This is the Magazine Remaking Southern Journalism

Black Lives Matter protesters gather in Atlanta, May 29, 2020 [Mike Stewart/AP]

By Sarah Leonard

The 2020 election was a tumultuous time for the South: national journalists parachuting in for quick scoops, the relentless scrutiny of new swing states like Texas and Georgia, and an endless roster of talking heads on cable television arguing furiously about what Southern politics say about Trump-era America.

Beneath all the noise, Scalawag, a small but mighty magazine founded in 2015, has been steadfastly covering big shifts in Southern politics. “We do movement journalism,” managing editor Lovey Cooper told me over the phone from Durham, North Carolina, “rather than the horse race.”

We talked about the unique role the South plays in America’s politics and imagination, how a new form of journalism might buttress democracy instead of sowing distrust, and how the election coverage played out from one Southerner’s viewpoint.

The “exotic South”

“People like to think of the South as a bellwether for the country, but only around elections. People parachute in, tell their neat little story and leave. It’s almost exploitive, like ‘look how wild it is in Georgia right now,’ and then [they] dip out again for four more years,” Cooper said. “But America’s origin story is so deeply intertwined with the South – it comes from slavery, and port cities, the origins of the police. Trump and his followers still cite the Confederacy.” This is why Scalawag, as its mission statement says, “illuminates dissent, unsettles dominant narratives, pursues justice and liberation and stands in solidarity with marginalized people and communities in the South … Scalawag reimagines the roots and futures of the place we call home.”

Movement journalism

One thing that sets the magazine apart is that their journalists are actually stakeholders in the conversation, Cooper said. “For example, one of our contributors on felon disenfranchisement in Tennessee, the way she got the idea was she was on the ground with protesters in Tennessee seeing people getting arrested.” The reporter then followed the law that criminalized setting up tents outside the capital progress through the state legislature, which meant that the activists she had interviewed were now at risk of losing their right to vote, Cooper said.

The goal is that when they write a story about a particular issue, they’re “nourishing that radical imagination around it,” she continued.

The left goes local

The 2020 election outcome revealed progressive energy at the grassroots level, and the willingness of even Trump supporters to get behind some egalitarian policies.

“I think the left has been galvanized by down-ballot races down to local sheriff [races] and school board [races] more than in other years,” Cooper told me. “The conversations around defunding the police and things like minimum wage – those are moments that people can organize around.” Being more aware of these issues “makes people invested in and researching those local offices. It creates more buy-in because there are more f*cked up things people are aware of.”

She also noted that in the some of the areas of the South that went for Trump, they also “passed these really progressive ballot measures. It’s more of an indication of where people are thinking outside of party politics and … in terms of people’s material circumstances,” she said. “You live far from what he talks about, like the border, and then these down-ballot measures like minimum wage or drug legalization – it’s like hell yeah I want more money, hell yeah I want to smoke weed – you vote for that. The thing that pisses me off most about national media is seeing how all these individual interests and motivations grounded in actual physical things are turned into a conversation about what the Democrats need to win. It’s like, ‘b*tch, what do I need to win?’”

On Georgia and the “Southern shift”

Cooper was not satisfied with 2020 election reports that the South had suddenly become more progressive.

“One thing that people get wrong is: The outcome of this election shows that people are shifting,” Cooper told me. “People were already like this. There just wasn’t an investment in getting these people out to vote. You’re not going to vote if you think it doesn’t have an impact and you don’t have agency in the process … we had a Black feminist roundtable on electoral politics – Barbara Ransby saying, the people I want to run for president would never run for president, and that’s the problem,” Cooper said.

She believes Georgia got a lot more attention this year due to the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery and Rayshard Brooks, and because of the prominence of Stacey Abrams.

“With the culmination of national attention and resources, we’re seeing a shift where people are piling support into these places that have always had strong organizing and always needed that support, and so I don’t think the way people are turning out is surprising. But the resources often come with a white savior narrative and the implication that ‘this your own fault that you didn’t have these resources,’ and using Georgia to gain the upper hand in a national fight.”

It’s the system

Georgia is one of the states that do runoff elections (most are in the South), and that law was introduced by segregationists to make it impossible for Black folks to get representation, Cooper said. “Everyone pays so much attention to the horse race and whether candidates are catering to Black interests. You can do that all you want, but you’re still working against the system and it’s a clusterf*ck by design,” Cooper said. “Every group of people that’s gained access to vote except white landowning men – it’s been a battle. So it’s not surprising that there’s a proportionate outcome to the effort being put in.”

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