Why is trusting poor people so controversial? Dr. Brittney Cooper, author of Eloquent Rage and professor at Rutgers, sits down with Aisha Nyandoro to discuss respectability politics and the ways poor Black women have had to perform worthiness just to be treated as legitimate.

What's underneath the rest of the country treating the South as backward? Sociologist and New York Times contributor Tressie McMillan Cottom argues it's a ruse to help Americans avoid reckoning with their own faults. It also erases the massive contributions the South made to turn the US into a global superpower. A conversation about race, Southern identity, and American history with host Aisha Nyandoro.

The South is misunderstood and this podcast aims to correct the record. From who gets to be Southern, to why you don't have to leave to succeed, to why the South is America's foundation and not its problem, Bless Your Heart is having conversations that will change how you see this place.

Bless Your Heart is a Southern expression that sounds sweet on the surface, but delivers sharp critique with a smile. We're bringing this charming, cutting and distinctly Southern sensibility with us as we challenge false narratives.

Each episode is a deep, two-way conversation between lifelong Southerner Aisha Nyandoro and a guest whose life, work, or story challenges what we think we know about the South: including Tressie McMillan Cottom, Mitch Landrieu and Kiese Laymon. Aisha is one of the most important voices in the national conversation around poverty, narrative change and economic justice. And she's seen up close what happens when the stories we are told get it wrong.

Aisha leads the Jackson-based nonprofit Springboard to Opportunities and is the architect of the Magnolia Mother’s Trust – the longest-running guaranteed income program in the U.S. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and PBS NewsHour. She is a Forbes contributor, TED Speaker, TIME100 Next honoree and Heinz Award winner. She also comes from a lineage of changemakers. Her grandmother was a former sharecropper turned Civil Rights icon, and Aisha has been carrying that work forward her whole life.

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