Episode 105: A Conversation with Tressie McMillan Cottom

Portrait of Tressi Mcmillan Cottom sitting in a chair

Photo By Tausha Dickenson

EPISODE 105: A Conversation with Tressie McMillan Cottom

Click on the audio player above to listen to the episode or follow BornCurious on Amazon Music, Apple, Audible, Spotify, and YouTube.

On This Episode

In a wide-ranging conversation, the cultural critic and essayist Tressie McMillan Cottom and the legal scholar and Radcliffe Dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin explore such topics as what it means to exist as a Black woman in the world, why Cottom keeps her grandmother in mind when writing her essays, and pop culture’s relationship to the aesthetics of power. The conversation was part of the Kim and Judy Davis Dean’s Lecture Series at Harvard Radcliffe Institute.

This episode was recorded on March 30, 2023.
Released on November 3, 2023.

Guest

Tressie McMillan Cottom is a New York Times columnist, a 2020 MacArthur Fellow, a sociologist, a public thinker, and a professor with the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Guest Host

Tomiko Brown-Nagin is dean of Harvard Radcliffe Institute, the Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School, and a professor of history in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Credits

Ivelisse Estrada is your cohost and the editorial lead at Harvard Radcliffe Institute (HRI), where she edits Radcliffe Magazine.

Alan Catello Grazioso is the executive producer of BornCurious and the senior multimedia manager at HRI.

Marcus Knoke is a multimedia intern at HRI, a Harvard College student, and the general manager of Harvard Radio Broadcasting.

Heather Min is your cohost and the senior manager of digital strategy at HRI.

Anna Soong is the production assistant at HRI.

Special thanks to Kevin Grady and Max Doyle from Radcliffe's event streaming team for their invaluable contributions to recording this podcast episode.

Transcript

[MUSIC]

Ivelisse Estrada:
Welcome back to BornCurious, a new podcast from Harvard Radcliffe Institute. I’m your cohost, Ivelisse Estrada.

Heather Min:
And I’m Heather Min.

Ivelisse Estrada:
Today, Heather and I are bringing you some highlights from a conversation between Tressie McMillan Cottom and Radcliffe’s dean, Tomiko Brown-Nagin.

Heather Min:
For those of you who do not know her, Tressie McMillan Cottom is an author, New York Times columnist, and a 2020 MacArthur fellow. She is also a sociologist, a public thinker, and a professor with the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Ivelisse Estrada:
And if any of you are on TikTok, you may remember the wild attention that Cottom’s video asking What is blonde? generated.

Heather Min:
Let’s dive in to this interesting and at times moving conversation between Brown-Nagin and Cottom.

[APPLAUSE]

Tomiko Brown-Nagin:
Wow. Good afternoon, everyone. Good to see you. And what a delight to have Tressie with us today—if I can call you by your first name.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:
Thank you. You may.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin:
Good. I have to tell you, every time I wake up to a Tressie column, I’m just delighted.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:
I got to say, it’s very nice that you are always thrilled when a Tressie is released. I am always still—the morning one is released, I don’t sleep well, still. For the record, that never passes. So, thank you all for coming and for being on the other side of one of those columns every time it happens. Thank you.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin:
Sure. So, let’s start with Thick.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:
Yes.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin:
You write in Thick that your work is underpinned by what is still a radical idea, that Black women are rational and human.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:
Yeah.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin:
I wonder if you can tell us what you mean by that and how that point of departure shapes your writing and your scholarship.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:
Yeah, I think it is still very much a radical notion. And I use the word “rational” quite deliberately, in that it was a rebuke of the idea that you could always assume the positionality of Black women as being one rooted in racial politics. And because of that, you could dismiss Black women’s political subjectivity as being a politics of grievance—which is, I think, still deeply embedded in our understanding of Black women’s understanding of themselves as political subjects, but also our limited understanding in public discourse and, I would go so far as to say, embedded in our understanding of them across many disciplinary knowledges of Black women, both individually and collectively, as being stand-ins for Black politics, like our personal lives, our inner selves, as being stand-ins for Black politics, which sort of flattens our human experience to this linear Black narrative that is really just always a story about America’s narrative, as if we are not a story about human experience.

And then also, I always, almost always, tweak in economics. But I was doing it in that essay. And I do it more implicitly in my work to say not that Black women are infallible, but if we are fallible, it is not because we are Black women, that our rationality should be taken as a point of departure, just as you would take any other person’s rationality as a point of departure, and that if you do that, that our complexities could lend itself to a better understanding of the complexities of our current political economy and our current realities.

And then what I try to do is say, and this is what that would look like. Here’s what you understand better or differently. Better is certainly subjective. I think you understand the world better if you endeavor to try to understand it from understanding Black women as being rational. And so, let’s take that out of the ether, right? Let’s bring that down. And let’s try to touch it. And let’s try to make that gritty.

So, what that looks like, for example, is we love—you know, there’s a social media saying or cliche, trust Black women, that I think people take literally, which is, whatever Black women say, believe them, which, in and of itself, is flattening, though. And I just say, what? Black women can’t be wrong? Or Black women can’t change their minds? Or Black women can’t be scammers, right? No, that is not what that means.

How I understand it is that, no, trust that Black women have a perspective on the world, and that if you interrogate it the way you would interrogate anyone else’s—and then if you find fault, you attribute it to, I don’t know—you can attribute it to them having imperfect information. You could attribute it to them having a need, and they’re trying to get over on you. You could attribute it to the fact that you are negotiating for something, and they want to win. You could attribute it to them being highly competitive. You could attribute it to lots of things. But not to them being a Black woman. If you do that, one, I think that you become a better actor in our current environment, but I also think that you become a better interpreter of the social environment and the social reality. And then I try to show what that would look like over the body of work.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin:
Wonderful. Let’s talk about kinship. And it’s something else that you’ve written, which is that your essays always start with a question: why me, and not my grandmother? Why is that your starting point? And what concepts are you getting at with that starting point?

Tressie McMillan Cottom:
Yeah. Well, I’m getting at one thing that I think that some people find depressing, but I find oddly liberating, which is that for all of its sociological realities, Black life in America today is empirically better than it has ever historically been. And yet it is still empirically, cumulatively, structurally unequal.

And I try to hold both of those realities at the same time. I try to recognize that my grandmother quite literally could not imagine my life. She used to say to me, “What are you, little girl?” That’s what she used to say to me. She could not imagine my life. And at the same time, she could absolutely imagine my choices. She could imagine the constraints on my choices, at least.

She wouldn’t have understood the particulars, for example, of arguing about tenure at my job. But she would have understood why I had to argue about keeping my job, right? She would have understood that.

And so, trying to understand how I have these things that she could not have imagined—why me and not her? When she was, to my mind, and to the mind of many people who knew us both and loved us both, far smarter and, I think, skilled in ways that if she’d had the structural opportunity to develop, would have been creative in ways that, I mean, I can probably only hope. I inherit a lot of my creativity from her.

She had a playful, creative spirit that she really did keep almost all of her life. She was one of my first and earliest playmates. We imagined together, created plays and stories together. Whenever I write something, I think I probably got a lot of that from her. But also, the idea of that for her just didn’t exist structurally, right?

I think everything that is possible for me to be, of course, is about structural opportunity. And I always want to keep that in mind. One, I think it is a check on my ambitions. But it is also a check on me about the importance of the intersection of biography and history. I could be as individually ambitious and talented as I wanted to be, and if the structure had not imagined the possibility of me, it wouldn’t have mattered. I like to keep that in mind because I don’t want the lack of my imagination to make someone else impossible.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin:
Wow. That is amazing.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:
I look out across the landscape, and I think about what we’re saying about trans children, for example. And I go, is this a problem of my imagination? And yes, it is, and me—me individually or me collectively—right? And I think, oh, that’s an us problem, right? That, to me, is the thing I always, always want to have a check on, because that’s what her life and holding those two up has taught me.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin:
Well, let me ask you to talk a bit more about the question that you’re often asked, which is whether you align yourself with the interests of Black people. In response to that, you know that, well, it’s important to situate Blackness, right? To push back against the notion that Blackness is fixed, that it is static, that Black people are without contradictions, internal contradictions. You specifically know the relevance of class to the Black experience and region. And we talked about how that resonates so deeply with me because we both have this Black Southern experience—

Tressie McMillan Cottom:
That’s right.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin:
—that so deeply informs our scholarship. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about why it’s so important to unpack Blackness.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:
Well, one, I think that when we don’t unpack it, it enables some of the worst impulses of people who would want to own it and sell it back to us more as weapon than as tool. I’m always inclined to want to put a check on my own worst impulses. So that’s the first thing. That’s like the big answer.

But the more particular answer about—any student of history, or even just a casual reader of history, has to be attuned to the fact that identity and people’s understanding of themselves changes across time. And I have to believe that it is supposed to and that if you want to fix that in a period of time, you probably do more harm than good, that loving people isn’t fixing them in time.

If I say, I love Black people, I probably mean that to be an action, which means loving them in action across time, which means allowing growth and change and difference to happen. Part of that is to understand and accept those differences and being attuned to the fact that they exist, but also to acknowledge that my definition of Blackness is not the only one, that we can’t own it. It’s not property to own it. It can really only be shared.

And I think we have to accept that the way some people experience Blackness doesn’t overlap 100 percent with ours, and that that’s not only OK but probably natural, and that the places where they overlap are places for us to build shared experience but not places for us to police the boundaries of those places. Where we fight to own it, again, doesn’t serve us. Ownership is at the basis not of Blackness but of anti-Blackness. I want to keep a check on that impulse.

And I also think there’s room for us to honor the parts of the Black experience that are unique to where we came from without dishonoring any other version of Blackness. I think it is perfectly fine to say that my experience, or the Black experience that comes from the rural South working-class Black experience is authentic to me and means something special. And that in no way devalues any other Black experience.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin:
And before you became Tressie the columnist, how did people respond to that complication? Because although you say people should know that it’s true, that there’s this subjectivity—

Tressie McMillan Cottom:
Yeah. They do know, I think.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin:
They do know.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:
They have to know.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin:
And they accept it?

Tressie McMillan Cottom:
No.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin:
No. OK.

[LAUGHTER]

Tressie McMillan Cottom:
I mean, right? I mean, your own scholarship shows that. Isn’t that the story of—they know, but accept is something else entirely, right?

Tomiko Brown-Nagin:
OK, all right. Just wanted to make sure.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:
Yeah. I don’t think they accept it now.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin:
Yeah.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:
No.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin:
OK.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:
OK.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin:
So, let’s talk about popular culture. You write about topics that some academics dismiss as unimportant or unserious—things like beauty, style, popular culture. Why do these subjects matter? And why do you think some people don’t want to concede that they matter?

Tressie McMillan Cottom:
Oh. Oh.

[LAUGHTER]

Tressie McMillan Cottom:
I like this question, I think. But that means I could get in trouble, trouble.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin:
Oh, it’s OK.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:
Oh, listen to you. [LAUGHS] OK. I think one of the really honest answers here is, we don’t like to do it because we aren’t good at it. I know. I’m so sorry. I mean, because fundamentally what that is, is that we’re talking about the aesthetics of power. We absolutely know. It goes back to your previous question. We know. Do we accept it?

I think that is a rejection of us accepting that these are statuses that hold power over us. I think we don’t like that it holds power over us. And many of us have either opted out of valuing those things or feel somehow judged by the fact that those things exist and so don’t want to engage. So, we decide not to participate in these ways, which perversely gives them more power over us, right?

My argument is, it is precisely because we don’t engage with them that they continue to have, I think, a disproportionate amount of power over intellectual production. And in some parts of popular culture, I think we give it more weight than popular culture does, which in some ways sort of brings some of the aesthetics of power down to size by making it malleable and accessible in a certain kind of way.

So, I think we should be in that space. And I’ll tell you a couple of reasons why. When you live in a mediatized world, that is a world that plays with the manipulation of aesthetics, right? In an internet world in particular, we’re talking about two mediums. We’re talking about discourse, and we’re talking about images. That’s what the internet is. It’s pictures of cats, and it’s tweets. I mean, that’s the internet, right? Discourse, pictures.

We think that we can just engage in the discourse part. But if you haven’t been paying attention, the aesthetics are winning. The aesthetics are winning. I can tell you who knows this. Politicians know it, the financiers know it, and I think we know it. I’m just saying, I think that we aren’t playing in it in the same way. I think we aren’t translating those power dynamics. And I think that’s part of the role that we should be playing in public life, in helping the public make sense of some of the ways that those aesthetics are playing with ideas and power around us.

So that’s one of the reasons why I like to do it. And also there’s a part of me that perversely enjoys being the person in the room, sometimes, maybe, kind of, that just brings up—I know everybody sees the elephant in the room, right? So why not do it?

Tomiko Brown-Nagin:
Let’s talk about a recent example of your cultural critique. This was the video about blonde hair that got you banned from TikTok and inspired a lot of chatter, pushback. Tell us about your arguments and why you think people reacted so strongly to it.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:
They reacted so strongly precisely because it is talking plainly about the aesthetics of power. I have learned that you can talk about a lot of things in public. And yes, you can get angry mail. I’ve been getting angry mail for many years now. It doesn’t quite bother me. I will say that the scale has changed. And postal mail actually does bother me just a little, because I just think of the effort that took. I will say that this article, more than anything I have written in many years, did generate a lot of postal mail. I think it’s two things: I think it’s about the aesthetics of power and also where I assigned responsibility for the aesthetics of who deploys that power.

I think we like the idea of somebody doing something to us, right? Like, “The patriarchy makes me do this.” And to tell you the truth, I sometimes forget—academia did this to me—the things that we aren’t supposed to talk about in polite company. And this was one of those cases. I honestly said this casually. I forgot that we aren’t supposed to say this around normal people.

I just said, you know, like blonde, and forgot that that’s a thing. And that is because blonde is the way we talk about whiteness in polite everyday company. And I forgot. That’s all. I just, I forgot. I forgot other people could hear me. I forgot that people don’t know that’s what—or they do know it’s what they’re doing, but they don’t know it consciously. And I just forgot. That’s all.

That’ll teach me a lesson. But then I decided to commit to the bit, because I believed what I said. And I doubled down on it because I am an only child and I never lost that impulse. And I did, though. And I thought, I have traveled around, and it’s now really kind of taken over my life a bit—my public life, anyway. People feel very deeply convicted by this, because what I was saying is, we make up our world every day in our interpersonal interactions. The patriarchy isn’t somebody standing out there. In the same way, racism isn’t standing out there. Classism isn’t standing out there. We remake those things every day in the things we do with and to each other.

And because we have so many big, scary things going on that really have given us lots of boogeymen out there. We got the DeSantises of the world—or, really, the Trumps of the world, who just have different names—but the Trumps of the world. And we are really comfortable with a big, scary, nice enemy. But we do it also to ourselves. Where do you think they get the language from? Why do you think it works?

I think that we are uncomfortable with realizing that that’s what we have done, especially when you have, in the case of white guilt and racism, an entire system designed to make you feel blameless. Then you wrap all of that up in something that is supposed to be frivolous. It’s just a little hair color, right? Frivolous.

This is, I think, the trap of relegating the discussion of aesthetics to something unserious. I am often saying to my editor at the time, aesthetics should be on the politics pages. I think we should cover fashion on the econ pages. I’m serious. Why not? It moves billions of dollars in capital. Why don’t we? I think if we thought about it more seriously, it wouldn’t have sent so many people into a tailspin to say, well, this is economics. This is politics. So, I’m going to use the language of economics and politics to talk about what it is you’re doing when you say, “Oh, I bet you are so happy that baby came out blonde.” I don’t know. Why would I be? Why don’t you explain it to me?

Tomiko Brown-Nagin:
Let’s shift gears a little bit and talk about something very much in the news. That’s abortion and reproduction and the recent Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade—there is no longer a federal right to reproductive choice. That issue is now being debated in the states. I wonder if you can reflect on what the fall of Roe means for the struggle for gender equality and, in particular, what it means for women’s participation in the economic and the social life of the nation.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:
You know, I said, when the Dobbs decision came down—and I should mention that two of my very good friends are longtime reproductive justice workers and organizers, so they had been working on me for years about how I should not be surprised, right? They’ve been working on tempering my outrage for a while.

I was prepared to be very cool about-—oh, y’all are shocked? You’re outraged? When Dobbs happened. And still, I was outraged and sad. And I was trying to process how that could be. And talked to my friends. And guess what? They were too. The very people who had been telling me for years that effectively, Dobbs had been the reality for lots of women for many years—we knew those things intellectually. Knowing them emotionally was something very different.

My emotional response at the time is something that I still feel, and now think, intellectually, is even more defensible. The more rational I become about it, I’m even more committed to it. And that was, oh, this is the beginning of the rationalized administrative argument for pushing women back into the private sphere. And I’ve only become more and more certain that that is what we are seeing. And you can, to my mind, tie what Dobbs has done, the accelerated response—many states in preparation had trigger laws, yes, but even for those that didn’t—how quickly they had legislation ready after Dobbs, but then also, how quickly the political rhetoric changed at the state level.

Even in states that we had thought of as being fairly, if not liberal, certainly moderate on the issue of abortion, we didn’t think that this was a politically winnable issue. We’ve seen it in my own state, for example, the state of North Carolina, where we now, were it not for our governor, which is still not considered politically safe, but that is right now our only line of defense. We are quite literally, in the state of North Carolina, thinking of ourselves as being at risk for reproductive choice in the state of North Carolina. We’re seeing that state after state, which says to me that that is not the beginning, that we were in the middle. For some of us who thought that we were at the beginning of a process, we had missed the beginning. We’re in the middle of this sort of transformation. And I see that as being connected to many things. I see that as being connected to the push to not just privatize public schools but to delegitimize public school education, the idea that we can move public money to charter schools and homeschool initiatives, the idea being that labor mostly will be done not by men but by women.

I think that is tied to our idea of reinstating the idea of biological gender being a governing public policy. I think this is behind trans bans, like those that we have seen coming out of Tennessee. I think all of these are connected, to my mind, as an all-out war on women in the economic sphere.

I see Dobbs not as the beginning, but as sort of the middle of that war, because what women cannot do when they do have not just reproductive choice but autonomy is they cannot fully participate in public life. You cannot participate in public life when the definition of you as an autonomous citizen is negotiated state border by state border, when your employer cannot be sure of what type of employee you are as you move from state to state, when you cannot make the same economic decisions as a homebuyer, as an investor, as an entrepreneur, as a traveling salesperson.

I think about one of my very first jobs out of undergrad. I remember being so proud because I was old enough to rent a car on the company’s dime, and their concern was because I had just turned—what was it, 24 or something? You had to be old enough to rent the car. I had to come in and show the person in HR that I had just finally gotten old enough to be on the company’s insurance so that I could get the company car. And I was thinking about, what is it that you would have to prove to your company now that you could do company business state to state as an employee in their state? You don’t have the same assumption, I think, of full autonomy as a worker, which, of course, was the economic case for Roe many years ago. But we take for granted that states will interpret that the same, state by state.

And the argument was that we shouldn’t have to take that for granted. And what we’ve seen, the political rhetoric, is that we cannot take that for granted. I do not think we should be asking you what the overall legal response is to that. When I’m talking to legal scholars in North Carolina, anyway, they do not sound particularly hopeful. They’re telling me things like, we have to basically do what the right has done state by state with a judicial response, which is organizing a judiciary that will do these cases—but that is a 40-year response.

What kind of economic decisions do women make in that 40-year span? And how do we tell you to predict your life in the meantime? I don’t know. I mean, I find it all overwhelming. And that’s what I think my gut felt that day, and my brain is still catching up to it.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin:
And I have to say that a lot of people felt the way that you’re describing, that emotional reaction, although there was a leak. And we knew that this was coming down the pike, right?

Tressie McMillan Cottom:
Yeah.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin:
To actually hear about the decision, to read the decision, was just on another level of recognition of where we are in the many ways you describe. Well, let’s talk about social media, which also involves the court and Congress. There recently were hearings about TikTok, discussions about potential national security threats. The Supreme Court heard a case examining whether those who allege harm by social media should be able to sue technology companies who host certain platforms. Then there’s Elon Musk and his continued reign over Twitter. So, a lot going on in the world of social media and the potential for regulation of it or not, even banning popular platforms. I wonder if you can react to those developments from your position as a sociologist, but also as one who’s deeply engaged in the world of social media.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:
My colleagues and I debate the possibility of regulation. I would be surprised if we see serious regulation in the near term. I think we are seeing a lot more political theater around not regulation but the romance between technology firms and politicians is maybe souring just a little. But that’s not the same as having political will to regulate.

One of the things my students and I—we were just actually just debating this last week. We were watching some of the testimony from the CEO of TikTok. And I was like, we want to separate some of the political theater from legislation.

I’m not as gung ho on the idea that we might see regulation from either party, actually. Some of what I think is driving, however, the political theater that we are seeing is that the potential for class action lawsuits from the fallout from the documents that we have from Meta about child endangerment and mental health does change the risk calculus for technology companies just a bit. I think that has technology firms a little bit defensive and has changed the political calculus for some elected officials to at least have a political position on the responsibility of technology firms in a way they didn’t feel like they needed to have a position on it five or six years ago, when we were a bit more enamored with technology firms enabling democracy. When we believed that the unfettered access to social media and information was enabling global democracy, you didn’t need to have a position paper on protecting young people from the Internet. Well, now, when parents are concerned about their children’s exposure to content that may damage their self-esteem, now you need to have a political position on that. So, I think that’s the calculus that has changed.

But we still have to reckon with the fact that we have a regulatory structure that does not give us much that we can do to regulate technology firms as it stands now. We would have to do some serious litigating and technology firms would push back. So unless we want to overhaul and fight some very serious legal battles, I don’t see a real serious regulation happening. I think mostly what could happen would be in changing consumer patterns about how we use social media firms. I think that would do more to change the political will to do any regulation than anything that is likely to happen in the political sphere right now.

I think if we fell out of love with social media platforms—which I actually think is far more likely to happen—I think that the revenue models for social media are shaky. That’s what Elon Musk is discovering, by the way. This is a real fine line to walk, by the way. I think he is more inept than his hype, but you know, many of us maybe are. But he’s more inept than his hype. He is not as inept as he pretends. Fine line.

I think he is playing into a particular narrative there. I think he knew what Twitter’s economic challenges were. I think he’s playing at another type of game. Everybody knew you couldn’t make money, that it had reached its economic potential. That’s why they were looking for someone to sell it to. Everybody knew that the ad structure was gone. Facebook knows the ad structure is gone. Unless we come up with something else, everybody kind of knows that the revenue stream for social media is drying up.

I argue that between that and social media becoming more and more difficult to use in an enjoyable way, our effective relationship with social media is declining. I think that’s going to do more than regulation is ever going to do. Now, that brings us TikTok. Now, TikTok is a challenge, because TikTok has something that the other major social media platforms do not have: TikTok is actually still fun.

I think that is purely objective, truly. Yes, the algorithm might be more powerful. But it’s actually not more powerful in the economic sense. Like, it’s not better at micro-targeting and selling you things. It is better at identifying your effective triggers, right? It’s fun. Facebook hasn’t been fun in years, right? Twitter’s only fun until you figure out how to use it. And then you’re like, oh my god, this is horrible.

TikTok is very fun. And the more you use it, the more enjoyable it becomes. I think that is actually what has made it a—that paired with its ownership structure, being a Chinese-owned company—has made it a political target. And I think they are using its ownership structure as anti-competition strategy.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin:
So we have a lot of questions from the audience. I’m going to start to weave those in. But first, I want to continue on current events. You have written so insightfully about the political economy of higher education, including student loan debt cancelation and how some opponents view cancelation as a kind of government handout.

I would love for you to talk about that reaction to that beneficiary class and the reaction to another recent example of government intervention—this is with the bank failures. And how there was action to rescue that class of beneficiaries, depositors, most of whom were very well-off in terms of their resources. And that happened in a weekend, right?

So, talk about that. What are the values that are at play in our understanding of who deserves governmental aid?

Tressie McMillan Cottom:
And that is the exact right word: values. Student loan debt cancelation has never, ever been about economics. It has always been about values. That has been clear to me from the beginning. It only becomes, I think, more clear to more people the longer the debate stays in the public discourse. You know—handouts for me and none for thee—the idea that what happens in the banking sector can impact the rest of the economy.

I believe them. I believe you. Sure, I lived through the Great Recession. I also know that if you can contain that, you could have contained any inflationary fears that would have spilled over from student loan debt cancelation. That’s what I believe. And so far, no one has been able to disprove it. I’ve asked very smart people many, many, many times. They may get angry when I ask. But they don’t say it’s impossible. They just say it would be difficult.

And that is not the same thing because difficult just means your values don’t align with the actions. That doesn’t mean it cannot be done. I told some students this recently, and they were alarmed. I think the fact of the matter is, people who hold student-loan debt are not viewed as—I do not think they are thought of as being productive citizens, right? Not in this job creator sense and all of that type of thing, but that they are more productive as debt holders. That is their contribution, right?

I borrow here from some work from a fellow sociologist, Louise Seamster, who’s talked about how, in a financialized economy such as ours, that your relationship with your government becomes negotiated through debt. And you are either the creditor or the debtor, right? It is not about job or worker. Our relationship to the state is about, you’re either a debtor or a creditor.

And so, forgiving the debt, in some weird way, would be canceling out this—this is your value to us, holding the debt. And I just think we just sort of refuse to let that go. You’re more valuable to us with the debt. That’s all there is to it.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin:
Let’s talk about book banning—the move to disallow engagement with history, race, gender, slavery. There is a question coming from the audience about why academics are being more vocal when questioning the censorship, the ban on—

Tressie McMillan Cottom:
That’s a wonderful question.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin:
Yeah, AP and AP Black studies.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:
Yeah.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin:
Why do you think all of this is happening now?

Tressie McMillan Cottom:
Oh, now, yeah. Why is this happening now? The election of Donald Trump cannot be overstated, not because he won, but because of how he won. and how he governed revealed, I believe, how much our institutions operated on faith, that there was no sense of accountability or checks and balances.

And once that faith, that fundamental just—oh, they work, because we all just kind of, sort of believed you did the thing—once that was blown, it was open season on everything. Once you could just say, “Oh, no, they just took the votes, the ballots are just gone,” and there was no accountability or checks or balances on any of that, every social institution that especially were weakened—the infrastructure of those institutions had been weakened from years and years of delayed maintenance and, in some cases, deliberate underfunding, in the cases of schools, especially public institutions, and libraries, especially those in poorer communities and minority communities. You have the intersection of those things. We hadn’t maintained and cared for our infrastructure. And many of them were really only running on faith. So, when the faith crumbles, there’s no one there left to defend it. This is an ideal time, then, to attack those institutions. Why aren’t we speaking up? We are part of what wasn’t maintained.

Except for some corners of higher education, we are part of some of the infrastructure that has been systematically underfunded, under-cared for, and under-maintained. Public institutions, historically Black institutions, minority-serving institutions, the overreliance on contingent faculty—even if you’re not contingent in some institutions, underpaid, teaching extreme loads.

Who isn’t showing up are a lot of people who had tried to show up for a very long time and, I think, are demoralized, under-supported for a very long time. Having said that, I really do want to turn to a couple of bright spots, which is, I do not think it is a surprise, then, that in this moment, we are seeing a massive amount of collective organizing in higher education, mostly led by graduate student unions, graduate workers, and service workers in higher education, I think, in part, because the institutional structures have crumbled right in front of their eyes.

Those of us with tenure or adjacent to tenure haven’t sort of stepped into the breach. And that has revealed the places where those people who do see themselves as workers, see themselves aligned with each other, have done collective action. That makes me hopeful. I am also, however, deeply dispirited by the fact that the very people who benefit the most from our institutions existing have not stepped into the gap more to make a case for why we are here and why we exist and, if need be, to just stand at the doors of libraries and schools, where they are physically removing books, where they are physically removing evidence of history.

Last week, was it? In the state of Florida, which of course, is ground zero here—yeah, you just can’t get around it, right? Ground zero. They removed a movie. One parent is all it takes. One parent cannot like something on a teacher’s curriculum, and it can be removed. They removed the showing of a film about Ruby Bridges because one parent didn’t want her child to find out that white people don’t like Black people. That was the argument. We should then be showing the film on the side of the schoolhouse. And I mean it.

[APPLAUSE]

I mean it. And our argument is, but then they win, because that’s what they want, right? They want us to not show up, or they want us to show out, and they want us to break the social norm. They want us to break the violation. And I’m going, I don’t think you understand. They want us to not exist.

Then, in the face of wanting us to not exist, the most radical thing you can do is to exist. You don’t actually retreat. You exist. Let me tell you who knows that. Trans people know that. Let me tell you. People of color know that. Minoritized people know that. Vulnerable people know that. You show up. When people do not want you to exist, that’s when you exist the loudest, right? If we ever knew, we have forgotten. It it’s a real good time to remember.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin:
Let me get to another audience question. And it’s a big one. Someone wants to know about your recommendations regarding artificial intelligence and equity. The way AI such as GPT-4 is trained seems so white, commentator says.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:
Oh, it doesn’t seem.

[LAUGHTER]

Tressie McMillan Cottom:
This is one of those cases, when we talk about artificial intelligence, I think it is an important moment for us to separate its marketing from its existing capacity while understanding, yes, its potential. In being critical of its hype, we can sometimes reinforce its hype.

When people talk about artificial intelligence being transformative, and we go, all this transformation is going to kill millions of jobs and it’s going to end education as we know it—well, then you’re accepting the hype as truth. And I think we’re not quite there yet.

So yes, it’s trained on data sets that absolutely reinforce not just whiteness, but Westernness. But also, it hasn’t completely decentered and destabilized all institutions. And I’m not quite sure that it will. I think it will do many things in the near-mid-term. I’m not exactly sold on the idea, for example, that it is going to displace significant parts of healthcare, that it’s going to take over tons of support service work. I’m not entirely sold on the idea that it’s going to be able to program complex technologies, for example.

But if we get to that case, I think we’ve got some other questions. I do think we need to be very critical about, however, wanting to tool it to be more diverse until we know what it can do. I think we need to ask more critical questions about, what are we programming it to be more diverse for? Because if artificial intelligence, for example, is going to be used to do better and more efficient sorting, signaling, stratifying, and stigmatizing in the case of surveillance, then I don’t want it to be any better at identifying people of color.

We’re already pretty efficient at identifying and stigmatizing people of color. It can stay white if it wants to do that. I don’t want to feed it, then, more images of people of color, if that is what we’re going to do with it. And currently, with our regulatory structure on artificial intelligence and how we’re using it, it is just as likely that that’s how it will be used. And it would be innovated in police surveillance before it will do anything beneficial for healthcare. Like, let’s be honest, right?

If it accumulates to our current political economy, it’ll be picked up by police departments before it would be picked up in cancer-care research. Until we have a regulatory structure that tells us how and where that’s going to work, I think I’m a little more cautious about wanting the data sets to be more diverse.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin:
Right. Tressie, let me get you to respond to this one last question. And it is, what advice can you give Black women reckoning with the challenges of remaining committed to one’s truth in institutions that beg us to abandon ourselves? In brief. [LAUGHS]

Tressie McMillan Cottom:
You know, you take what works for you, and you leave what doesn’t. And I think that is the great story of being part of any small group in a big pond, which we still are. We leave a big footprint, because we are a big people who’s done amazing things. But I think it’s important to remember that that is still fundamentally the story.

You take what works, and you leave what doesn’t. When your story is so different than the story of the people who produced you, you can feel responsible for taking it all in, right? Taking advantage of everything that the people around you didn’t have the opportunity to do. But you cannot, right? You can’t make up for everything denied to the people you love. And you can’t make up for everything that didn’t happen or could have happened around you.

You can only take from the institution the things that work for you and your particular needs and particular interests. And you leave behind what doesn’t. And that includes the things that would make you over in the institution’s image in a way that separates you from the people and the places that you love and that love you back.

Any part of professionalization or socialization that separates you too far from the spaces, and the people, and the places that make you feel healthy and whole is, I always think, a price that is too high to pay. And you keep the parts you love—the great library, the wonderful books, the great ideas. But I don’t think you need to take the places that tell you, you shouldn’t speak that way, right? Or don’t tell those stories, right? Or don’t mention that part again. Or maybe I wouldn’t dress that way. Or I have such a hard time pronouncing that name, right?

I don’t think have to actually take or accept those parts. Do you run the risk of being isolated a bit when you do? Yes. But you run the risk of being mentally unwell and isolated if you do it. Or at least, that’s always been my calculation. And I have always figured that what was the point of being externally successful and being internally unwell?

I’ve seen those people. And I think that must be horrible. So, take what works. Leave what doesn’t. Try to find a happy medium between just enough external validation that you can live with it, but not at the expense of what you need to be mentally well. And I wish you all good health and good wellness. Thank you very much.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin:
Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

Heather Min:
The BornCurious podcast is brought to you by Harvard Radcliffe Institute.

Ivelisse Estrada:
Thanks for joining us. You can find BornCurious wherever you listen to podcasts. And to learn more about Harvard Radcliffe Institute—

Heather Min:
Visit radcliffe.harvard.edu.

[MUSIC PLAYING]