An excellent conversation in the latest episode of Ezra Klein's podcast with Tressie McMillan Cottom, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the author of Thick. The whole episode is worth it, but a few snippets:
Human nature is resistant to learning. I mean, nobody knows that more than people who 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.
I never want to wed my sense of self and my identity to something I don’t control. And 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.
What a culture needs from its smart people at any given point in time changes. We can 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 the correspondence of how smart you are is just really about your place in the world is because I want people to feel obligated to think about what world they’re creating for somebody else, 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.
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