, that neighborhood’s better than that. Oh, it’s not just a binary of are you in a sorority or not? Which sorority are you on? Because there’s a caste system of the sorority.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

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

Katie Gatti Tassin:

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 some big accomplishment. And then you’re still not…

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

Of it

Katie Gatti Tassin:

From day one. Nope. You are not. I recognized Tressie, from the first pledge meeting. I was like, oh, there is a hierarchy of power in this house. There is an ingroup of power in this house and I am not in it.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

That’s right.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

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

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

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

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Yes.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

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 are 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, 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 Gatti Tassin:

Is that how you feel?

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

Yeah, I think I’m going to say so. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, nobody likes that person. I’m going to be honest with you. 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 are 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 Gatti Tassin:

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.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

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 Gatti Tassin:

Our show is a production of Morning Brew and is produced by Henah Velez and me, Katie Gatti Tassin 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.