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 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.