The Forgotten Man: Reporting on Class, Race, and Poverty in America

In January 2025, just after the Inauguration of President Donald Trump, Switchyard organized a gathering of journalists from across the country to discuss how we would go about covering the new administration. We gathered together the biographers of Michelle Obama and Mitch McConnell, authors of books about the Koch Brothers and The Family, about Amazon and Google and Facebook, about the rise of white supremacy and the cash value of racism. We featured writers and editors for the New York Times, the LA Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Mother Jones, for StoryCorps, This American Life, and Reveal. We also had musicians, filmmakers, novelists, essayists, and poets. 

As we had hoped, the gathering was a source of solace, a call to action and a chance to recommit ourselves to our values and best practices and a rekindling of our belief in the power of storytelling, in all its forms. In these unprecedented and difficult times, we are once again reporting on a president who characterizes journalists as enemies of the state and jokes about killing us. And he empowers and emboldens state and local level officials to indulge their most authoritarian impulses. Here, in the heart of Tulsa, on the grounds of the Tulsa Race Massacre and the end of the Trail of Tears, we have state officials who have sought to block the teaching of that history while requiring schools to buy Bibles branded with the new president's name.

The solemn question each of our panels addressed: What are we going to do now?

In this live episode, we hear from Mya Frazier, Joe Kloc, Tracie McMillan, and Monica Potts with responses from Gary Lee and Paul Reyes.

Mya Frazier is an award-winning investigative journalist based in the Midwest. Her work focuses on the power of the U.S. financial system in the lives of low-income Americans. She has written features and cover stories on credit scoring, housing insecurity, and inequality for The New York Times Magazine and Harper's Magazine. She is at work on a book for Knopf about the history of the U.S. credit scoring system and is the program director at the Watchdog Writers Group.

Joe Kloc is a reporter and senior editor at Harper's Magazine, where he was a finalist for the 2019 National Magazine Award for Feature Writing. His work has also appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, New York magazine, and the New York Review of Books. Author of a book Lost at Sea about the "anchor-outs"—an unhoused community living off the California coast on abandoned boats

Tracie McMillan covers America's multiracial working class for the New York Times, Mother Jones, National Geographic, and the Village Voice. A one time target of Rush Limbaugh, she is the author of the New York Times bestseller The American Way of Eating and The White Bonus: Five Families and the Cash Value of Racism in America. 

Monica Potts is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America. Her previous work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The New Republic.

Gary Lee is the editor of the Oklahoma Eagle and the director of the Tulsa Local News Initiative. Lee is the former Moscow Bureau Chief for the Washington Post. 

Paul Reyes is  the editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review and author of Exiles in Eden: Life Among the Ruins of Florida's Great Recession.