 Hello, and welcome to Policy Talks at the Ford School of Public Policy. I am Celeste Watkins-Hays, the Gene E. Fairfax Collegiate Professor of Public Policy, a University in Social Transformation Professor and Professor of Sociology here at the University of Michigan. It is my deep honor to be in conversation with Dr. Tressie McMillan-Cottum. Dr. Cottum is an award-winning author, researcher, educator, and cultural critic whose work has been recognized nationally and internationally for the urgency and depth of her incisive critical analysis of technology, higher education, class, race, and gender. The foundation for Tressie's first book, Lower Ed, The Troubling Rise of Fur Profit Colleges and the New Economy, was formed by her dissertation research from her doctorate at Emory University's Laney Graduate School. In Lower Ed, Dr. Cottum questions the fundamental narrative of American education policy. In 2019, Dr. Cottum released THICC and other essays. The collection has been described as essential, and the Chicago Tribune calls Dr. Cottum author you need to read right now. Dorothy Roberts compares reading it to holding a mirror to your soul and to that of America. THICC was the winner of the Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize and was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award. Dr. Cottum has served on dozens of academic and philanthropic boards and publishes widely on issues of inequality, work, higher education, and technology. She's currently an associate professor in the School of Information and Library Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Information Technology and Public Life at UNC. She was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship in 2020. Dr. Cottum also co-hosts Here to Slay, a fabulous podcast with Roxanne Gay, a podcast with an intersectional perspective on celebrity culture, politics, art, life, love, and more. It is brilliant. It is fun. It is engaging. It is an amazing place to be. So thank you so much for being here. It's an honor to have you and to be in conversation with you. Thank you very much, Professor Watkins-Sates. I am pleased to be here. I have to thank the students and Sue Denarski earlier today. We had a wonderful talk and I'm only sure that will continue. I'm really pleased. Oh, great. So we come into this conversation with heavy hearts and one who acknowledge the victims and their families, the people who are slain in Georgia. And as we try to understand what happened, as we think about how we respond to this, what kind of questions come to mind to you? We're dealing with an epidemic of gun violence in this country, but we're also reminded of the notion that to be socially marginalized on the basis of race and class and gender and sexuality and poverty is to have a deeply unsettling proximity to death. Can you just talk to us about that? And as we try to understand the details, because we don't know everything yet, what questions are coming to mind for you? You made me think, of course, of Ruthie Gilmoury says that the fundamental definition of racism is premature death. And if you don't look at what happened in Atlanta as part of a continuum of our decision about who deserves premature death and who does not, then you miss probably the most important parts of what has happened in Atlanta beyond the immediate and direct tragedy of the violence of the eight people who were killed, most of them Asian and Asian American women. It is worth noting for reasons that you point out so well, and that hopefully we would all be familiar with, which is that not all of us bear equally the cost of America's preoccupation with capitalist extraction, oppression, and the gun violence it produces. That's just the story of the American narrative about whose lives we are willing to put on the line to defend the right of other people to control the terms of extraction. That's what we have seen since time and memoriam of the founding of this nation, certainly, but over the last few years in particular, a ratcheting up and a clarification of the call to violence was everyday routine violence against minority people in this country. And so it's part of that continuum, one that is as tied to racism and sexism and immigration and colonization as is any mass murder in this country, a country that, by the way, has far more of these in any other country in the world. This is a uniquely American problem that is predicated on what the American tension is. That is that this was one of the first major democratic nations, but it was also built inherently on enslaved labor and on the expansion of global slavery until that dialectical tension is resolved. The nature of American violence will always look like what we see in Atlanta today. And so we know the narratives, we know why people feel emboldened to do what has happened in Atlanta, but that is also not unique. I think it's really important that these things are specific, but they are not unique. They are just very much us. It is the exactly wrong to say this is not America or this is not the America I know. This is actually uniquely American. And how do we think about resolving that dialectical tension that you talked about? Because for so many of our students in particular, they're now witnessing this ever present narrative and dance that we do of a tragedy happens. There is sharp analysis, just as you've provided, and people retreat to their defensive postures and ultimately defend and continue to defend the status quo in a lot of ways. How do we break through that? How do we break that dance, that cycle of thoughts and prayers, but no action? The lack of embrace of a deeper analysis of these issues. And I know that our students are wondering this because they're here to change the world, and they're trying to figure out and gather the tools to be able to address some of these seemingly intractable problems. So how do we break that tension? It's fascinating. They say one of the things they told us repeatedly when I was in graduate school is that studying race, class, and gender inequality means to constantly advance your own skill set while negotiating a world that willfully refuses to negotiate that same skill. It has become expert in something that people just don't want to know. That is fundamentally our problem. There is almost no problem in public policy where we don't know what the answer is. I think it's really important for people who are entering public life to understand most of our problems are not problems of empirical limitation. They are problems of political will. And so no matter what you are studying, when you enter into the realm of public life, you are entering into politics small p, not big politics like run for office or et cetera, but you are dealing with the everyday negotiation of politics because people know the right thing or they will know the best or the effective thing to do by and large. Usually what you're dealing with is a willful resistance to the right thing. And that's because it is either comes with political consequences or personal sacrifice. So what do we know historically about getting people over their inertia to the right thing to do? And politics both big p and small p, you only do that a couple of ways and only one of them to my mind is desirable, but there are only a couple of ways. I mean, there is just direct conflict, obviously. But there's also building solidarity to make political choices that you want to have happen, the inevitable political choice is about shifting incentives, such that people who may want to do the right thing have covered to do it. And people do not want to do the right thing, pay a far higher price for not doing it than they would for ignoring the problem. That's some of what we see when we talk about the groundwork that has happened throughout the U.S. South, for example, over the last six years to sort of build political solidarity and will and capacity to move the needle on things like voting rights, local governance, state governance, and then also, you know, sort of major political party platforms moving the needle on those things. But I think for people who are entering into public policy with the sense that you want to change things, it is really important to figure out as early on as you can, one, what your own personal constitution is on these things. I think that once you are in public life, it's a little too late to determine what you are willing to compromise on and with whom you want to be in solidarity with. The sooner you make decisions about this is my team, this is, these are, these are my beliefs, right? And these are my values. And now I can be moved on means, but I can't be moved on my constitutional beliefs, right? As soon as you can figure that out, right, the better off you are because you're actually not entering into a war of empiricism. You're mostly entering into a war of narrative and belief and incentives. And the only thing that really works there in a, in a representative democracy, certainly anyway, is solidarity with other people. And Tracy, what would you say are your constitutional beliefs? It's a great question. I actually spend time every year revisiting this. That's how I spend my birthday, by the way. I spend the week of my birthday revisiting sort of like, okay, you know, what do I believe in? And am I still really clear about that? I think my beliefs are really straightforward, which are, which means that they're easier said than lived. Because the simple things are the hardest things to live out in your daily life and in your work, especially when there's so many incentives for you to do other things, easier things, frankly. I believe Black people are human. And that is still just, that's still just a radical statement. It does not mean that we are magic. I mean, you know, you know, all, all do credit and respect to people who, you know, wave the banner of Black girl magic. But as a, as a person who deals in the complexity of the human condition, I think it is far more important to be human than to be magic. Magical bodies are the ones we don't mind holding up to take the shots for other people. Magical bodies have things done to them so that other people can be more comfortable, right? Magical bodies that are seen as constantly self-generating don't require any investment from the state or from other people. Human beings do. And so for me to say that I believe Black people are human really does shift almost all of my empirical assumptions, right? So I think about the work I do, you know, sociologically, when I come into a room and I say whatever you have assumed about the rational incentives of other people who pursue higher education or pursue work, they are probably also true for Black people because Black people are human. That actually does shift assumptions that there isn't something inherently flawed in our racial category and makeup that makes us, you know, a natural match, for example, for poorer outcomes or poorer opportunities. That's still quite a radical statement to say in some disciplinary conversations. And then in my everyday life, when I try to write for publics, when I try to create a public around an idea or participate in public discourse or in policy narratives, my belief system is always guided by what is the best I can do here that no one else could have done if they weren't. If somebody else could have done it, then I just need to get on board with them and about knowing what I'm supposed to be a leader and what I'm supposed to be a follower. And it's not always the case that I need to be leading a conversation. So I try to ask myself, what can I contribute here that only I could have contributed? And that is of use in that moment that I do it wholeheartedly and I do it 100%. But the best thing I could have done would be to put forward or to join forces with or contribute my energy to somebody who has a better analysis, a better plan, a deeper understanding of the issue. Sometimes the best thing you can do is actually follow. And being a leader who knows how to follow is to me one of the most, it is what turns leadership into service. No one went to follow. Right. So there was so much there in what you said that I so appreciate and thank you for kind of unpacking the phrase Black Girl Magic and getting us to think about that and complicate that, that phraseology. I really appreciated that. And then the other thing that strikes me is when you think about analysis and then the plan, that so often is how we think about policy work as well. But what I see you doing, which is so powerful is bringing in a cultural analysis as well to these conversations. So we're thinking about the economic implications of something, the social implications, the political implications. And then you're also thinking about the cultural implications. And I just want you to talk about, I think my suspicion is the reason that you do that is that you don't believe we can disentangle policy analysis and cultural analysis. I suspect that you think that the two go hand in hand. And I wonder if you can just comment on that because I suspect you had to defend that choice of getting us to think about all that's happening in our society to think about how it's all fitting together through these kind of cultural conversations you're sparking. So can you talk a little bit more about that intersection of cultural analysis and policy analysis? Absolutely. You know who deserves credit for that is my grandmother who used to say to me, little girl, don't listen to what people say, listen to what people do. So what we understand and how I understand and have translated that into my life is that the policy analysis, the political analysis and the economic analysis and all that is very important. But that is about who we think we are. It's the story that we tell about ourselves as being rational, being motivated by sort of clear cut incentives. And if you can just align those properly, you will get the right proper outcomes. The problem with that is that we have an immense amount of evidence that says we don't operate that way at all. That in fact, when human beings undertake massive social change, when we build new institutions or new ways of living or being, we are usually doing so because we have been motivated by a collective story about who we want to be. That's the culture. Who we want to be is usually at odds with or certainly in a negotiation with who we think we are. And what I saw happening and still see happening is that for every time I was called into a room on Capitol Hill or to go to the White House or go to some state agency to talk about data research-driven decision making, you get in the room and many of your students have experienced this. They come from work life or they will soon. You get to the room and what people tell you they do is remarkably different from what they actually do. We make data-driven decisions here. And they certainly have a lot of the theater of data-driven decision making, but then you're into the room. And you realize that they're being driven as much by organizational narratives and stories and feelings and emotions and identity as anything else. And so it became really clear to me, especially in some of the policy rooms where they call me in and they go, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, we've got the data. What we would like from you is for you to tell us a powerful story that will move the needle on getting people to accept the data. That to me is the cultural analysis and what that does knowing that the world that you send that data and that research out into is always going to see your empirical findings through the lens and the limitations of the culture. Right? We've got to condition the culture to understand a more nuanced conversation about race and class and gender, for example. How do I produce really meaningful and impactful data about something like, you know, racial marginalization and sex workers and immigration and citizenship to go back to the case of the violence that's happened in Atlanta, if I haven't conditioned the culture to make sense of that. Right. Both of those things need to happen. And that's not to say that that's everybody's work to do. But if you can, if you can create and craft empirically driven and sound stories that also tap into the cultural discourse, our desire for a story to make sense of the world. I think you have a much better chance of using the data and the empirics and the policy work to actually get people to take that up. I will tell you your real challenge is getting people what to uptake, to uptake, right? And whenever you introduce a new resource or policy, it's about uptake. Well, one of the best ways to move uptake is to get people to buy into the story of what you're trying to move the needle on. And so I think both of those things, yes, are important. And those of us who feel called to do so, I think have to feel empowered and supported in doing the work that does both. So as I think about the stories that we tell, I want to ask about education. And I know that was the area of your dissertation work and continues to be an area of interest. So one of the things that we're worried about in this COVID moment is further disparities that we might see as it relates to education and virtual learning and who got access to virtual learning and who didn't, who went back into the schools, who didn't, and all of the different complexities. So first, I want to ask you to comment on the K through 12 context. And then I'm going to ask you to comment on the higher ed context in terms of helping us to understand this moment that we're in as it relates to education. The two are actually very similar in that save for a few, a few exceptions, both K through 12 and higher education, everything that happens is happening within the context of depending on where you are anywhere from 20 to 40 years of public disinvestment. There may be a scale, but just writ large that either overall this either been an overall decline in public disinvestment or a reallocation of disinvestment that has increased within district inequalities, for example. That's the context. And so anything that happens in that context, no matter what the external shock is could have been Hurricane Katrina, as it happens, it could be a mass act of violence like in the cases that we have too many of across the country, whatever it is, the external shock happens in that context. And anything that happens in a context of that kind of disinvestment means that any resource that comes in is going to be allocated along the lines of the preexisting inequalities. Just what happens if you want investment to sort of transform a district or institution, you have to do a far more deliberately, right, than what usually happens in these types of moments. That's what COVID was primed to do. And that's what we are seeing happen at the very start of COVID when some of the first districts started to close. My first instinct was to go and look and see how we'd manage massive cataclysmic external events and shocks of education. And the best most recent literature was on Hurricane Katrina, which is why I bring it up, right? This was an external shock that shut down an entire district, right? And what we saw when we came back from Katrina was an acceleration, shop doctors shouldn't surprise too many people, but we saw an acceleration of all of the privatization and neoliberal efforts that had already been in place, maybe piecemeal or without unilateral support before Katrina, almost all of those processes accelerated during and after Katrina. So much so that like a school district in New Orleans, it looks, you know, dramatically different to people 10 years after than it did five years before Hurricane Katrina. Everything that kind of been put in the place gets accelerated. So then we start to look at COVID and what should we expect to happen without some sort of like deliberate attempt to not have that happen? This is what happens. That massive federal investment, external shock, the sort of resource flows that were already in place are able to take advantage of and access emergency funding and emergency resources in a way that continues to skew the public investment in schooling K through 12 or higher education away from the public goods mission. And that's pretty much what we've seen because that's what happens when that's the context. What is a little different, certainly at least in the higher education context is that we've never had anything that was an external shock to the entire system of higher education, right, not just asleep. And so that is delimited some of those competitive forces because we can't compete. Everybody was shut down, right? As things started to open, some of those state differences start to become very significant. There's a reason why some states like a Florida would jump out there ahead of other states to reopen quickly, right? Yes, it's about politics and political affiliation. But it is also about being the state that's open and ready to receive new monies, investment, et cetera, just a little bit before other states. And so all of that starts to matter sort of within between state competition starts to matter for investment as they start jockeying for federal dollars. But I think we could have predicted and many of us, I mean, did that said, you know, if we're not more deliberate about this, if we're not more sustained, but that's what happens when you try to make policy in a very contentious environment. This was, you know, it cannot be overstated that the last four years, we just had a very hostile political environment to public education, through 12 and in higher education, we had the hollowing out of the Department of Education, sort of like a buffer. And that is going to take quite some time to backfill. But in the meantime, money has to flow. And so what you've got is you've got a moment here where the money has been turned on, thanks to COVID, necessarily so thanks to COVID relief bills, the money has been turned on. But the oversight is going to lag, right? The federal oversight is going to lag because it has been gutted. And that's a moment for a couple of things. It can be a moment for positive transformation for those, you know, parent led and community led organizations might have a moment there to try to shift the balance in their local school districts. But it is also historically a moment of great opportunity hoarding, frankly. Right, right. And what about in the higher ed context? And one of the things that I'm thinking about is this ongoing conversation about the future of work and the idea of people saying people who were able to work from home saying, I can actually do my job as effectively, if not more effectively from home. And there's a conversation about what is that going to mean for commercial real estate? What is that going to mean for kind of workplace interactions? And there's some skepticism around whether higher ed was able to pivot as effectively. But on the other hand, real questions about college affordability and the idea of, you know, should we be charging what we're charging? And is there a way to do this more efficiently and more cost effectively through the use of technology? Students have to be on campus for all of their classes. Is there a way that we can deliver some of what we do that is so special and so important in a remote environment that might render costs cut a little bit and for us to be able to make it more affordable for students to attend? So can you comment on this conversation on the future of higher ed and are we going to, you know, have a post COVID transformation as well? Or do you think we're all back in the classroom? As usual? I know. I'm so sorry to put it on which side of that you're on. I'm either a Debbie Downer or I am the Harvard student. So it depends. I think that the the proposals of a radically transformed post COVID university are vastly overstated because you have to look at what we actually learned from COVID, not what we can now predict people might learn from COVID or what they would experience. So our first thing is very similar to working at home. Online education for the past year has been online education in name only, not an experience. Working from home during COVID is not what we have met by working from home. What we have been doing is emergency survival. Yeah, amidst a global health crisis of truly epic proportions to call that online education or working from home is a misnomer, right? These are qualitatively different things. Working from home when you can still go to the grocery store, when you can still dine out, when you can still travel mostly freely about the country, about the world really is not at all what we have experienced over the last year. Similarly, what we have heard from students, people who have done surveys, many universities have already done some of their own. I think there are a couple undergo going on right now at University of Connecticut and someone else is trying to do a representative survey of students. But even, you know, colloquially hearing from our own students, we know that the experience of going online this last year has not been very positive. If anything, people who are bullish on online education should want to distance themselves from the COVID experience as much as they possibly can. Because what people had to do, institutions had to do to make do, right, during these circumstances are not at all what we mean by online education, which is supposed to be high quality and flexible. I'm not not necessarily affordable, but high quality and flexible. And that's not what most institutions were able to do unilaterally over the past year. If anything, I suspect that families and students, especially traditional age students, will be more invested in a traditional on campus experience after COVID. Many of them very sort of resistant to giving up the college experience for online flexibility, which leads me to another point. Online flexibility and online education has always had a natural ceiling, right? And that natural limit is market desire, right? People have to want to go to school online, not settle for going to school online because their lives are so complicated and it's the only way to get it done, but want to go online, to desire going online. There is a natural limit for that. I just do not believe given the limits of our current technology, our current cultural reality, the norms, all the cultural capital we invest in the traditional college going experience is not going to transform overnight. And I don't think that a once in a lifetime public health crisis is enough to rewrite a hundred year narrative about going to college. Yeah, yeah. And all of the tangibles, but the intangibles that are so much a part of that experience. It's about not just the professor speaking, but it's about the networking. It's about the building of community. It's about the independence of having to strike out on your own and figure out how to solve and address your challenges. Education is really good at everything but social and cultural capital. And as it turns out, social and cultural capital are how people make the decision to pursue higher education. That's the fundamental mismatch. We actually are not very good. We're good at leveraging existing social ties, but building new meaningful ones that lead to career mobility and personal growth and relationships, both interpersonal and professional, those still are not things well suited yet. Right, right, right. So can you talk about your own professional trajectory? And as we listen to you talk, we hear such a multitude of experiences in the policy world, in the cultural conversation, in education research. And I wonder if you can talk about how you have crafted your professional trajectory. And particularly for those of us with PhDs, we know that we were often given one model for how you craft your profession. And it is step one, step two, step three, and don't you dare deviate from it. And you have recreated that model for yourself and created a model for others. So can you talk about that? And was it how intentional was it? That's the million dollar question. You know, I always say I've got to get a better story about this. I got to get a better branding. I really do need to start owning. Oh, no, absolutely. I'm not there yet. So let me be very honest with you. Listen, at the outset, I like to say like the first like, you know, four or five years of my academic career, I mostly made decisions without knowing that there was an expectation that I choose something else. But really that and that wasn't necessarily about like being first generation in college because I wasn't. But I was the first in my family to pursue a PhD, but not the first to go to college or graduate school or anything. But the PhD admittedly, PhD culture was quite unique and new to my context. But I really did in some ways benefit from there being not particularly high expectations for me. Like nobody was like creating me in their own mold, you know, there was a critique that mentorship model. And then my earliest mentors were just really fiercely devoted to like intellectual rigor and discipline. And beyond that didn't care what you did. I mean, my models were, if you're the best in the room, just be the best in the room, right? We'll worry about the title and all that later. And so some of that was, I just got really, I think fortunate in the sort of people that I attracted in my life. But then as I did start to kind of clue in, I mean, I'll give myself a little credit here. I cheated a bit in that my work was on higher education. So I was studying the system that I was being professionalized and socialized into. Unlike most of us, I think, you know, when we come through the academy, like the way academic hiring and all that works is just this vast mystery to us, right? Focus on your domain of expertise. It just so happened, my domain of expertise was the system that I was in. And I remember pretty distinctly, pretty late, I might have been like the last year, somewhere around when I signed my first book contract for lower ed, which is like my last year in graduate school, I do remember sort of making a choice about, okay, if I do this, this means this. And I know what the risks are and accept them and build a career based on these assumptions. And I remember thinking, I just think I just spent the last six years studying everything from the state of adjunctification, financialization and neoliberalism in higher education, public investment, competition, macroeconomic changes. And frankly, you know, it was a little hubris on my part. I thought I understood the problems of academia a little better than some of my senior, you know, professors and advisors. The advice they were giving me was for an academy that no longer existed. I just knew that really well, because I had spent a lot of time studying it. I thought, well, yeah, everything you're saying would make sense if tenure track jobs were still increasing exponentially. If we could count on the expansion of certain disciplinary programs and hires, if we could count on growing year over year student demand for higher education, if we, and I know all those things have changed. And so I was deliberate in saying, I need to do the best work I can under the best conditions that I can defend as long as I do that, whether that was in public work, or in strictly narrowly defined scholarship, but as long as I could defend it, it didn't matter who I was defending it to, whether it was a hiring committee or an editor or a public policy person. So I never sacrificed on rigor, but in choosing to speak sort of my own voice and cobble together the opportunities and really just taking advantage of opportunities as they came along, because some things I couldn't have predicted. I mean, you know, how do you predict the a book's reception? You don't, you don't predict how, but I could do my best work. Right. Long as it had done that, I thought I could navigate what is fundamentally becoming an increasingly more unpredictable academic trajectory that I think that's about, you know, the likelihood of a tenure track job opening, but I could control how good is my work and how well can I speak about it. Right. So it sounds like in your leveraging of technology and your understanding of, say, social media, that wasn't, oh, I really like to tweet. That was you understanding the direction of how information was flowing, right? And how higher education was shifting in terms of what experts were going to be called to do, not all are going to be called to into tenure track jobs, although you have one, but part of our public work is going to have to be more outward facing by design, because the pipeline of students that will be sitting in front of us and the pipeline of tenure track jobs was fundamentally shifting. So you realize that your voice as a professor was going to have to be much more kind of outward facing and to build a career around that. And that certainly I could better identify and anticipate changes if I was participating in the conversations where those changes were being negotiated. I mean, what I learned from my dissertation research where so much of it was happening in real time. So some of my earliest forays into like public discourse or social media was really about me trying to keep up with this super fast moving environment. I mean, the political environment for for-profit colleges in 2005, I think it was, was that there was literally a news item every day. It was constantly being litigated. Like my work, what I was having to respond to just didn't live in the archives, all right? It wasn't in the journal. It was so present that I had to be there. And then once I was there, yeah, I've got a sense that, wait a minute, the people who were speaking to this did not necessarily come through these pathways. And that I would need, I would be expected if I was going to be the expert on this subject, I would be expected to talk to them just as much or as well as I spoke to other academics. And so I did start to sense very early on that that is where, you know, the the center of gravity had shifted on where the force was happening and we're also making narratives were bubbling up that I probably needed to be there. Yeah, we have something else in common in that we've both spent time at predominantly white campuses, but we've also spent time on HBCU campuses, historically Black colleges and university campuses. So I'm a Spelman alum. So and talk to us about your undergraduate experience at an HBCU and, you know, help people who don't know or people who do know but always like to hear about that very unique and special context and environment. There's nothing like it. And I say that as somebody who for my daily life when it is not the, you know, pandemic times, I have been on the road almost constantly since my last year of graduate school, I visit university campuses as just a regular part of my experience and they are some of the most amazing communities, you know, probably ever developed in the year, certainly inside of a formal institution. And I love college campuses. I mean, I choose to live, you know, in Chapel Hill, I chose that for a reason. I love this life and I love that lifestyle. Having said that, there's nothing, nothing like an historically Black college experience. And that is not to say that it's perfect. What it is, you know, I write about this a little bit in thick, and I've written about it in response to several years ago, just sort of like a series of essays in response to Tony Heesey Coates in the Atlantic. And Tony Heesey is, you know, famous for talking about Howard, the Mecca on the Hill and his experience there. And I always, you know, and I would kind of come behind and I complicated, I go, listen, we're not perfect. Back to that, my very first point about wearing magic. We're huge. Right. So we're not perfect. This is what Black institutions are. They are institutions that assume the humanity of its Black students. And when you are Black in America, it is probably the first and the only time that you will be in an environment where your humanity is assumed. What is possible for you when you are not defending your very existence every day of your life? For that four, excuse me for meaning longer than four years, it's okay. But whatever that four to seven years is, it will move up to the end. We'll also have it a really good time. My mentor said to Darryl likes to say that's why you would end so long. But it all worked out fine. It's okay. Right, right, right. However long you are there, there is almost no place in the United States of America where Black people control enough of the institution, the institutional relationships to provide even that kind of assumption and to have it built into the everyday functioning of an institution. We really only have to. We've got the Black church and we've got Black colleges and universities. And so what becomes possible for you? Listen, there's a range of data about aptitude and self-efficacy and success, the long tail of success for African American students who attend Black colleges and universities. And it's not just about what happens there academically. It is about basic psychology, which is that when you are safe, not just physically safe, psychologically safe. When you're psychologically safe, you can self-actualize. That's all it is. So it is that we are safe there in a way that you just don't experience every day as a Black American. And so yeah, it's a marvelous experience. There's nothing like it. It's why I defend and invest in institutions no matter how flawed they are. I also know that once an institution is gone, you don't get it back. Right, right. Absolutely. And I suspect you're looking forward to being able to go back to homecoming in person. I mean, you know, listen, I may have an opposite plan. I won't admit to it. Absolutely. Absolutely. So before we pivot to questions from the group, tell us about your current projects and what you're working on now. Thanks for that. You know, one of the great privileges and honors of the MacArthur award is that it is a moment where you get to take a moment to step back from whether, no matter how brave or self-contained you are, you inherit and internalize a lot of the pressures of academic competition and staying on top of everything. And the MacArthur really does give you a moment to step back and think about, okay, if I could choose to do anything in the world, what would it be and what would that project be? And really for me, I was very fortunate to realize that I was already doing what I wanted to do with my life. But the resources of the MacArthur means I can do it in a way that is more sustainable and maybe at a different scale. So, you know, along the line of some of the questions that you have asked and that like some of the students asked earlier, which is like, how do you do this academic work that contains a multitude of publics? I am thinking very seriously about how to sustain that kind of work and invest in that work beyond myself. Right? How do I provide or create with others a space for academics who I think there are many of us who have maybe not a long-term parallel public career as I have and probably will have at this point until it's all said and done. But who in our work, just by the nature of how we tend to come to our research questions, very motivated usually by our personal experiences, I think we all have in us that one public long form research and form essay that can shift a critical public narrative. How do I support that? How do we give the academic a year to take a moment to write in a different kind of way for a different kind of audience? So that's what I'm starting to build. I have a project called Essane from talking about the form and the craft of writing for a public audience as a scholar with the long-term plan of partnering with some organizations to make that a sustainable fellowship that will support mostly minority and women scholars to write in this sort of way for the one project I say that nobody but you can write. What would that thing be? Because I do think that is super important to shifting narratives in a media-driven world like the one that we live in where it's both cheap to create discourse but really expensive to access high quality discourse. We need more people in the room who look differently, who think differently and who can bring different experiences to those narratives. And so I'm thinking about supporting that and we're slowly building out that apparatus. I probably am in the middle. I'm in denial right now that I'm working on a new book. So we'll just continue to pretend that I'm not. But my research project at CTAP at UNC which is what I came here to work on is actually comes out of the lower ed some questions I had at the end of lower ed where I talked to hundreds of students most of them women of color especially black women who are enrolled in high-cost low-quality for-profit colleges and when I would ask them, well what are you going to do if this doesn't work out? There's no job for you on the other end. You know you got $110,000 in debt. You're not with a PhD or EDD or a nursing doctorate from a for-profit college that may or may not be accepted in the field. And they would say to me well that's all right if I don't get a job I will just go into business for myself. And I kept thinking wow how entrepreneurship had become a catch all social policy prescription for all these other intersecting social inequalities. We tell people to go on the business for themselves because we don't want to invest in improving the quality of work. And so we call them the hustle studies. We're thinking about hustle ship hustle as a way of entrepreneurial survival among women of color in digital economies and so we're also working on that. Okay wonderful. So we have some some questions from the community and one of them is about allyship and I want I would love for you to talk about what is high quality allyship look like and the way the person phrased it is this is the golden age to be white and woke in America. Yeah and then they go on to ask about allyship. So can you talk about that? You know allyship isn't even my favorite word. I like to say to people that allys should be a way station on the way to becoming a comrade. So the difference for me is that an ally is someone who has learned about inequalities, has learned about injustices and feels personally implicated. A comrade is someone who has learned that their personal implication will come with personal sacrifice. So for me it's probably a necessary step on the path to solidarity but it is not a sufficient one. And I actually think we've done ourselves a bit of a disservice in the public discourse about how we have made allyship the goal. Allyship is just a stage of identity development. It means you're consciousness raising and you should back to the point though about how important it is to serve in our leadership to know when you need to lead and when you need to follow. I think there's very important things to develop as an ally but always with the understanding that for us to move into a space of sharing the burden will always come with sacrifice. But I think it's important to point out that in exchange for that sacrifice you are ultimately freed from all of the lingering restraints that allyship puts on you. So it is better to become a comrade. I think it feels better. Yes there's personal sacrifice but there's so much collective benefit that then spills over to your personal experience but it doesn't mean it's easy. So I think the best allies are the ones who are not trying to stay allies. What does that personal sacrifice look like? People really don't like to talk about this which is fascinating. I've been thinking about this a lot recently. I wrote a short piece a few months ago about the goal of becoming anti-racist was always to break up white supremacy. Like I don't know if anybody told you but it was supposed to come with some sacrifices and I think we should get that part that this idea that you can change nothing else about your life as long as you talk the talk right? That that is sufficient but it means some relationships will not survive. Just like any other developmental stage you don't keep all of your friends from fifth grade as a middle aged adult. The same happens if you think about your racial identity development you will lose relationships but you will gain better more honest ones because now you can be who you are because you aren't just an avatar for white supremacy right? Once you become more human you then have better more sustaining friendships edifying friendships and relationships but you will lose relationships so you know every year around the holidays you get all of the wonderful race talk and allyship about how do you talk to your racist uncle at Thanksgiving or see a comrade knows that your racist uncle doesn't come to Thanksgiving. That's the developmental process in stage because you start to see yourself as having a stronger kinship and tie to others than you do to this relation and that you'll lose some of those. It means in the organizational context very often it does mean that sometimes your pet project the one that you would benefit from the most personally should be tabled for another project that was the need that hasn't been met before. That's not even about uh sacrifice it isn't that resources are limited but that everybody isn't going to get what they want all of the time. That's a that to me is sort of a mature maturity process. Right, right. I think one other question I have related to that and it's another question that people have asked is grappling with these obvious displays of power and white supremacy and for many of us we have a long view of history. We know that it's been there and for others it's a shock to the system and they're trying to have an intersectional analysis of it so one of the questions that I got is can you tell us about some of your current ideas on the performance of white femininity in politics for example how does Marjorie Taylor Greene capitalize on tropes of white blondness as the gold standard of gender capitalism to advance her particular political power or how Lauren Boner I'm not sure if I'm saying the name correctly invokes ideals of thinness. How do you see these performances evolving over the next decade and I'm thinking about the writing that you do and thick and how it's so perfectly suited to take on this very sophisticated question. Oh thank you for that one and I'm somebody can email me later if they ever want credit for the line that I just wrote down that I will be borrowing and that is the gold standard of gender capitalism because that is that works on so many levels because it is about blondness which I've been particularly as as the culturally acceptable avatar of white eugenesis ideas of white supremacy. This longing for an investment in a genetic recessive expression of white purity that gets manifest as our cultural valuation of blondness which so many by the way of the sort of extreme right most of the most extreme right candidates like Marjorie and Boner and there's a handful of them across the country who play in those tropes. Boner is a brunette but still I think playing with these ideas of cultural purity that like you said have a long view of history that are about the cult of femininity that are designed to ultimately reify a patriarchal white supremacist inheritance of property and identity and power but that in the short term can be retrofitted as a sort of conservative feminism which is what I find fascinating that you can but that's what happens when you reduce solidarity politics to individual politics so the minute we defame feminism and made it about which slogans you prefer and made it about economic empowerment we divested it of any ability to be elastic enough for the kind of solidarity narratives that of feminism was supposed to do and this happens you know they get co-opted you know all social movements and rhetoric gets co-opted eventually but the idea that someone like Marjorie can call herself feminist at the same time that she opposes every basic tenet of even mainstream feminism she's only feminist in a performance of individuality it's not even corporate feminism it's a very capitalist feminism you know that this has become such a powerful currency right now isn't necessarily surprised because these things happen in tandem you see the sort of resurgence of southern ideology and Confederate ideologies right that start to emerge on things like you know the January attacks on the Capitol but that really have pervaded like our discourse about what should we do about Confederate statues all right that's right there's this resurgence these things tend to happen in tandem there's a resurgence in a nostalgia for that lost Confederacy that dovetails with what some of my colleagues and I have written in response to the sort of case in Deaton work on declining white life expectancies but these sort of deaths of despair which is my colleagues and I have argued is just really about the perceived loss of status not about the real economic loss because our buying power is roughly the same it's just that they are roughly less unequal for some people and they're perceived so it's a perception of the loss of status that seems to be at the root of white deaths of despair and that when you tile that together that is the perfect environment for an increase in our you know increase investment in blondness as we gotta have you know the sort of gendered caretaking of those patriarchal ideas and that's what they're doing they they sort of clean them up they make them bulletproof and political discourse because you can't attack a woman right and so you certainly can't attack a white woman and so it mainstreams these ideas and the political discourse in a way that I think is as dangerous if not more dangerous than some of what we saw coming from something like Donald Trump right I always said that Donald Trump's most powerful weapon was actually Ivanka it was his daughter doing the exact same work but through that avatar of blondness and femininity precisely because we are so conditioned for that to be eternally innocent and that is my innocence effect and that's what they're trying to leverage in that political discourse and I think this is one of the first times that women have had enough of a full franchise enough for them to do it in mainstream politics they usually would have to do that through philanthropy and sort of tertiary political organizations to be doing it from elected office is a historical first not one that I would probably call an achievement but it is a historical first and we're going to have to reckon with how do we have a complex conversation about how not all women who proclaim feminism are doing feminist politics right right and that brings me to here to slay and I am so regretful because we have so many other questions and people have so many questions for you but I would love for you to talk about here to slay because I suspect that that is also a space in which people can hear from you and engage with you and you know send tweets your way that you may kind of incorporate into the conversations that you have with Roxanne Gay so can you can you just talk very quickly about how how that came together yeah so when we were you know Roxanne and I have been friends and always had a really good time together we do these live events sometimes together and we said we really wanted more of that space and less of some of the spaces that we were constantly being invited into and that was not that we wanted something that was less serious but that we thought it was important for us to bring some of the conversations that we have purely as academics or purely a sort of like literary authors into popular discourse because one both of us take popular discourse seriously we think popular culture is serious business happens in popular culture and is all the most serious for how one seriously we treat it right and so we had this idea of you know we called it a black feminist daily show was how we how we posited it and it is us taking on like what would happen in these conversations that everybody's having this week over the last week or two what would happen to that conversation if we assume the full humanity of black people and LGBTQIA people in the room well every conversation as it turns out gets smarter as it turns out every popular culture conversation becomes more meaningful there is nothing that we've talked about on the show we bring celebrities on we bring authors people that we don't we think should be on the news far more than they are that we think should be like on the sunday morning news shows right we say to them you can always come here one of the most edifying parts of this experience is that we always have a space for any black woman who's doing anything and so you know we have Stacy Abrams on we have Gabrielle Union I mean you know just across the gamut and they come on the show and let me tell you they walk into the studio and come on and go hey girl hey and see them just sort of like collapse they've been in these rooms where it's like combat right and we have the most meaningful sustained conversations with them because to the point about hbcu's they know they are safe right right and so we can get into some of those nuances about how does colorism shape who becomes our black elected representatives right we can talk about the limits of middle class discourse and black entrepreneurialism and how that disproportionately negatively impacts poor working class women right like we can then have a nuanced conversation because everybody feels safe and so that's what here to slay is yeah so it's a lot of fun Dr. Tressy McMillan-Cottom we could do this all evening this was so enriching and thank you to those thank you to everyone for watching thank you to you Dr. Cotom for engaging in this conversation thank you to those who sent in questions sorry we couldn't get to everything but it's really a testament to the level of interest people have in your work and how wide ranging it is and how many topics in which people feel heard by what you're saying and want to engage with you further so very quickly tell people how to find you and how to how to keep the dialogue by keeping in mind everybody boundaries and we have to make sure that you have time to do what you know self-care and work on projects so we're all in the pandemic everybody yeah there's a non-pandemic world happening there was no seriously everybody is always the easiest way is to go to tressymc.com it really does there's a page there in contact that are a route different types of questions to the right people and i promise you that is the best way to get to me even if you have my direct email address because that system is set up for me to see the things that need to bubble up so that's one way tressy mcphd at twitter um and you can find us at here to slay the essaying project if you want to talk craft and public voice and scholarship is at tressy.substat.com wonderful thank you so much thank you everyone for tuning in i bid you good evening this has been policy talks at the forward school of public policy at the university of michigan take care