transcript
show notes
White South Africans are quietly reshaping labor in the Mississippi Delta, and the story is far more complicated than the headlines suggest. In this episode, Boyce Upholt returns to untangle the history, economics, and racial fault lines behind his New Yorker reporting, revealing why these workers are arriving, why Mississippi farms are hiring them, and what it all says about power, immigration, and the modern South. Boyce brings deep research and a place-based perspective to this conversation, connecting his acclaimed book Great River to his new print magazine Southlands and his ongoing work on the Mississippi Delta. Angus pushes the discussion into the uncomfortable but necessary questions at the center of the story: apartheid's legacy, the movement of white labor across borders, and the uneasy overlap between infrastructure, race, and who gets access to opportunity.
