Beyond Us & Them: An interview with podcaster Trey Kay (Part One)

The night that Donald Trump was elected in 2016, I was strung out on painkillers due to an as yet undiagnosed neuropathy attack. It helped to dull the pain but left me with a sense of unreality about the outcome. For the following weeks, I found myself waking up in pain at the wee hours of the morning and listening to podcasts to try to go back to sleep. Trey Kay’s Us & Them podcast (produced by West Virginia Public Radio)  was one of those I discovered during this period – a voice of sanity in insane times, a source of comfort for me as someone who had spent large chunks of my life in Rural North Georgia (Marjorie Taylor Green’s district) and did not want to walk away with reductive explanations for why so many of the folks there had joined the MAGA movement. Us and Them brings Appalachian perspectives to national debates and cultural divides, allowing us to hear from multiple perspectives and understand why people feel the ways they do. I hear there voices I would not encounter in my daily interactions in Los Angeles and as such, I start to understand the state of the nation with greater nuance and with some degree of hope.

Through the years, as a loyal fan, I reached out to Kay and invited him to come to USC. He framed an episode around our Civic Imagination workshops and brought me to West Virginia. I taught some of his episodes in my class on podcasting and he joined us via Zoom to share how they were made. Recently, we had a long conversation which touched on the value I saw in what he was doing from the perspective of educators trying to foster civic responsibility and media literacy with their students. We saw this exchange as a starting point for giving them the support and resources they might need to map its values into their instructional practices.

Henry: How would you describe your vision for Us & Them? What inspired you to start the series?

Trey: As you know, the origins of Us & Them really go back to the radio documentary I made called The Great Textbook War, about the 1974 Kanawha County textbook controversy in West Virginia. I was 12 years old and living in Kanawha County when that conflict erupted, so when I returned to it as a journalist decades later, I was revisiting something I had experienced as a child.

I began developing the documentary around 2008, during the Obama vs. McCain presidential campaign. At the time, people were already talking about the country being more politically polarized than it had been in generations. Looking back now, that period almost seems mild by comparison. But the textbook controversy of 1974 helped me recognize that the cultural and political divisions we were seeing were not new. Many of them had been developing for decades.

I followed that project with reporting on curriculum battles in Texas, and by 2014 I began developing Us & Them with West Virginia Public Broadcasting.

People sometimes interpret the title as meaning that the premise of the program is, “There are two sides to everything, and both sides probably have a point.” There are certainly times when we bring people with opposing views into conversation, but that isn’t really the central idea behind the program.

What interests me more is the human impulse to divide ourselves into groups — political tribes, religions, classes, races, regions, factions and identities — and then to begin seeing the people outside our group as “them.”

Regarding Us & Them, I have often thought about the traditional Bedouin proverb that states: “Me against my brother; me and my brother against my cousin; me, my brother, and my cousin against the stranger.” It captures something elemental about how human beings organize themselves.

Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart was an early influence on my thinking. I became fascinated by the ways Americans increasingly sort themselves geographically, culturally and politically into communities of people who think like they do.

A recent experience has caused me to revisit this question.

I am working with a group exploring Christian nationalism, and I put out a crowdsourcing request asking to speak with people who believe that America is a Christian nation founded on Christian principles. I specifically said that I wasn’t looking to stage an argument on Facebook; I wanted people who actually hold those beliefs to contact me privately so that I could understand how they describe themselves and what those beliefs mean to them.

Someone I respect objected strongly. Her concern was essentially that attempting to “understand” certain beliefs can inadvertently legitimize ideas that are historically false or morally indefensible.

I take that criticism seriously. Journalism can create false equivalence, and I do not believe that every factual assertion has equal validity simply because somebody believes it.

But I also think there is an important distinction between saying:

“These two propositions are equally supported by the evidence,”

and asking:

“Why do millions of people believe this, how did they arrive there, and what happens in a democracy because they believe it?”

The latter question is central to Us & Them.

A belief can be historically inaccurate and still be enormously consequential if enough people organize, vote, govern or educate their children according to it. Understanding those people does not require accepting their factual claims.

That tension — between understanding and legitimizing — is actually something I think the program should continue wrestling with openly.

Henry: “Hillers and Creekers” has always been one of my favorite episodes. It is an example of a cultural conflict that at first seems very location specific but it always seems to touch my students when I play it in class. Why do you think this has become one of the most popular of your episodes? And how does it illustrate the ways Us & Them  addresses cultural divides?

Trey: I think one reason “Hillers and Creekers” has connected so strongly with listeners is that, although the story is rooted in a very specific place and a very particular West Virginia social division, the emotional experience underneath it is nearly universal. Most people know something about feeling out of place, looked down upon, left out, economically inferior, socially inferior, or simply not part of the group that seems to matter. You do not have to have grown up as a “creeker” in Kanawha County, West Virginia, to understand what it feels like to believe that the people on the hill have better clothes, more money, more status, more social acceptance, or a greater sense that they belong. I have played the episode for audiences far removed from the world in which it took place, including predominantly African American audiences, and people immediately recognize the dynamic. They may not know the words “hiller” and “creeker,” but they know the experience.

The story also helped me understand something fundamental about Us & Them itself. In 2017, Us & Them was part of PRX’s Project Catapult, an accelerator for public-radio podcasts. We had been making the program for a couple of years, but the people working with us kept describing it as a show about politics. I kept resisting that definition. Politics was obviously present in the work, but I did not believe politics was really the subject. 

Eventually, during one of those workshops, I said that I thought Us & Them was really about sorting — the same human tendency I described earlier, where we form groups, decide who belongs to “us,” and almost inevitably create a “them.” I was challenged to come back with a prototype episode about that kind of sorting that was unmistakably rooted in West Virginia. Driving home, I immediately thought of the “Hillers” and “Creekers”.

My original plan was fairly conventional. I would interview people from my hometown, talk with former classmates, perhaps speak with current students, assemble a lively montage about this strange local class distinction, and then find some social scientist to explain what it meant. But the story changed when I interviewed my childhood friend Randy Thomas. Randy grew up in the poorer part of our community, the part associated with the “creekers,” while I lived on the hill. We were sitting together in his truck outside the high school we had attended, talking about how kids from the hill used to tease kids from the creek. I remembered one particular form of teasing involving their shoes that came from a discount store and asked Randy about it.

He stopped talking for a while, and at first I did not understand what was happening. Then I realized he was crying. We were men in middle age, decades removed from high school, and yet a casual question about a pair of shoes had reached something that was still profoundly alive in him. That changed the entire story. Instead of imposing the story I had planned, we followed the emotional truth that emerged from the tape. That is one of the things I value most about documentary journalism. Sometimes the reporting takes you somewhere you did not know you were going.

I think that helps explain how Us & Them approaches cultural divides. We try first to identify the divide, but then we try to move beneath the argument and understand the human experience that gives the divide its power. Sometimes distance helps. Randy and I could talk about those experiences thirty or forty years later in ways we probably could not have talked about them when we were teenagers. In many of today’s culture-war conflicts, people are still standing directly inside the wound. They are defensive, angry, afraid, and prepared to fight. “Hillers and Creekers” gives us a smaller and somewhat safer model for examining the same dynamics. 

Once we recognize the tribal mechanism in a high-school class distinction, perhaps we become a little better equipped to recognize it when the stakes are larger. In some ways, I wish we had been able to make more episodes like it, stories where we begin with curiosity and allow the reporting itself, rather than our original assumptions, to organically unfold and help us  determine where we end up.

Henry: What mechanisms do you use to bring people together across the political spectrum? What might teachers borrow from those methods?

Trey: The first thing I would say is trust. Trust seems to be in extraordinarily short supply in American life. Before people will speak honestly about deeply held convictions, they need some reason to believe that I am not inviting them into an interview merely to embarrass them, defeat them or turn them into a caricature.

I have never pretended that I am a person without opinions. I have political views, and when it is relevant, I try to be candid about that. What I tell people is that my purpose in speaking with them is not to win a debate or advance my own political agenda. My purpose is to understand their worldview well enough to represent it fairly. That has been especially important when I am interviewing people whose beliefs differ substantially from my own.

One of the things I discovered almost accidentally while reporting The Great Textbook War was the value of encountering people outside the formal interview. Sometimes I went to church with people I was interviewing. I did not go pretending to believe what they believed. I went respectfully, participated as a guest, listened and tried to understand something important in their lives. I found that worshiping with people could lower barriers in a way that simply sitting across from someone with a microphone often could not.

Meals work in much the same way. I have had breakfast, lunch or dinner with many people I have interviewed. I remember interviewing a coal miner whose political and cultural worldview was very different from mine, and his family served me deer sausage they had prepared themselves. Something changes when somebody feeds you. For a little while, you stop being simply “journalist” and “subject,” and you encounter one another in a more ordinary human way.

That instinct eventually intersected with an experiment we had heard about in Europe. ZEIT ONLINE, a German news organization, had created a project called Germany Talks, which later expanded into Europe Talks. Participants answered questions about contentious political issues, and a matching system paired people with significantly different political views so they could meet and talk face to face. The idea had a kind of dating-service quality to it, except instead of trying to find your ideal match, the system was deliberately trying to find someone who saw the political world differently from you.

What fascinated us was that the encounters often did not produce the reaction one might expect. People did not simply emerge saying, “That was unpleasant, and I never want to do it again.” Many found the experience worthwhile and wanted more opportunities to talk with people outside their normal political circles. The project eventually grew to involve thousands of participants across Europe.

We began thinking about whether we could try something similar in West Virginia. We actually planned a live event built around that concept for March 30, 2020. People with different political worldviews would be paired for conversations. Then COVID shut everything down, and the event obviously could not happen.

As we tried to imagine another way of creating that kind of encounter, the Us & Them Dinner Party began to take shape. Instead of pairing two strangers in a public place, we began thinking about bringing a small group of people together around a table. We generally invite four people who identify as politically conservative and four who identify as liberal. Everyone brings food, often something with a family or cultural story attached to it. We try to gather somewhere that feels more like a home than a debate stage. Before we discuss politics, people eat together.

The first Dinner Party was necessarily virtual because of the pandemic, but even in choosing that first group we were looking for people who could model what we were trying to create. In an earlier episode, The Abortion Divide, I had interviewed a woman who advocated for abortion rights. I asked her whether there was anyone on the anti-abortion side whom she encountered at the West Virginia Legislature and still had a cordial relationship with. There was. We brought those two women together for a conversation in that episode, and later invited both of them to participate in our first Dinner Party.

I thought they were important because they already embodied one of the ideas behind the experiment. They disagreed profoundly on an issue that is among the most divisive in American politics, but each was still willing to sit with the other and talk. We were not asking either woman to surrender her convictions. We were asking whether strong disagreement had to eliminate relationship and conversation.

That remains central to the Dinner Parties. We explicitly tell participants that this is not a game of “King of the Hill.” The purpose is not to “own” somebody on the other side. Nobody wins because somebody else loses. We try to establish some sense of commonality before moving into disagreement. Sometimes the food itself helps do that. A person brings a recipe from a grandmother, or something connected to the place where they grew up, and suddenly the first thing the group knows about that person is not how they voted.

I think there are lessons there for teachers. A teacher dealing with politically divided students or parents might begin by finding ways for people to know something about one another that precedes political identity. Where did your family come from? What traditions matter to you? What music do you love? Who raised you? What place feels like home? What is something you are proud of that has nothing to do with politics? Once people have encountered one another in that way, disagreement does not disappear, but the person across the room becomes harder to reduce to a caricature.

We have also been exploring an idea called Tough Talk and Tunes: whether music could surround a difficult civic conversation and create another form of common ground. We have not yet tested that idea fully, but it grows from the same instinct as the Dinner Parties—that disagreement works differently when it is embedded inside some shared human experience.