The water crisis in Jackson, Mississippi has laid bare the fraught relationship between the state’s majority-white, Republican leadership and the city’s majority-Black, Democratic leadership. Funding and resources for the city often comes with strings attached that give more control to the state, a pattern the city's Mayor has previously called "paternalistic."

We talk with Jarvis Dortch, executive director of the ACLU of Mississippi and ms.org/en/biographies/jarvis-dortch-executive-director">former representative in the Mississippi legislature, about the state's long history of racial politics and what it has meant for the health of the state.