Episode 3: You might be a racist

For the third episode of the Brutal South Podcast, my guest is the man behind the popular Twitter account @YesYoureRacist.

Twitter, for the uninitiated, is an open-air insane asylum where celebrities, world leaders, and everyday people log on to air their grievances. Logan Smith is a political communications worker from North Carolina who has been dunking on racists on the website since 2012.

Themes for this episode include white fragility, ongoing beefs between North and South Carolina, and the time Logan’s Twitter account went from idle entertainment to anti-racist information clearinghouse.

We also spend some time on the subject of digital duality, or the idea that our online selves and our “real” selves are separate. I’ve written about this before in a newsletter about Instagram and parenting, which borrowed some ideas from Nathan Jurgenson’s book The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media (Verso, 2019). That book, like the others I mention in the newsletter, is available to order via the Brutal South Bookshop.

If you haven’t already, you can check out the previous episodes of the podcast here and here. You can subscribe to the podcast for free via iTunes or Spotify.

As always, if you’d like to receive something interesting in your inbox every Wednesday, subscribe to the free Brutal South newsletter at the link below. For an optional $5 a month, you can support my work now and get access to exclusive content later on down the road.

The image at the top is Coccothraustes rubra (now Cardinalis cardinalis) from Mark Catesby’s The natural history of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands: containing the figures of birds, beasts, fishes, serpents, insects, and plants, Vol I.