Process
Status Items Highlights Done See section below Claims None Questions None Output None
Highlights
Time 0:10:29
Economic Sentiment vs. Indicators
- Traditional economic indicators like GDP growth and low unemployment suggested things were good at the end of 2023.
- Despite this, economic sentiment was poor because people were working more to earn more.
- Industries supporting invisible labor cost more and became less accessible.
- This led to increased friction in daily lives, with customer service worsening as an example.
- Calling the situation ‘inflation’ simplifies a broader set of factors creating economic precarity.
- Language shapes people’s understanding, making the prevailing story crucial. Transcript: Katie Gatti-Tossan For those who maybe have like repressed this period of media discourse, this was the period when all the economic indicators that the powers that be will typically look to to say. Things are good, right? GDP growth, low unemployment. Oh, there’s real wage growth at the bottom. Inflation is back down. It’s under control. Things are good. And yet economic sentiment is so poor. You write this op-ed that essentially says, yes, people are earning more. They are also working more. And the industries that largely support all of the invisible labor that makes life possible, A, cost more now, and B, are harder and more inconvenient to access. And so you’re kind of pointing to these maybe like softer indicators, like customer service being worse, for example, and that essentially all this culminates to make the friction In people’s daily lives harder. And I read that the other day, again, from the 2025 vantage point where I’m going, okay, the economy is now like infinitely more precarious than it was even just two years ago. Posted after the election about the power of language and how people really only have the language that you give them to describe what’s happening. And so if you keep saying it’s inflation, then people are going to say, well, inflation is why my life is hard. That’s right. Inflation becomes the name for this broader set of factors that create this economic precarity, and that that story is very important.
New highlights added 2025-10-23 at 1:08 PM
Time 0:13:51
Folk Economics
- People need to understand how their lives work, but in America, the language of class is missing.
- Instead, nonsense statements about fiscal responsibility fill the void.
- This creates a system of fairy tales where regular Americans don’t understand how the economy truly works.
- Those who understand the economy benefit when the public is ignorant.
- Politicians convince people that the government should work like a household budget.
- This allows them to criticize spending on social welfare. Transcript: Tressie McMillan Cottom And I think that what happens there is that over time, people need to understand why their lives work the way their lives work. But in America, we don’t talk about class. And so there’s this whole language we don’t have to help us understand our world. What we have filled in with all of these nonsense statements about fiscal responsibility and a deficit being morally wrong or that, yeah, China needs to be paying as much as we do. Like, none of that is how geopolitics works. But our folk economics, our need to understand our world, we come up with this system of fairy tales. So, like, on the one hand, it’s not to say that the American people don’t understand how the economy works. It’s to say that the people who do understand how the economy works benefit when the regular American doesn’t understand it. There’s a political benefit to having them think it works like a checkbook. Then you can convince them that Democrats spend money recklessly because we run a deficit taking care of social welfare.
Time 0:43:37
Pitfalls of Top-Down Hope
- Avoid pinning all your hopes on one leader like AOC to change everything.
- The American two-party system trains people to think that getting ‘your person’ into executive leadership is all that matters.
- This thinking is antithetical to collective action.
- You need leaders, but don’t assume that the person in the top role is the only solution. Transcript: Katie Gatti-Tossan There’s even like a meta narrative there of I check myself pinning all my hopes on AOC and be like, oh, you’re doing it again, though. You’re doing the thing where it’s like a top down. There’s going to be the one person who changes it and fixes it. And I think even that is pretty antithetical to the idea of collective action because you do need leaders. But I think that the two-party system in America has really trained us
Time 0:49:31
Beauty Standards as Politics
- Beauty is often considered a safe, apolitical space, but it’s deeply influenced by societal biases like racism, sexism, classism, and ableism, as Tressie McMillan Cottom notes.
- Even those with radical leftist views may unconsciously perpetuate these biases in their preferences and intimate lives.
- Data from dating websites reveal the hypocrisy, showing that many people with social justice signifiers still prefer certain beauty standards.
- What we find beautiful is shaped by our exposure, including residential and school segregation.
- Intimate lives and relationships with our bodies are political and should be understood as such. Transcript: Tressie McMillan Cottom And that’s hard for people to accept because the last safe place for us to be ruthlessly racist, sexist, classes, and ableist is when it comes to bodies. You can get the most dyed-in radical leftist you’ve ever met, And they want to blow up everything, okay? They’re going to throw a Molotov cocktail into Wall Street. They were at Occupy. They broke down the statue of the Black Lives Matter protest. And everybody they’ve ever dated has been blonde. And they will look you dead in your face. Another subtweet to the Bernie Bros. I’m sorry. Will look you dead in your face and tell you that those two political realities have nothing to do with each other. Some of my favorite research is from the data sets from dating websites because it so brilliantly punctures exactly this hypocrisy of that, you know, all of these people have all these Signifiers for social justice in their bios, and then you’ll get beneath it on the data. Yeah, but they only respond to 19-year blonde white girls who weigh less than 128 pounds. Those are your politics, too. That’s all I want people to understand. Those are also your politics. That’s not to say that you should be sexually attracted to everybody, but also that what you’re sexually attracted to is not just natural. There’s tons of research about the fact that really what we find beautiful is an average of the things we’ve been exposed to. Residential segregation, the school segregation that puts you in classrooms with people who look just like you, has shaped what you think is a natural desire that
Time 0:54:25
Accommodation vs. True Power
- Tressie McMillan Cottom argues that the lack of a clear language for class hinders discussions about race and gender.
- She defines true power as the ability to define the terms and wield control, not merely accommodating existing structures.
- Accommodation, whether in beauty standards or other forms of performance, is not feminist or anti-racist because it doesn’t allow for true control.
- Americans often channel their political aspirations into consumption, leading to accommodationist behaviors.
- Katie Gatti-Tossan highlights the idea that women are often allowed to use beauty as power, but never truly own it.
- This power remains in the hands of corporations and those who control the definition of beauty. Transcript: Tressie McMillan Cottom Yeah, just don’t call your crop top feminist activism. I mean, some of this is about when I was talking earlier about how Americans don’t have a language for class. And while I certainly am a materialist, I believe material conditions matter, but I’m also a Black woman. I think race matters and is a material condition. I don’t want to like separate out these two things. One of the reasons we don’t talk about race any better than we do is because we don’t have a language about class. And the reason why we can’t talk about gender any better is because we don’t have a language about class. Right. Because what’s beneath that is that the only thing that is ultimately powerful is the power to will the power, the power to wield it, to define the terms of something. Anything that you are doing as an accommodation, by definition, means you can’t control it. You can’t confer it. You cannot wield it. That actually can’t be feminist. It cannot be anti-racist. And I love my folks, but there’s a Black empowerment version of this about, you know, embodying sort of natural beauty as some sort of type of performance of power. All of that is an accommodation. All of it is accommodationist. And the reason why I think we fall into that uniquely as Americans is because we have channeled all of our political aspirations into consumption. Katie Gatti-Tossan The phrase I originally wrote down was beauty is the only power that women are allowed to use but never own. Tressie McMillan Cottom That’s it. Katie Gatti-Tossan And that ownership, I think, is the. That’s it. The key. Power to wield the power. Accommodating power. That’s it. Tressie McMillan Cottom It’s still owned
Time 0:57:57
Lizzo and Power Dynamics
- Lizzo became a target because her success challenged the traditional power dynamic where white men control women’s value.
- Her visibility as a successful, fat, Black woman was seen as evidence that men’s power to determine women’s worth was weakening.
- Tressie argues that the attacks on Lizzo were not about her personally but about preserving this power structure.
- Black women are often the targets of such hate because they lack structural and institutional protection. Transcript: Tressie McMillan Cottom Yeah. If a fat Black woman didn’t pay a penalty for being fat and Black in public, that meant that white men had lost some of their power to control women. That’s all that was about. That’s what Lizzo represented. And I don’t even know if that poor girl knows that. I’d love to tell her if she doesn’t. Had nothing to do with her. It had to do with the fact that she was evidence that there was some softening around men’s power to determine the value of women. And as a Black woman, that meant she had absolutely no protection. And so she was a very convenient target for it, as is often the case, right? Black women get most
Time 0:57:57
Lizzo and Skinny Talk
- Lizzo became a target because she represented a softening of men’s power to determine the value of women.
- As a Black woman, she lacked structural and institutional protection, making her a convenient target.
- ‘Skinny talk’ shows women reverting to accommodating men’s desires due to the perceived weakness of liberal feminism and economic aspirations.
- Beauty standards change to accommodate the political economy’s needs. Transcript: Tressie McMillan Cottom Yeah. If a fat Black woman didn’t pay a penalty for being fat and Black in public, that meant that white men had lost some of their power to control women. That’s all that was about. That’s what Lizzo represented. And I don’t even know if that poor girl knows that. I’d love to tell her if she doesn’t. Had nothing to do with her. It had to do with the fact that she was evidence that there was some softening around men’s power to determine the value of women. And as a Black woman, that meant she had absolutely no protection. And so she was a very convenient target for it, as is often the case, right? Black women get most of that hate because there’s nobody to protect us structurally and institutionally. But that was the beginning. And I would say it starts with Lizzo and ends with skinny talk. Skinny talk is women saying, we pretended for a while to accept these accommodations. But now that liberal feminism is showing its weakness, there is no space for my economic aspirations. I’m going back to accommodating men’s desire and projection of desirability onto me. One of the things I talked about in this essay I wrote ages ago about beauty is that what can be considered beautiful at any point in time in history can change. And it changes to accommodate what the political economy needs. In the 1930s, wide hips and a small waist on a woman was considered desirable, not because we were more feminist or pro-women, but because it was harder to get nutritious food, and it Was just evidence of status to have wider hips. You get a more athletic build in thinner, skinnier women when the
Time 1:02:05
Diversity as Social Capital
- Diversity and inclusion were largely discursive, existing mainly on platforms like Twitter.
- There was never a fundamental shift in representation in positions of power like Fortune 500 companies or elected offices.
- Embracing diversity, especially during the Obama era, primarily yielded social and cultural capital.
- This ‘social capital’ did not translate into economic benefits or material change for diverse individuals or bodies. Transcript: Tressie McMillan Cottom You go. It was discursive. This is what happens when we push all of our diversity and all the difference into just the discursive space. This was Twitter, honey. This was never real. This was never real. I mean, I can’t say this enough. There was never a good time to be a fat woman. There was never a change in the makeup of women who run Fortune 500 companies or women who are elected to office or women who there was never any meaningful change. What you saw was a sense of there being some social capital that especially, I think, progressives could pursue. This was during the height of the Obama diversity coalition. Being diverse and embracing diversity and all its definitions just came with some social capital. It never came with economic capital. Yeah. There’s never been
Time 1:10:59
Effort to Conform
- Women are judged on their effort to conform, not necessarily on actual attractiveness.
- The fat positivity movement was seen as a threat because it rejected the need to try to conform to beauty standards.
- Conservatism, now inseparable from Trumpism, demands that women show the effort to be deemed valuable.
- The visible effort in appearance needs to be easily read and literal, signifying a willingness to conform.
- Trump values this effort because it demonstrates vulnerability and gives him power. Transcript: Tressie McMillan Cottom Women are judged on is their effort to conform then. You don’t even have to be. You don’t actually have to be attractive. That is actually one of the reasons that the whole fat positivity moment was considered such an assault to a deeply held conservative value. Because even if you are, you can be fat, you can be unattractive, but as long as you look like you are trying to not be fat. And the fat positivity moment was about embracing, giving up the competition, the not try so hard. That is the threat. This conservative, both small C and capital C conservative moment, which is now just inseparable from Trumpism. I always like to point that out because people want to act like he’s an aberration and he’s not. He’s just a stop on a continuum of where conservatism has been going. Have to show the effort to be deemed valuable. That’s why it’s so literal. We keep trying to figure out like, why does the work look so bad? Why does the hair look so bad? Why are the clothes? Because it signifies the effort. It needs to be easily read. It needs to be literal. If it looks natural, we don’t know if it was effort or you are just genetically lucky. And what we are judging women on right now to allow them back into the fold is how much effort are you willing to expend? And someone like Trump really values that effort, by the way. He likes the vulnerability of the effort and the power it gives him.
Time 1:16:11
Critiquing Embodied Power
- Tressie McMillan Cottom argues that feminists should critique the embodied performance of power without being sexist.
- Focus on class symbolism and how individuals use their power within hierarchical systems.
- Avoiding critique of embodied power gives political cover to bad actors.
- The right can exploit this by propping up figures like Christy Noem and shielding them from scrutiny under the guise of protecting women.
- Feminism should be about power, not accommodation. Transcript: Tressie McMillan Cottom And so I go on to this piece to say, okay, I’m going to try to demonstrate to the best of my ability that you can do this without being sexist. You can focus on the class symbolism and what people decide to wear. System, hierarchical system, you cannot say that she is excused from being judged for how she uses that power. That’s just ridiculous. How could that ever be feminist? Well, it’s only feminist if you think feminism is accommodationist, and I don’t. I think feminism is about power. Katie Gatti-Tossan There is a passage from an essay that I read in the introduction of this episode before we spoke. And I really like it because I think it elegantly weaves together and then subverts a couple of threads that I think are often hard to parse. Again, I think because we don’t have the language for these things, like you said. Those threads are race, class, and gender. So you’re kind of gesturing up the trope of the welfare queen without really naming it explicitly. Of course, this is the trope that Ronald Reagan introduced to the American imagination to really hit all the notes of respectability. Politics, you have this avatar who is Black. She is a woman. She has children out of wedlock. She is assumed to be unproductive in society. And so you’re kind of triggering all these things that we’ve been trained to think about as negative.
Time 1:18:28
US-Specific Abstractions of Race, Class, and Gender
- Tressie McMillan Cottom is drawing a diagram to explain how she sees the interconnection of race, class, and gender.
- She emphasizes the importance of understanding that there are two levels of abstraction to consider.
- One level is the uniquely American way these concepts are structured and given power.
- Because the US is a global economy, its structures impact the rest of the world. Transcript: Tressie McMillan Cottom Realize people can’t see me. I’m literally drawing this out on my notepad here. It’s a great question. It is a deep, hard question. It’s a really good one. Here’s what I’m going to try to explain and lay it out. So I think it’s important here when we talk about race, class and gender to understand there are two different ways, what I would call in my world, a level of abstraction. American way that
Time 1:20:39
Contextual Intersectionality
- Race, class, and gender operate differently depending on the context.
- While they are always present, their specific impact varies.
- Understanding the context is crucial for determining their relevance in a situation.
- Being a Black American female consumer can sometimes represent a position of power. Transcript: Tressie McMillan Cottom What we can say is that the context matters. So the first two questions I always ask when I’m trying to figure out where is race, class, and gender in this equation and how does it matter is I have to understand that it’s not always Going to matter the same way in every context, but it is always present. It is always present. And that in some contexts, being a Black American female consumer, for example, is actually the power position in that exchange.
Time 1:29:26
Being In but Not Of
- Tressie McMillan Cottom says one of the most powerful analytical positions is being in something but not of it.
- You are both inside and outside at the same time.
- The friction between those two positions creates a spark.
- There are social costs for doing that, but it’s a powerful place to be.
- You can see it but are not beholden to upholding it.