Your Success Probably Didn’t Come From Merit Alone

Prepping for a conversation with Tressie McMillan Cottom is intimidating. McMillan Cottom is a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, a 2020 MacArthur fellow, co-host of the podcast “Hear to Slay,” and the author of the essay collection “Thick,” which was a National Book Award finalist. And she’s one of those people who can seemingly write on anything: The way for-profit colleges generate inequality, the cultural meaning of Dolly Parton, the way the U. S. medical profession treats Black women, how beauty operates in contemporary America, the role of hustle in the economy — the list just keeps going. And so did this conversation, in the end. I barely made it through a third of my planned questions because so many interesting topics came up in each answer. We discuss the dangers of nostalgia, the social construction of smartness, the moral panics gripping America, why journalists are racing to platforms like Substack, how different mediums of communication shape our conversations, the central role status plays in American life, her research on the root causes of the uptick in “deaths of despair,” how beauty is constructed and wielded and much, much more. This is one of those conversations that could’ve gone on for four more hours. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Recommendations: "Minor Feelings" by Cathy Park Hong "Fearing the Black Body" by Sabrina Strings "The Chosen" by Jerome Karabel "Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry" by Mildred Taylor You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Rogé Karma and Jeff Geld; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Ezra Klein?

  I'm Ezra Klein, and this is The Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:20Ezra Klein?

  So when I do these introductions, I try to have a particular thread I'm following, something to set up the main argument or the main question of the show. But that's not possible today. It wouldn't do this justice. There's too much in this show for me to wrap it into one idea. It is, as my guests might say, really thick, and it is great. Tracy McMillan Cotton is a sociologist at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. She's the author of the book Lower Ed and then the wonderful essay collection Thick, which was a National Book Award finalist in 2019. She won a MacArthur Genius Grant. She's co-host of the podcast Here to Slay. And she's just one of those people who you can ask her any question, any question at all, and you just get a sparklingly interesting answer.

• 1:04Ezra Klein?

  Prepping for this was intimidating because her work is just vast, from academic research on how for-profit colleges generate inequality, to sprawling essays on Dolly Parton, to these analyses of how beauty functions in contemporary America, to ideas about the role hustle plays in the American economy, everything, everything, everything in between. But in part, I just want to understand, how does she take on so many different topics constructively? Like, what is her process for being able to say something useful as she moves into these different areas? It's a lot to find something intelligent to say about. But as you'll hear, there's also one idea that thrums the core of a lot of this, and that is the way status structures and reinforces the hierarchies of American life, of who gets

• 1:48Ezra Klein?

  listened to and who gets seen and why. But this is honestly one of those conversations that could have gone for four more hours. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. As always, my email is [email protected]. Here is Tracy McMillan Cotton.

• 2:08Ezra Klein?

  So something I always admire about your work is the range of topics you're able to write in and the range of topics you write about and this like crazy group of registers you do from Twitter to Substack to academic work. So I wanted to start here. How did you train yourself to write in so many different ways?

• 2:28Speaker 01

  Oh, man, I wish I could say that I did train myself to write in so many ways. I think what happens instead is that, first of all, I'm a very curious person. I'm in these spaces anyway. I am an internet person for better or for worse, right? I came of age as a public person in like live journal, right? Like I followed the development of these spaces, just like any other person I think of my generation, though. That's just kind of where we were, where we were hanging out. And when I'm in a space, this predates being a sociologist or an academic. When I'm in a space, I'm very much a, you know, one step in, one step

• 3:09Speaker 01

  removed kind of person. You know, I'm watching the thing I'm participating in, can't turn that off. It's just, you know, this what I am and who I am. And so it makes sense for me that if I'm on Twitter, I'm also thinking about Twitter, right? Like, I'm thinking about, why, why are all these people here? Like, what's the audience looking for? What's that about? And so that comes out in the things that I'm interested in. So that's one thing. I think training myself to write to that audience, understanding it is one thing, to be fair. Understanding everything as a genre is another thing. And there was a moment when I realized, this is just like learning how to write the five paragraph essay, right?

• 3:47Speaker 01

  As opposed to a long form piece of creative nonfiction. Every medium has a genre. And some of that cracking, some of it really is just fun for me. It's like, okay, let me see if I could do this. I can't do them all, to be fair. There are definitely some genres, especially ones that lean more visual, because I'm a textual kind of girl. And I just don't get like visual and editing. But some of it is just fun for me to see if I can remix the genre. First of all, can I capture it? And then can I remix it a little? Can I make an essay have like the freewheeling feeling of Twitter?

• 4:26Speaker 01

  Can I surprise an audience that thought they were showing up for like a first person essay with a little bit of empirical thinking? Like, can I just sort of surprise people? That's part of the fun for me.

• 4:40Ezra Klein?

  How do the genres change the way you think? When you, when you sit down and you begin writing in the academic register versus the personal essay register, does it change the kinds of thoughts you have?

• 4:52Speaker 01

  Yes. What will often happen is I sit down and there's something I want to write about or I'm obligated to write about. That happens sometimes too. Like, I just, I gotta write about it. And, you know, one of the first questions I kind of ask myself is what is the right speed for this argument? So I actually think that one of the things that happens in writing in different registers is that you become much more reflexive about, should this have just been a tweet? And which is totally fair, right? And I think it's a fair thing to say. Like, sometimes I'll start on an argument and I'll go, this is not substantive enough for like this genre. And I, you know, and I'll even push back sometimes now, like editors or people I'm collaborating with and go, y'all, I think we just mean to write a quick write-up and

• 5:37Speaker 01

  move on. One of the things, you know, the academics are taking a task for is, you know, bloviating and overcomplicating simple things. And I really do think we could be set free a little bit if we would just admit that sometimes the thing we turned into like an academic piece probably just should have been either a first person essay or tweet or somewhere in between. But, you know, the status drives us sometimes more than like the question we're asking. But yeah, I sit down and I go, okay, what is the right, what's the right speed for this? What's the right genre? When will I know that this argument is done? I like a complete argument. I like to walk away from something and say, I left it all on the court. And sometimes that's, that's 240 characters.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  Sometimes it's 20,000 words and just being like attuned to that, that those are options, those are choices. I ask myself that a lot when I sit down and I start with an argument, what's the right size?

• 6:29Ezra Klein?

  I feel like I used to be able to ask that question to myself. I came up as a blogger and I'm an internet person and I would write little, little posts and long ones. And I swear to you, I cannot, no matter how hard I try now, write something that is in between 280 characters and 1,800 words.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 6:44Ezra Klein?

  Like I completely lost the register, like all the way in between. It's like a book, it's like a long essay, or it's a tweet.

• 6:52Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 6:53Ezra Klein?

  And like, God forbid, you have 400 words worth of something to say. Like, I just can't seem to stop.

• 6:57Speaker 01

  Because then you just feel like you talk, it feels like a stub, right? I call those stubs. I've got so many of those. It's something like 350 words or something, and I'm not sure where that would go. I think what you're asking is for us to bring back blogger. I think that's what you're suggesting we do.

• 7:12Ezra Klein?

  Well, I've always asked for us to bring back blogging.

• 7:15Ezra Klein?

  There is a nostalgia oftentimes among people who came up in it for the internet of the aughts.

• 7:21Speaker 01

  Yes, the old internet.

• 7:22Ezra Klein?

  Do you think that's nostalgia, or do you think something was lost?

• 7:26Speaker 01

  Hmm. Okay, so I, you know, I now work with a lot of internet people. I'm in an information school at a university. And so a lot of my very good friends are those people. So I would like tip top carefully. I do think that there was a clubbiness and a camaraderie, even among people like who politically disagreed. But like, there was a class of thinkers, a class of writers who came up in that like web 2.0. That does feel like, yeah, we lost something there, something. There was a, there was a humanity there, you know, for good or for bad, you know, humanity's messy. But there was a sense that those ideas were attached to people. And there were things driving those people. And there's a reason they had chosen to be in that space, like before it all became about chasing an audience

• 8:10Speaker 01

  and a platform and turning that into influencer and translating that into that job, you know, before all of that happened, the professionalization of it all. And that's what I think we're missing when we become nostalgic for that web 2.0. I think it's the people in the machine. Having said that, I am very resistant to nostalgia as a thing. Because usually what we are nostalgic for is a time that just was not that great for a lot of people. And so what we usually are really nostalgic for is a time when we didn't have to think so much about who was missing in the room, who wasn't at the table. So like when I talk to friends and especially like younger people coming up behind us,

• 8:51Speaker 01

  either in the internet or in writing spaces, where they're like, that time was horrible for young queer people. Like, right, they talk about looking for like little safe pockets of space in web 2.0 world, where it was still very okay to be homophobic, for example, in those spaces. And like our casual language and how we structured that kind of thing. And they love being able to leave that part behind in this new world of whatever the web is now, both a consolidated and a disaggregated like new web. That's why I'm like resistant to nostalgia. At the same time, I'm like, you know, yeah, I also laugh and go, I really miss having a blog.

• 9:32Speaker 01

  In some ways, like coming back to the newsletter and Substack was kind of part of that. It's me being nostalgic for having a place where I could put thoughts that didn't fit into any other discourse or, you know, genre. And like, I wanted a space where I could talk to people who were actually interacting like real people. They weren't acting like bots or trolls or whatever your internet persona is. So, I mean, I say I'm resistant to nostalgia, I just try not to reproduce it. But even I'm get a little, I will always have a soft spot for blogger, which is coincidentally my first where I state space on blogger.

• 10:05Ezra Klein?

  Yep, me too.

• 10:06Speaker 01

  And then I'll always be a little romantic about it.

• 10:11Ezra Klein?

  But I think you're right about that criticism of it too, something that For all that I can tip into nostalgia, like something that I think is often missed in today's conversation is the conversation has never been wider. People talk all about the things they can't say, but it has never been wider. There's never been a larger allowable space of things you could say. And people have also never been more pissed about how it feels to participate in it. I don't want to say never, but broadly, there is an intensity to that conversation that is distinct. And I don't think those things are unrelated. Right? I think it is the wideness of the conversation and the fact that there are so many people you might hear from that make you feel cautious and insecure and unsafe. And like, the good of it is the bad of it.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  Exactly. One of the things I like to say to people is that we think that broadening access in any realm, we do this with everything, by the way, is such an American way to approach the world. We think that broadening access will broaden access on the terms of the people who have benefited from it being narrowed, like, which is just so counterintuitive. Broadening access doesn't mean that everybody has the experience that I, privileged person, had in the discourse. Broadening it means that we are all equally uncomfortable. Right? That's actually what pluralism and plurality is. It's that it isn't that everybody's going to come in and have the same comforts that privilege and exclusion had extended to a

• 11:35Speaker 01

  small group of people. It's that now everybody sits at their table and nobody knows the exact right thing to say about the other people. Well, that's fair. That means we all now have to be thoughtful. We all have to consider, oh, wait a minute, is that what we say in this room? Like, we all have to reconsider what the norms are. And that was the promise of like, expanding the discourse. And that's exactly what we've gotten. And if that means that I'm not sure about letting it rip on a joke, that's probably a pretty good thing.

• 12:06Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, Jennifer Richison, the psychologist at Yale, once called this a democratization of discomfort to me.

• 12:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 12:12Ezra Klein?

  And I think it's such a, it's such a good line. And something that always makes me think about is that there are a lot of us who came up in an earlier iteration, not just of the internet, but of journalism, or cultural criticism, or whatever it might be. And there were certain things it's selected for. You know, I mean, there's like the 80s New Republic people who really selected for slashing, counterintuitive, provocative, and somewhat offensive essay writing. And just this era requires different virtues. And that's a conversation I almost never hear people have, that maybe just the new internet, or this moment, to be in one of these highly public, you know, very privileged positions, you're going to need to develop a different set of virtues and competencies

• 12:54Ezra Klein?

  in how to conduct a conversation and how to speak to people that are just hard. It's just going to be really hard.

• 12:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. And human nature is resistant to learning. I mean, nobody knows that more than people who like teach for a living. But for all we valorize learning and education, human nature really trends towards inertia. And every layer of privilege you layer on top of somebody makes that more true. And so what we're fundamentally, I think, saying to people is, who achieve something where part of the promise of the achievement was that I'll never have to learn anything new again. Right? This, this was the promise, right? Like, I'm now, you know, I'm now the editor, I'm the gatekeeper, I'm the whatever. And the whole promise of that was, I'll never have to worry about learning anything new again.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  And then we come to them and we go, no, you gotta relitigate, you gotta reconsider what your role is. And now there actually are people who can hold you accountable for that in a way that wasn't always true. And I have found it to be true in every space I've ever been in, every organization, it is true of myself. Nobody likes being reminded that they are not done yet, that there's still more work for them to do. And that's, I think, what we're fundamentally saying to people, and they resist that because that's like human nature. It's just that some people get to resist it in a way more aggressive fashion than other people.

• 14:16Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, you know, Yuval Levin, who's this conservative thinker, I once heard him say that almost all change is generational.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:22Ezra Klein?

  Almost all real change that happens is that a new generation comes and they are able to change. And I hadn't thought about it quite the way before, but now when I look at, say, Congress, and I see the way part of the Democratic Party is changing, or I look at what's happening in online discourse, some of it just feels to me like I'm of a different generation even than than some of the young writers now. And you feel a little left behind. Like, there is more change generation to generation than there is within generations. And maybe it's for exactly that reason.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, nothing is funnier to me than when I realize, you know, we wrote all of this stuff, we did all this stuff, we threw out all these theories of change, and then, like, people believed us. That's literally what happened. You've got young people who said, wait a minute, gender is a spectrum? Okay, I'mma live it like a spectrum. And we're like, no, but we didn't mean that, you know? Like, like, really, what fundamentally happened is we hypothesized and imagined all of this stuff, wrote it into the ether, and then we're surprised that people actually took it up and lived it. That does happen faster, as you point out. We do owe that to the internet. The generations are now like four and a half years long. But it happens faster, and so we feel older faster, and we feel outdated faster.

• 15:35Speaker 01

  But, you know, I get so inspired by the people who, within a generation, have resisted becoming that old person. And I'm just like, okay, I'm just gonna double down, right? I'm just, I think we got a choice. You can become like the Angela Davis of the world, or where you're like, okay, I hear you. Each new generation comes along, and I hear you. I gotta get with it. And I've seen Angela do that in real time, like a young person stand up in the audience and go, and we say sibs now. And she's like, I'm with you, gotcha. Like, you just take it, and you're supposed to go. And I think we got a choice. You can become that person within your generation who lives in that uncomfortable space, or you can become the person, I won't name a name, but you can become the person who doesn't and resist it. I just don't want them writing about me like that later.

• 16:19Speaker 01

  So I'm really shooting for the Angela Davis model.

• 16:23Ezra Klein?

  Let me ask you about your own generational change. You have this line I love where you say that all of your essays begin with a question of why me and not my grandmother? Tell me about your grandmother.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you. I'd love to tell you about my grandmother. I've been thinking about her so much lately, in part because I've moved back home to North Carolina and that's where my family is and so get nostalgic and because we've been trapped in the house, what else is there to do? But my grandmother was a part of, you know, this sweeping, talk about a generational change, like sweeping generational change in the United States of America, really, I think in the Western world, when you think about how central the United States is to that definition, you know, she's the tail end of the great migration generation, Black people who left points south for points north and west with millions of other people, spans about a generation and a half of people, if we use like the big definition of generations.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  But I think something really just coheres that generation of African Americans in particular. They're the ones who made really foundational decisions about whether to stay or to leave. And my grandmother was one of the people who left and she was probably the least likely of her family members to have been predicted to leave. I mean, this was not a brave woman. I love her dearly. She's sweet as she could be, but like this was the woman who had like 19 locks on the door. She wasn't exactly a pioneer in that, you know, pioneering spirit. What she was, was pragmatic, however, and if jobs were in the north and that's where you went. But I think about how much she probably had to fight her nature to do what she needed to do. She was creative.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  I get so much of, I think, my creative energies from her. A big reader, which all of us are in the family, but even in a family of readers, my grandmother was the reader. Really wide reading, like she read anything and I think I got that from her too. Very agnostic on genre and I don't care, I'll read anything. I got that from her. And so when I'm thinking about like why me and not her, like all of those instincts that I inherited from her and all those things she socialized me into, she's just for me, the concrete example of how you can be everything that a culture values and not be in the right body for the culture to value it and that is going to shape the limit of your life.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  It is my understanding, like this is what inequality and stratification looks like in a very real way. My grandmother should have had my life, basically.

• 18:52Ezra Klein?

  And what life did she have?

• 18:54Speaker 01

  She had a hard life. She moved from rural eastern North Carolina where hard life meant partially sharecropping, you know, leasing yourself out in the summers to pick tobacco that was left over after the machines that come through. She wanted to labor with my mother in the middle of a field and almost did not survive childbirth. So she leaves that to go to Harlem, which would have been an exciting time by all accounts, but another hard transition. Small, crowded living conditions, very different from what she'd come from. For many, many years, she worked for, you know, went back and forth between working for Jewish families as like a domestic worker to again, working like in the garment district and just always trying to eke out something that was just a little bit better than the

• 19:38Speaker 01

  position before. And then eventually came back home to North Carolina, as many black folks did, and reverse migration. And by that time was done with like raising people and taking care of people and being as a caretaker. And she really spent the last few years of her life reading. And I think it was the most peaceful she'd been her whole life, living right there at the edge of like social change, as much as we like to write about it and romanticize it, living it is tough. So she had a tough life.

• 20:08Ezra Klein?

  And so tell me about the question, why you and not her? Like, what is that question?

• 20:12Speaker 01

  I think that question is about the limits of how we internalize the American dream. You know, I think a lot about like, nobody believes in mobility more than black people. Like, nobody believes in the promise of this country more than black people. And nobody has less reason to believe it than we do. And I think holding those two ideas at the same time is probably why our health outcomes are as poor as they are. I think like, living in that liminal space between it's supposed to be better, but it isn't. And like trying to just like constantly trying to like butt up against that, just find a, trying to find a crack, trying to get in there. And I think what I'm asking about when I think why me

• 20:55Speaker 01

  and not her, one, I hope I'm keeping myself grounded in how contingent this all is.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  I never want to wed my sense of self and my identity to something I don't control. And you know, part of being black and being a woman in this country is that even when you're very successful, you just don't control the terms of your success. My success is always limited by how well other people can imagine the possibility of me. When people could not imagine my grandmother, she just wasn't possible, you know? Here's this big reader who did well in school and she's like a domestic worker. They just couldn't imagine anything else for her. And so I'm always really aware of and never want to forget that, that no matter how hard I work, and yeah, you're supposed to maybe work hard or whatever, then you invest in yourself and you develop your

• 21:47Speaker 01

  skills. I always want to be really clear that I can do all of that. I can do all of the right things and it still won't work out. And I think that's just like the basis of my work of trying to explain that to other people. Many of people who for the first time in their lives are reckoning with the fact that I did everything right and it didn't work out. Really like this is just not supposed to happen. And what's basically just becoming more true for more people is that, you know, more people feel like my grandmother than they ever imagined would be possible for them.

• 22:20Ezra Klein?

  Sometimes I hear, hear a line when I'm doing the show that I just know I'm not going to get away from for a long time. And how well I did is how well people could imagine me is one of those. That's a, that's a remarkable way of putting that. You say something in thick where you write and quoting, "Smart is only a construct of correspondence between one's abilities, one's environment, and one's moment in history. I'm smart in the right way, in the right time, on the right end of globalization." Tell me about that because I think we frame smart culturally as something that cuts through. Time, space, society. Tell me about seeing smart as contingent.

• 22:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think we love that idea because I think it's an idea about ourselves, that there's some one true thing about human nature that will be as fixed as a mathematical relationship. You know, it's a very post Enlightenment sort of way to think about it. But like, yeah, there's supposed to be one smart that you would, you would recognize genius no matter where you were on the timeline. Right? I'm not into this show, but I have a young person in my life who's very into the Doctor Who show.

• 23:28Ezra Klein?

  Uh huh.

• 23:28Speaker 01

  One of the things I do find interested about Doctor Who is it is that, it's that premise, it's that conceit that no matter where you drop in in the time, space continuum, you're going to recognize that person as the doctor, the scientist, the one who knows, right? It's just so not true. What a culture needs from its smart people at any given point in time changes. We could have a very different value system about what constitutes smart. What I want to keep in mind, and one of the things I hope that people take away when I say something about like the correspondence of how smart you are is just really about your place in the world. It's because I want people to feel obligated to think about what world they're creating for somebody else.

• 24:11Speaker 01

  But first, we got to recognize how vulnerable our own identity is. If you build your whole identity on how smart you are, I think it can make you very small and selfish in thinking about the world for everybody else. And so that's why I try to pinpoint, like, if you think that I'm good enough, if you think, wow, you know, Tracy's really sharp, right? Tracy's really brilliant. What I want you to imagine is how easy it would be for you to not think that and for me to just not exist. Right? I'd still be me. I'd still have my talents and abilities. And that we do that to people every day. You know, we build a world where that's just not allowable or acceptable.

• 24:54Speaker 01

  And then I also really want to push the idea that we have so embodied the idea of smart as being something that a person is. That it makes us really easy to disinvest from the things that make smart actually possible. Cause smart is like a social problem. We make smart, we make smart with schools, we make smart with our political decisions and choices. Right. And if you think nature is just gonna take care of it and it's just gonna give you a once in a lifetime genius every go around, then you don't invest in the things that produce smartness. And a fixed idea of intelligence invites us to disinvest from like the social contract of making more smart people.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  Just make more, you know, by expanding your understanding of it.

• 25:42Ezra Klein?

  One of the things I was thinking about with that is I I've been thinking about the the idea in disability studies. Disability is is about a relationship between you and the built world. And we were talking before we began recording about our eyesight that you got lasik. And I've like had negative eight vision since I was five, basically. And, you know, in another context, I'm just completely useless. The things that make you smart, like I'm a good reader and I can, you know, write a lot. I can't do that without my glasses. Not that long ago in human history that wouldn't have been possible for me. And even that, like you can have everything exactly the same, but just one lapse in the accommodation society or technology is able to make for you and and you're gone.

• 26:26Ezra Klein?

  And meanwhile, I have no sense of direction whatsoever. Like my mechanical and physical intelligence is really weak. Like I I think all the time about how low the esteem I would be held in would be at other points in history.

• 26:38Speaker 01

  You take away things like libraries and the written word and the printing press. And I actually, my social value declined significantly. I've learned so much from the disability studies people, by the way, and it's actually something that was in back of my mind the whole time I was like answering your question. One of the things that like flipped me just sort of like flipped a switch in my brain. I was in graduate school and there at Emory University, we had a a really strong like contingent of Pute scholars who were doing disability studies. And I learned a lot from them, but we were having coffee one day with some of those folks. And friend Adam turns to me, he's like, um, the thing is, it's not about who is disabled. It's about when are you going to become disabled?

• 27:19Speaker 01

  We will all be disabled at some point in our life course. And so much middle class consumption, by the way, and our obsession with like health and wellness is about that. Like, we are fundamentally terrified because we know how horrible we are to other disabled people. Right? So like, we are terrified of becoming in any way disabled or differently abled. So, right, right? So it's like, you know, take your bee pollen and, and, and get your magnesium and da, da, da. Well, you know, you're gonna age. If nothing else, your eyesight is gonna go. You're gonna lose some of your mobility. Speaking about smart as a fixed idea, just the way your brain works is going to change. Like, we're just so vulnerable to like nature and time and biology.

• 28:04Speaker 01

  And we're so terrified of it, I think, because we know that a lot of what we have built, our ideas of who we are on, are really far more vulnerable than we think they are.

• 28:16Ezra Klein?

  I think about this all the time when I cover healthcare policy because people will, during these fights, will talk about, "Well, I don't know, as a healthy person, do I need to be subsidizing the, the sick so much?" Or we'll start talking about the old and the young. And I'm always like screaming during these debates. These are not fixed categories. We go in and out. You know, you're young now, but you're gonna be old someday, hopefully. And you're healthy now, but you're gonna be sick someday. And it's funny, it's, it's a place where I think our enthusiasm for categorizing people, you know, it's one of many that really leads us astray. Like, as soon as you begin talking in categories, it tricks the mind into fixing the boundaries. But a lot of categories are very porous.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  Yes. Categories are really useful for like analytical thinking. Like, yeah, it helps me get my arms around something that's really messy, you know? And it helps me figure out like, because you, you can't just consider every eventuality. That's just a limit of human nature, you know, the, how the human mind works. So like, categories, they become useful as long as you keep in mind that that's all they were. That right, like you gotta constantly, I think, relitigate, wait a minute, what was the category I had at play here? Like, we're talking about like the old internet and the world people miss. I think one of the things that people are so uncomfortable with right now, why there's just so many, like, there seems to be moral panic after moral panic after more, we just, we've got a lot of moral panics happening right now. Hard to even like, separate them out.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  And I think that it's because it's all one big moral panic about, I don't think we feel equipped for doing that. It is a moment, I think, in time when we're being asked and really pushed to rethink almost every meaningful category that we've kind of taken for granted.

• 30:02Ezra Klein?

  I, I love that description of, of the moral panic. You talk in your book about thick descriptions and thin descriptions. And one of the things that feels to me like part of the moral conflict, or the reason it feels so panic inducing, is we are having like, the thickest conversation possible in the thinnest mediums possible.

• 30:21Speaker 01

  Bingo. I totally agree. So, thick description is ultimately about asking as many questions of yourself as you're asking of other people. So, a thin way of sort of like engaging with the world is to assume that everybody has already made the decisions that you've made prior to the discussion. And all of your questions are going to be reserved for the object that you're talking about, right? The people you're talking about, the idea you're talking about. I think that's one way to think about it. We also think about thick description as being like, really evocative, and that's true too. Like, using language to really try to capture people's experience of things, that's also true. Whereas thin description usually tries to flatten differences between

• 31:03Speaker 01

  experiences, because it wants to tell you about sort of a universal experience, right? That I can make you understand your connection to something by pointing out what's universal in it. We think that we're gonna lose people when we start talking about the differences, by the way. And I'm not sure that's true, but, and I try to show in my work that that's not true. That you can absolutely seduce people into having a thick nuanced conversation. It's just gonna take work on your part, right? I think you have to be dead on with craft. I think you have to be brutal about your empirics being accurate. I think you have to consecrate your own belief in yourself as being the universal storyteller. But I think if you do all of that...

• 31:47Speaker 01

  People will follow you into a thick, uncomfortable conversation that they did not know they needed to have. But the mediums you talk about, like, who's gonna do that? The economics of that are horrible, and I know that, I get it. But I think what we're seeing is an unspoken desire for exactly that kind of work. But a media ecosystem and an attention economy that just cannot allow that to happen. That takes a lot of human beings, a lot of human power. Takes a lot of willingness to embrace risk because you're gonna mess it up. You're gonna fail and you're gonna piss somebody, right? You, this is just gonna happen. There's a lot of risk involved.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  And initially, it's not profitable. But that is one of our struggles, I think, in like the public discourse. Where we are trying to have that kind of conversation that I think people absolutely are attracted to. Even if that attraction feels like they're angry about it, but that's still desire for the conversation. Like, I think they're attracted to it, but we've only figured out the economics for like very thin genre.

• 32:56Ezra Klein?

  I don't want to pick on Twitter and cable news here, which are two mediums that I operate in sometimes. But I will see conversations happening there. And I'll just think that is such an important conversation. And there is no way I'm engaging it in this medium. Like, I am not going to come within a thousand feet of it in this space.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  Never gonna happen.

• 33:15Ezra Klein?

  Whereas in a podcast, there are things you talk about in a podcast that are a lot trickier because it has this quality of hesitancy. I got a reader email yesterday, actually, or I guess it was a listener email. But they were emailing me to say that they listened to a show and they just thought there shouldn't be podcasts anymore. They thought podcasts are part of what are ruining America. Because it was such a loose and messy form, people just talk. I mean, they prefer columns, which is fair, and I write columns. But as I was reading, as I was thinking, it's the exact thing I like about the medium, that messiness that allows things to be thick. To take on these topics, you have to let things breathe a little bit. And so many mediums over time, particularly when they get professionalized, they trend towards this tight optimization.

• 33:57Ezra Klein?

  You ask as little of the audience as you possibly can before letting go of them. And that works for scale, but I think it's bad for understanding and very bad for your relationship with the audience.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't think we have the luxury right now of scale and efficiency. Like, we don't have a culture right now. For scale and efficiency that can be productive. That's for a culture that mostly agrees on who and what it is, is mostly functioning the way most people need it to function for a good life. We don't have that culture. And so I tell people maximizing efficiencies is for a very different political body and public discourse than the one we have. The one we have is trying to grapple with potentially massive social change and social transformation. That is a culture that needs messier, more nuanced places for public discourse.

• 34:52Speaker 01

  Trying to skip over that to get to the scale and efficiency part is how you become antagonistic to the audience. It's how you, even if, even as y'all are sort of in a dance together, I think that thin stuff that is narrowed to asking the least from the audience is actually fundamentally antagonistic to the idea of having an audience.

• 35:13Ezra Klein?

  What are those spaces for you?

• 35:15Speaker 01

  I mean, I think I'm in part like trying to build that with increasingly thinking about micro media, of which podcasting is one of those. I tend to think of audio storytelling, which is a little bit broader to me, thinking just about podcasting, because I'm thinking about the different cultural traditions for telling oral stories and that there has to be more than one way for us to capture those and share them and reproduce them. So like audio storytelling just broadly excites me a lot as a potential avenue. And I think it's all right if that never scales. I think that's actually probably preferable. I think what we are in a moment for is like a lot of micro media attempts to capture the

• 35:55Speaker 01

  parts of the discourse where people are willing to be called in to complicated conversations. That again, scale just might not be the goal. It might not even be preferable to desire scale in that arena. I'm still, you know, working out whether or not I think something like, um, I've been on Substack, I've been on Medium, I've done my own sort of, and that's just way too hard. I don't like running all the backend, but like, but basically trying to recreate that, you know, the comments section. Of web 2.0, you know, becoming a destination, conversation place for people around an idea. And I think that's what some people like are doing with the newsletter model and et cetera. So I'm, you know, interested in that. I'm not sure yet if I, what I think that space does, but I like the experiment.

• 36:40Ezra Klein?

  I think a lot now about the way we're all taught to want scale. And the way that that's often a false or counterproductive desire. Like I'm somebody who was taught to want scale and I got it. And I can't tell you I'm happier for having it. It definitely affords me opportunities and all kinds of things, but I can't tell you I'm happier for having it. And I know a lot of people who got it. And I can't tell you they're happier for having it. And it's a funny thing, like the desire people are given for a certain kind of success as measured by, by scale, where scale takes away a lot of what makes these conversations and work joyous.

• 37:21Ezra Klein?

  And yet it's the way we are taught to measure, whether we are succeeding in these conversations and, and work. And so then you see now, I think Substack and podcasts, you see a lot of people who've achieved scale, actually fleeing to things that are smaller scale.

• 37:33Speaker 01

  They're trying to actually pare it down. I was about to say, so what you have is you've got somebody with like a million followers on Twitter, who has realized it's actually horrible. And now they want to talk to, you know, 20,000 people more regularly and, you know, and more in depth. And we don't have a way to either capture the value of that. That's actually, I think, part of what a lot of the, you know, the more contentious debates are about. We don't know how to value that. I mean, we don't know whether we can say that's worth a half a million dollars or not. But I don't think that's about our inability to, like, we have the tools to capture how many eyes you have on it, how long people spend. So it's not that. I think it's what you're saying. I think we're just resistant to the idea of evaluating anything other than scale.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  Right? I think it's perfectly reasonable to imagine like a midterm future. We're having 20,000 regular people who meet and talk about an idea is valued roughly equal to a periodical that has a mailing readership of 350,000 people.

• 38:40Speaker 01

  We don't like thinking about it that way, but I think it's entirely possible.

• 39:07Ezra Klein?

  I got to read a lot of your work all at the same time to prepare for this, which is great. But something that leapt out at me was that a lot of your work revolves around this idea of status, how it's developed and what it's composed of. So how do you define what status is and how we construct it?

• 39:24Speaker 01

  That's a great question. And I think, I mean, I think I agree. You know, a challenge for me professionally is that I write so broadly and certainly the way other people experience it is broad. But in my mind, I'm always writing about one thing. And I'm always stunned that other people don't see it. It's just status. It's just status. The thing is, status looks the same everywhere you go, but it wears a different outfit. So it's always at play. It's always happening. And so when I show up and I see status, it's not that I'm the person who does race and gender or whatever. It's just that I entered a room and I looked around and I went, oh, here's what's happening here. Here's the status that's at play. And sometimes that's a little bit more gender than it is race. Sometimes it's a little bit more class than it is race, right?

• 40:09Speaker 01

  But it's always there. And the way I explain it to students and my audiences is status is the thing that is external to you that defines you as much as your identity does. So we love to talk about identity, right? We've got a whole language about identity, about self and our political identities and our racial identities and sexual identities. We don't have as rich a conversation to talk about status, which coincidentally is some of the most powerful work that status does. It becomes so taken for granted that we never even label it. All right. We'll walk into a room and everybody agrees who's

• 40:54Speaker 01

  supposed to sit at the chair at the front of the room. That's status. All right. And that it operates a little differently everywhere you are standing. But if you learn how to identify it wherever you are standing. In many ways, you become one of the most powerful people in the room because you see what's driving and shaping the decisions. But as a cultural critic, as a social investigator, you also become like super important to the people who will never be invited to that room. Right? So when I leave a room, I want to be able to tell people not just what happened, but I want to be able to give an informed opinion about why it happened, why it happened.

• 41:36Speaker 01

  And that's what understanding status does. It means that when I leave the room, I can bring some of the people who will never be invited to that room with me by being able to translate the dynamics that happen in that room. And it's a hard thing to do with like American audiences. You know, I travel before times, I was doing quite a bit more international travel. And it's so interesting, like, I can go to the UK where everybody gets this. Their language about social class is so refined that they get it. They may not have that same understanding of race and gender, but their language about class has really given them a public language of talking about status. In America, we only talk about status as race.

• 42:18Ezra Klein?

  Mm hmm.

• 42:20Speaker 01

  And so our language is very, very atrophied, you know?

• 42:23Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, we want to ignore the idea that class is status.

• 42:26Speaker 01

  That's right. Class is natural. Class is biology. Class is destiny. Class is family. We talk about it embedded in those things, you know, family politics. We talk about it about values, ideals, having the right behaviors. But we don't have any language to talk about it in this country. And that, and since it is one of our biggest status differentials in this country, it means we miss a lot of what's happening.

• 42:53Ezra Klein?

  I think a lot about places where we have language that hides what we're doing. Hides particularly the way we actually treat people. We have language that venerates them as a way of not making good on what that language would say. So, middle class, working class, essential workers, the military and veterans are huge in this. There are certain groups where we have an agreed upon political language. And if you were an alien who came to this planet in this country and listened to us, like, ah, those people they're talking about, they have the most status and they're going to be treated the best. And then you look at how policy plays out and it's the exact opposite. And, and the, the language, like, we are pretending we have a different. Like social hierarchy than we actually do.

• 43:37Speaker 01

  Which is super important to our ruling ideology, which is merit. How else do you get people to buy into the idea of merit? When their own lived experiences say to them every day that merit is not real, or certainly not as concrete as everybody says it is. Well, you get them to buy into it by saying, you just need to get into the right category. And if you get into the right category, military veterans is one, is a big one in my world, like an education policy. We make horrible education policy for veterans. They have some of the highest rates of student loan defaults. The money that they're given to go to college really translates into them going into high

• 44:18Speaker 01

  quality institutions. But you try to talk to somebody about making the GI Bill more robust. And they will have a public meeting in the middle of Capitol Hill. Everybody shows up, there's, you know, the equivalent of Bible thumping, and then they will all close the doors, and both sides of the aisle, by the way, will close the door and will agree to not do anything to protect veteran students.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  But the veterans believe that they're protected. You see, that's what matters. They believe. How else do you get somebody to sign up? For something like military service, when they're poor and working class and from places with poor economic outcomes, you do it by saying, yeah, you won't be rich. But everybody will value you, will give you status instead of money. This is one of the allures of becoming a police officer, where status can far outstrip the economic rewards of being a police officer, to take on the risk of doing the job. So like, really tightly closed status that does not have the economic power to go with it can actually become violent, frankly. But we don't have a language yet to talk about any of that.

• 45:26Speaker 01

  All we know how to do is say, this group of people deserves. Our deference and our respect, but we don't have a commensurate policy conversation to talk about how we attach actual meaningful resources to it.

• 45:40Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, there's almost nothing more destabilizing in politics than a group that the way they are talked about and the way they talk about themselves in terms of of of merit and status is not recognized by society because it creates a deep sense of unfairness, of shame, of resentment, you know, for individuals for whom it happens to. Like, I think it's, I think it collapses a person's psyche oftentimes, but for groups, particularly when it's a group that is told or actually has power, but then society isn't treating it like it does, or stops treating it like it does. Like, that becomes, as you're saying, it becomes very violent. This whole discussion has always been to me like the molten core of Trumpism. It's this class

• 46:22Ezra Klein?

  of voters and Donald Trump himself, who on some level have so much status and have had so much power. But then what begins to happen is not just a losing of power, but a losing of status, a feeling that the culture is turning on them, that they're being disrespected. Like, what what motivates Trump is disrespect, the feeling that he's not a winner, right? And and the same for what motivates many of his supporters. And I do think this is why the fights over speech and cancel culture and and all of this are so intense, because they are at some fundamental level about who has a status to decide how they are spoken

• 47:03Ezra Klein?

  about. And then who is a status to not fear what it is they're saying? And like, you can't solve that with policy. It's actually a question of social hierarchy.

• 47:12Speaker 01

  A lot of people woke up to find that the merit culture that they have been operating in has been, for a very long time, an honor culture.

• 47:27Speaker 01

  See, we were supposed to be too sophisticated for our honor culture of ritual and honor, exchanges of prestige and status and privilege, right? We were supposed to be too sophisticated for that. And so you work hard and that the status will follow economic achievement. And when that economic promise starts to collapse, but the ritual of status remains, you really just have, you have an honor-based culture where people will defend honor, will determine their honor in relation to other people. They'll build hierarchies of honor within their own little corner of the world that might be at odds with another corner. That's what we talk about, the siloing effect of culture. It's not that people don't know that people disagree with them. It's that they've built their own little honor culture over here.

• 48:12Speaker 01

  And if there's no economic incentives to leave it, why would you? If you can be the king of, what's the guy with the thing on his head? The horns on January 6th.

• 48:21Ezra Klein?

  Oh, the, yeah, the, the QAnon shaman.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  Thank you, but if you're gonna walk around with horns on your head, you know, I get to mock. But yeah, so like, that's an honor culture he brought of a subculture that had a set of rules where that actually wasn't absurd. But if you divorce then some of the economic incentives for people to participate in that, all you're left with is the guy with the horns on his head.

• 48:44Ezra Klein?

  You did this research project about white deaths of despair. It feels real relevant to this conversation.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  Very much so.

• 48:51Ezra Klein?

  Do you want to talk about it a bit?

• 48:52Speaker 01

  Yes, so our argument, my colleagues, Arjman, Siddiqui, Sandy Darity, and I did, so we were responding to the documented demographic data points about change in white Americans mortality. One of the arguments had been that that was due to several things. The opioid crisis, growing economic insecurity, job polarization, and access to healthcare. Well, one of the things that we actually find in arguing the data is that you see those deaths even in places where those indicators do not exist, where they have not experienced job losses, where they do enjoy access to healthcare and a certain amount of economic security.

• 49:36Speaker 01

  And our argument is that white people's deaths of despair, as it has been called, is not as much about real losses in their status. It's about perceived loss.

• 49:47Speaker 01

  In their status, right? The perception of loss was enough to undermine positive health outcomes and health-seeking behaviors. That, that point you were making is that people feel like they have lost status, whether they've lost it or not. Well, that's not about actual loss, that is about perceived loss. And that we so underappreciate how much perception matters to how, how much we'll even accept facts, right? Most people will just accept the facts that match what they already believe, you know? Confirmation bias and et cetera. We're seeing this in like vaccine rollouts, right?

• 50:26Speaker 01

  Where people's political identity shapes what information they will accept about scientific evidence. Well, that happens like in every facet of life. And so perception is just as important as any universal belief system in what's true and what's untrue. And that that perceived loss is enough for people to not seek out healthcare or to engage in dangerous health behaviors. How else do you explain people arrested on January 6th who perceived loss of status? And they engaged, and if you think about self-selecting into a conflict with armed

• 51:09Speaker 01

  police as a dangerous health behavior, that's the one way to think about it, you could quite literally get hurt, right? They elected to go into this risky behavior that could end in loss of life, and for several people did. That's a risky health behavior. And that's about perceived status. And that we haven't thought concretely enough about how dangerous privileged people will become if they just perceive that they have less privilege, not actual loss of privilege, but they perceive they have less privilege.

• 51:41Ezra Klein?

  I wonder if one way of thinking too about this actual versus perceived is to think about base rates versus rates of change.

• 51:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:49Ezra Klein?

  You get this in economics all the time where people, part of their politics are much more driven by how their economic situation is changing than what it actually is. You know, if the, the, the fact that you're richer than you were 10 years ago doesn't matter in terms of a recession. You know, if things are getting worse right now, you get really upset. And I think there's something in this for white voters, for more conservative Christian voters, more traditionalist Christian voters, where

• 52:14Ezra Klein?

  Still on top, like no doubt about it. But in terms of groups raising and lowering their power in society, in terms of like rates of change in status, the rate of change is bad. White people feel that they are not as protected as they were, not as powerful. Christian folks feel they don't have the hammerlock on politics they did, you know, particularly white Christians once upon a time. And that people are very sensitive, not just to rates of economic change, which we know in the literature forever, but they're very sensitive, much more so than we give them credit for, to rates of status change.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  Yes, actually, I think that's a great way to think about it. It's actually like, you know, when we talk about socio-economic status, the addition of the socio to the economic status is something that was being said, and like, I think about old sociological literature, 60s and 70s, where we had something we call like, we do these massive, you know, class structure and stratification tables that said that people's understanding of their economic position was conditioned on their social position, basically. We got away from that understanding when we thought that there was more equal opportunity access to economic positioning. So it's, well, yeah, that makes sense when you got like, you know, a lock on something like male privilege in the workplace, but once women entered the workplace, you know,

• 53:34Speaker 01

  we expected those things to level off. So it isn't that those things stopped being true. We did, however, stop studying them that way. There became a real preference for saying that your economic position was so wedded to your social position because we were more egalitarian. And, you know, macroeconomists, especially the more critical ones, will now say that what you're really seeing is with the polarization and the pulling apart of the economic structure, a reemergence of the importance of how social position conditions your understanding of your economic position. But like, if you look at women, however, women workers, for example, non-white workers, that's always been true.

• 54:16Speaker 01

  It's always been the case that like, we understand the fine-grained differences in our relative economic status based on who we are and our lack of social status. It is just more true now, however, yeah, for white workers, especially white males.

• 54:33Ezra Klein?

  I always think that the political conversation here is driven basically mad by something that's all over your work, which is that status is not stable. And there's no agreement as to who is where. And that's partially because who is where changes. But you know, there's a real different status hierarchy in elected politics and how power courts are to where it is in culture, to where it is in religion, to where it is in a bunch of other parts of our society. One of the things I noticed in your work is that you are incredibly sensitive to using the way status changes for you, moving in and out of different rooms as an example to showing it for others.

• 55:16Ezra Klein?

  Like you really do use yourself as like, look what happened to me here and look where I was here and look where I was here. Could you talk a bit about that? Cause we keep using status as a singular, but, but it's not. It's a, it's a shifting plural.

• 55:28Speaker 01

  Yes, it is. It is a, it's highly contextual, which is why we don't like trying to measure it frankly. And it is experienced subjectively, but has objective consequences and measurable effects. That's why it's a really messy thing to try to understand. But as we start our conversation with the mess is where the good, important stuff is happening. And then we also are living in a time where this is the technology piece. Almost all of the dominant technological changes that have reshaped our world over the last 30 years have only made status more contextual. So it's added a layer of how important context is to status.

• 56:10Speaker 01

  Audiences can be collapsed and expanded so quickly and they can shift so rapidly. And there are new forms of status emerging all the time, driven by like digital platforms and digital technologies and just digital ideas, the idea of technology. And so at the very time that status has become more destabilized and contextual and transient, they're also. Ever new and emerging forms of status, right? One of the examples I like to give is you can be a celebrity, or we call a micro-celebrity, in some digital space. And that translates to absolutely no form of capital anywhere else. Like, I love these stories, they do them every few years where they go, oh, what happened to somebody

• 56:54Speaker 01

  who was in that massive meme, you know? And they'll go find them and like, they're working in fast food. Or they're doing, you know, they were doing what they were doing before, usually worse off because the celebrity impacted their ability to work and get a regular job. And so like, status has become decoupled in so many micro ways from economic relations. And I use myself as an example because people are so resistant to thinking about themselves as being vulnerable. If I invite the reader to think about how much status they lose when they go from one room to another, very few people are like ambitious enough and courageous enough to do that. Like, it's a level of vulnerability to ask from the reader to go,

• 57:36Speaker 01

  you know how, you know, you feel like such a girl boss when you go do X, right? But you know what happens when you leave that room and you go to this other room, right? And it doesn't feel good to people. But if they can project it onto me and experience it through the way I've learned to see myself as sort of like a meta-narrative as I move through the world, I think it shows them a model for when they're ready, a model for how to think about it in their own lives. I think of some of my work, especially like in Thick and some of the essay work, as just trying to model for people that you can understand that this thing is happening to you and it not change who you are. I'm still who I am, I still have what I have.

• 58:21Speaker 01

  But I know there are rooms that I enter where my status evaporates the second I walk in, you can almost feel it. Sometime, you know, you become so attuned to it, I can feel when a room changes. And we know that feeling, if you've ever been someplace when a celebrity walks in the room and the air gets that crickle-crackle feeling in it, right? We know it, we just don't think of it as being something that happens with us and to us. And so I use myself as an example to try to give people a way to develop a model of thinking about the world, that you don't have to be afraid of acknowledging that because status exists.

• 58:59Speaker 01

  And it makes you vulnerable. Acknowledging it doesn't change your vulnerability. You're vulnerable whether you develop a language to think about it or not. And that, that thing you talked about earlier, that psychological fissure that can happen when the world doesn't recognize your status the way you think they should. Developing a language is the most powerful thing we can do to protect ourselves from that kind of psychological trauma. That I may not be able to control how the world will see a really smart black girl as she walks around in the world, but I can have a language for describing it. And I can know at the end of the day that if I can label it and if I can talk about it, it hasn't completely broken me.

• 59:43Speaker 01

  And that more of us need that language, more of us need it.

• 1:00:11Ezra Klein?

  We've talked about some of the tributaries of status here of money, education, race, gender, politics. One of the really challenging essays from Thicke, one that I still think about having read it now, I guess, a couple of years ago, is In the Name of Beauty. And attractiveness is like a huge generator of life outcomes of status. And you write in that, that beauty isn't actually what you look like. Beauty is the preferences that reproduce the existing social order. People talk about lookism. Is attractiveness a generator of status? Or is it the reflection of it?

• 1:00:49Speaker 01

  Both.

• 1:00:51Speaker 01

  You know, I just did this, you know, a really fun project, fun for me project about Dolly Parton. And I read a book, She Come By It Natural by Sarah Smarsh. And what Sarah's doing is she's talking about her, she comes from a white, working-class rural family, woman-dominated family, a very matriarchal family, and I could relate, I come from a very matriarchal family. And she talks about the women in her life, in her family's lives, about how important it was for them to be attractive as working-class women, white women. And she said, "It wasn't attractive the way attractive matters to my now-upper-middle-class white peers." You know, her life has changed. But she said, "Being attractive meant a level of security

• 1:01:35Speaker 01

  and very marginal economic mobility for white, working-class women." She was like, "For us staying thin, or staying attractive, or staying pretty, was about just like being able to get some favor at a really brutal job. Like, if I'm a waitress, then it means I get a slightly better shift because the manager thinks I'm cute, basically. Or it opens up an avenue to marry and get the hell out of the Blue Ridge Mountains, right? Like, that marginal amount of very-conditioned and complicated status, that beauty and attractiveness was generating then, in that space, status. But it also, the idea of what is beautiful, about what is attractive,

• 1:02:15Speaker 01

  is a reflection of our collective political values and is about reproducing the underlying economic relations embedded in them. And the way you know that is true is because if beauty were some objective idea, the same thing would have been beautiful in 1880, that was beautiful in 1980, that will be beautiful in 2080. In fact, what you see when you study ideas, popular ideas, about what constitutes attractiveness and desire and beauty, is that they have changed to match whatever is the economically-valued group of people.

• 1:02:55Speaker 01

  In the world. And so like, yeah, there's some underlying, you know, you know, sometimes evolutionary psychologists like to point to work about how there's a universal equation for beauty, like there's a ratio, the beauty, I think ratio is what they call it, that we all value eyes that are set to pointing at something, you know, some weird math. And I go, or there was a global system of capital by the 1500s that had developed an idea the world over that was predicated on an equation of beauty that was exported. And when I do that, they always get very, ah, with me. But I also complicate the evolutionary psychology people because I think they are wild. That's just a wild group of people.

• 1:03:35Speaker 01

  But looking for stable ideas across thousands of years is wild to me. But yeah, we don't think about, we'd like to think that beauty is just like the merit myth, so that we'd like to think of beauty as being objective at the same time that we want it to be achievable. Right? So this is the tension in every idea about merit that is both supposed to be inherited and achievable. And things cannot be both. If you inherit beauty, but you can also achieve beauty, then inherited beauty won't matter as much. Right? And so, and that's the tension that we have and what the ideas about what we'll say is beautiful becomes a tool for

• 1:04:16Speaker 01

  consolidating status and opportunity and privilege for people who have inherited a social position. You know, one of my favorite ways to get people really upset is to talk about how much we valorize blondness in our culture. Right? So here you have a biological blip, a set of recessive traits that has been elevated to almost a political ideology that we never, ever, ever critique as political or economic base. But turn on the evening news tonight. Turn on Fox News, right? And you tell me what the visual comportment of

• 1:05:00Speaker 01

  power looks like.

• 1:05:03Ezra Klein?

  I think all the time, just all the time about how Hitler ran this genocidal campaign in service of an aesthetic ideal that he didn't represent.

• 1:05:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:23Ezra Klein?

  Like the mind crumbles.

• 1:05:27Ezra Klein?

  Not that it's funny, obviously, but it's just one of these things. Sometimes like I sit there with that and it's just, it is the strangest thing in the, like, I understand on some level, going nuts in service of something that, that obviously accrues to your own power. But the whole thing he was fighting for, like, he would have been on the outside. It's just, it drives people mad.

• 1:05:50Speaker 01

  It really, really does. It does.

• 1:05:53Ezra Klein?

  I don't know if you come across this, I come across it a lot. There's a whataboutism around beauty and attractiveness. It will come from people who say, oh, well, you care about discrimination or inequality or inequity that comes from, you know, race or gender, education or something else. But, you know, look at the research on, on attractiveness and you don't seem to care about that. And it's always when people don't care about any of them who are saying this.

• 1:06:15Speaker 01

  Anything else, uh huh.

• 1:06:16Ezra Klein?

  But it actually is, but I do think that it's a critique worth taking seriously in the sense that there is something real to it, that it really, we really do treat people differently in society based on height, based on, on looks. And we don't have a very good critical discourse around that, in, in part because I think it implicates us too much. Right? It's very hard to talk about something that you're part of, that you can't change, you know, or don't want to change, like what you're attracted to, or don't want to think too hard about where it came from. It feels like a pretty expansive vista for complication. Not that obviously a lot of scholars haven't been doing this for a long time, just that in the public conversation, it's a little, it's a little thinner.

• 1:06:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's the one that goes at the heart of, we, listen, you don't own a lot in a leasing society, right? So here's a society where we just, we're running out of stuff. We don't get much, okay? You know, many of us are going to be renters forever, you know? So the idea of the things that are naturally occurring, that emerge from our true selves, I think we have always put value in that, but I think we especially put value in that now. The idea, so that this is the, the, the part where people will feel implicated, I think, in critiquing beauty privilege or whatever, attractiveness privilege, is what they think we're saying is who you're attracted to is a social construction and a political problem. And well, here's the truth, that is exactly what I'm saying.

• 1:07:40Speaker 01

  I am saying that there is, that that is not nearly as natural as you think it is. And that one of the most basic ways that we are all implicated in the status hierarchy is in naturalizing those differences and saying that they are naturally occurring. And then that gets really, really, really fuzzy when I think it pushes people on thinking about something like gender and desire. I think that there's a lot of resistance coming from that side, but I also just think there's just sort of routine uncritical resistance to the idea that you're going to try to police

• 1:08:20Speaker 01

  what I find attractive and you're going to tell me that even that is a political problem. And yeah, it kind of is.

• 1:08:28Ezra Klein?

  I think it's hard in a lot of, in a lot of these conversations to hold the idea that what we believe, think, do intuitive reactions we have do reflect political problems, but they are not sins.

• 1:08:43Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, the morality. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:08:46Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, people have a lot of difficulty, even I have a lot of difficulty with the idea that there can be things about me that don't fit my politics. That can be an interesting fact and worth interrogating without it being something that I have to like loathe myself for.

• 1:09:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. One thing I didn't get from my family was I, we are what I call culturally Baptist. You know, we show up on Easter and Christmas and we do some of the things, but we were not like devout churchgoers, which actually made us quite different in the places that we're from, where the church is the center of the social and economic life of black communities, right? Like, we kind of participated, but like, we didn't bring a lot of that home. And I think because of that, I just did, I never had some of the moral baggage. I mean, I have some that just comes from, I think, living in a secularly religious society, but like, I never internalized that because I am a part of a thing that's bad, I am bad.

• 1:09:46Speaker 01

  And I actually will forget sometimes that other people aren't like me in that regard. And yeah, and they'll start spinning out and I'll go, what's wrong with you? And somebody will say, Tressie, you basically just went at the core of their entire belief system. And I was like, well, all I said was you like blondes and that's a little eugenicist. I mean, I don't know why you're now crying.

• 1:10:08Speaker 01

  And apparently, because I don't have that impulse, I forget to be empathetic with others. So thank you for reminding me. Yes, it does, I think, make people feel really bad.

• 1:10:18Ezra Klein?

  But also, just, I don't know, I don't want to get prescriptive here and then, you know, come into the end of this, but when we were talking earlier about mediums for thicker conversations, and how do you have them? And how do you have this, like, you know, what you described is like a unified moral panic about our categorization systems, without it feeling like a panic and without it feeling like a war of all against all. Like, I feel like there's something here that's really important and in the way you approach it that makes a lot of sense for why you're good at talking about these things, because somehow, like, it has to be okay that we are going to fall on the wrong side of even our categories. And I don't know that

• 1:11:01Ezra Klein?

  we can do that in these spaces that are so tuned for shame, that are tuning us for shame. Like, you somehow have to, like, it has to be safer than it is to have somebody's conversation, because if it isn't safe, you can't admit any of it.

• 1:11:14Speaker 01

  I actually really counter into a position on shame that, which is that it can serve a social function when it is divorced from some of the other social functions. So like, one of the problems right now is that social shame, which I think in and of itself is enough usually to discipline most people, is now tied to economic and political and like cultural capital in sort of a way. And people feel that in a really gut level, and I think they're right to feel it, when really, shame is important to kind of like get people to adhere, especially to new norms, and we got to have that. And so I'm always like, you don't want to take shame off the table. What we probably do need to have happen is we need to divorce it from our

• 1:12:00Speaker 01

  Micro celebrity driven culture.

• 1:12:03Ezra Klein?

  That is such a good point.

• 1:12:05Speaker 01

  Where your, your systems are the people, right? Like people become avatars for a whole system of thought. And I'm just like, well, you know, that's, that's almost never going to work. And I, and the celebrityization of some of these things that are always supposed to be like really contentious sort of trade offs, right? Well, celebrity is not set up for trade offs. Most of what we do for work is not set up for trade offs, but our status is set up for that. And so that's probably where we should confine those conversations to. Like, I think it's perfectly fine to say when somebody is on the wrong side of one of our political values to say, I don't mess with them when they talking about minimum wage, right? They've been wrong on it.

• 1:12:50Speaker 01

  When they get started on minimum wage, I tune out. And for that to be the takeaway, tune out on so and so when they do minimum wage, because they don't know what they're talking about and they're on the wrong side of history on this one. But to say, but that person tends to be in the pocket on X and will listen to them on X. That would be to me like contextual and status based. Like, okay, let's not give them status on this idea, but give them some status on that idea. But micro celebrity and micro, the micro economics of writing into public life right now really privilege everybody being a generalist and a universalist who performs being an audiologue. And you just can't do all of that. You can't do it all.

• 1:13:31Ezra Klein?

  Ooh, let me try that. Let me try to make this comparison. So this feels technological, at least in part. We, we were talking earlier about your work on how status doesn't follow you room to room, how you change room to room. But one of the problems online to what you were just saying about how many things shame attaches to is our, at least our, our, our root identity, our name online is cohesive. And the things that attach to it, which are not everything, it's a very flattened identity. Only a certain number of things attach to it. But the things that attach to it, follow it into every room, follow it into every Google search, follow it into like what anybody would know about that online identity. And it's very then hard to, to change it. You can't get out of the room. And we don't really know what to do with that well.

• 1:14:16Ezra Klein?

  And it's funny because we were talking earlier, I think it almost maybe sounded negative that that things in our lives are contextual. But in many ways, I think the problem with our online identities, which now, as you're saying, are our economic identities, our cultural identities, et cetera, is they are non-contextual, like they are decontextualized.

• 1:14:34Speaker 01

  Yep. That efficiency and maximization piece again. The thing is, technologies can only maximize and increase efficiencies. And a system of unequal distribution is just going to make unequal distribution more efficient. And it's just going to maximize it. And in the case of our very identities, that's what it does most effectively. It flattens differences and distinctions and elevates the place where you have cobbled together the most consensus, even if that consensus is itself negative and decontextualized. But it will drive efficiencies of driving up consensus, even if the consensus is negative.

• 1:15:17Speaker 01

  And that there might be some value, yeah, in there being contextual spaces where in this space, I am an expert. In this space, I'm just a member of the audience, right? And in this space, I'm a membership of a group who has a group position and we're trying to move forward a group agenda. And that we cannot do that when we attach our work to our identity. So what we may have here is just like a fundamental critique of, should we be our work? And I always tell people, if you judge me about Twitter, that's on you because I write all the time. And I have made as much of it free as I possibly can. So I'm like, you can judge me on what I write. But I've never told you to pay attention to me in these other contexts.

• 1:16:01Speaker 01

  And that is my, one of my ways of trying to navigate that. If I write and I articulate a reasoned, more thoughtful position on something and I make it freely available, then I always feel like I've got plausible deniability on the fallibility of being a digital person, an internet person, right? That's me trying to build a buffer. It's harder to do when you don't control where you write. And you can't control the circulation of your ideas, but yeah, that's what I think I'm trying to get around. The technology is never going to give us that affordance. We're going to have to come up with social norms about it. The technology just can't differentiate. The economics aren't there. The political structure regulation isn't there to make it differentiate. So what

• 1:16:46Speaker 01

  we really would be asking for is something like where we own all of our data and we could change access to different parts of the data we produce in different ways. We just don't have that environment. So that means social norms are going to have to do it. My challenge is this. I want those social norms to bubble up from the actual vulnerable people and not to be imposed top down from the people who only perceive that they are vulnerable.

• 1:17:14Ezra Klein?

  I think that's, I think that's the good challenge right there. You wanted to do some book recommendations?

• 1:17:19Speaker 01

  Oh, yes, yes.

• 1:17:20Ezra Klein?

  All right. What's your, what's a work of cultural criticism you'd recommend?

• 1:17:23Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. And it's, it's not only one of the more, more recent things I've read, but it is one of the better things I've read. And so I got lucky in that regard. And that is Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong. I think everybody who says that they are an essayist and a popular culture critic right now needs to be chasing this book.

• 1:17:46Ezra Klein?

  What's the best book by a contemporary sociologist who isn't you?

• 1:17:50Speaker 01

  I am actually going to recommend something that in my dream scenario, these things would come together in a pack when you went to the store. Like if you bought one, you'd get the other. And that is Sabrina Strings is a sociologist and she has a book called Fearing the Black Body. Fearing the Black Body that actually gets at some of what we were talking about. The construction of beauty, how we have defined beauty to be antithetical to whatever our racialized assumptions were of difference at any point in time in history. And that if that's the line you take, then beauty has been stable. The construction of beauty has been whatever was not the racialized moral panic of the time. And so it's a really great book.

• 1:18:32Ezra Klein?

  We managed to have so many interesting conversations here. I didn't expect, I never got to all of my education questions for you, but because you've done so much education work, what's a book you'd recommend on, on thinking about education?

• 1:18:44Speaker 01

  Well, when I think about education, I am most often thinking about higher ed. So this is going to be the higher ed book. I think it's just the GOAT. I think you gotta do the GOAT book. And like, this was one of those, you were talking about the difference between census reading and reading around. This is a census book. So that's why I say, these things still matter to do. It's just, I want people to do both. But you gotta read Jerome Carable's The Chosen, so the history of selective admissions in elite higher education. I, as a person, do not care about Ivy League institutions. I tell people this all the time, and I think they think I'm doing that to angle for a job at one, and I promise you, I'm not. But we are always, always in a long historical conversation in higher ed circles in this

• 1:19:27Speaker 01

  country with the foundations of how selective admissions were designed. And until we fully understand that, you can't grapple with something like student loan debt, or why people keep showing up for paying $100,000 for a master's degree that has a symbol on it, right? Like, we got it, we gotta get that, again, status.

• 1:19:47Ezra Klein?

  And then finally, always our last one. What's your favorite children's book?

• 1:19:50Speaker 01

  My sentimental favorite will always be Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred Taylor. I often call this book, it was baby's first novel. It was a longer book, right? It wasn't a children's reader, so I felt very grown up when I read this book. Didn't have any pictures in it. I was so impressed with myself. And it is the kind of story, I mean, I saw myself in that story in the first, in the way that was really new for me at that age and at that time. And the book holds up. I read it, reread it again within the last like, year and a half or so, and it really holds up.

• 1:20:21Ezra Klein?

  Did it really? I remember reading that as a kid, and actually, it was almost too adult for me.

• 1:20:25Speaker 01

  Well, that's why I liked it, to be fair, and probably why I now think it holds up, because now I'm the adult, right? I thought it nailed the emotions of a certain point in history without being too heavy-handed. But it was adult, in a way that like, all kids don't get to be kids. That's kind of the moral of that story. So when we're talking about a moment when like the adultification of young men of color, young women of color, making them more vulnerable to police violence and et cetera. Like one of the, my adult takeaways from the book is that not all kids get to be kids in the same way. And that's probably why I liked it as a kid.

• 1:21:00Ezra Klein?

  Trusty McMillan Cotton, thank you so much. What a pleasure.

• 1:21:03Speaker 01

  It really was a really good time for a thing that did not involve cocktails or dinner. This was a lot of fun. Thanks Ezra.

• 1:21:10Ezra Klein?

  Well, next time we can do it with cocktails.

• 1:21:11Speaker 01

  I'm holding you to it.

• 1:21:15Ezra Klein?

  That is a show. We'll see if I keep doing this, but, but I thought it might be fun to offer occasional recommendations of my own here at the end. And here's mine for today. I just watched My Octopus Teacher on Netflix, which is in there, you know, nominated for Oscars documentaries category, but it's all about a guy's friendship with an octopus. And it is wonderful. I think I need to do a show about octopi at some point. I've been reading some books on them. And then after watching this, like it's, it's really strange how much we just have a wonderful alien style intelligence on this planet and how little attention we actually pay to that fact. But, but if you want to just, I don't exactly want to say trip out here, but, but if you, if you really want to enter a different world for a while, My Octopus Teacher, it's, it's terrific.

• 1:21:59Ezra Klein?

  If you want to help the show, you can leave us a review wherever you are listening or you can email this episode or text it, or however you kids share your episodes to a friend if you think they'd enjoy it or a family member. It's a great way for the show to grow and we always really appreciate it when you do it. The Ezra Clancy Show is a production of New York Times Opinion. It is produced by Raja Karma and Jeff Geld. Fact checked by Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones and mixing by Jeff Geld.