Karen Frillmann

Our Future of Black History series concludes with conversations about self-expression. Because when you carry a collective history in your identity, it can be hard to find yourself.

People are excited to replace Andrew Jackson’s face with an abolitionist hero. But Dr. Brittney Cooper argues not all honorifics are the same.

The Senate’s trial and acquittal of Donald Trump left many with mixed emotions. But did it move us any closer to a reckoning with the worst of America’s political culture?

Saidiya Hartman introduces Kai to the young women whose radical lives were obscured by respectability politics, in the second installment of our Future of Black History series.

We’ve got complicated relationships with this annual celebration -- from joy to frustration. So to launch our Future of Black History series, we ask how it began and what it can be.

Kai checks in with poet Jericho Brown, historian Kidada Williams, and listeners as we all try to transition out of the Trump presidency.

And what MLK’s uniquely Black theology can teach us about the relationship between faith and politics in 2021.

January 6, 2021, offered a hyper-condensed version of our country’s entire political history--with all of its complexity, inspiration, and terror.

An odd racial pecking order puts Indian Americans in a curious place -- outside of whiteness, but distinct from other people of color. How’d that come to be? And is it changing?

A first draft of history for 2020, told through three very personal efforts to find -- and keep -- human connection amid a pandemic.

Segregationists gamed the system 57 years ago. But this year, Black organizers may have finally slipped the knot that Jim Crow tied around democracy in the state.

Two Black physicians describe the racist history the medical world carries into the COVID-19 vaccine rollout -- and answer listeners’ questions about why we should still get vaccinated.

The HIV epidemic is nearly 40 years old. So what can we learn from that pandemic, as we approach a year of living with COVID-19?

A family’s legend about "40 acres and a mule” takes host Kai Wright on a fact checking mission to the Mississippi Delta. He finds an unexpected solution to wealth inequality in the U.S.

White supremacist myths turn defeated leaders into heroic victors. Will Donald Trump now get the same transfiguration as Robert E. Lee?

WNYC’s politics reporter Brigid Bergin and New Jersey Public Radio’s Nancy Solomon join us to take your calls and answer how recent elections are impacting our communities.

Melissa Harris-Perry joins Kai to discuss all of our complex feelings as Donald Trump’s presidency comes to an end.

Radical imagination is now essential. What can we imagine for our country, our communities, and ourselves --beyond this election, and beyond this pandemic?

From poll taxes to the canard of “voter fraud,” it’s always been a struggle to cast a ballot in America. We review the record, and investigate the anti-democracy enablers of 2020. 

Conservatives who’ve shunned the GOP say it’s given up on democracy. Which begs the question: How long ago did that happen?