Notes from America with Kai Wright

There’s something about Sofia. The iconic character was first born within the pages of Alice Walker’s canonical 1982 novel, “The Color Purple.” She is a fierce, principled Black woman — friend to the protagonist Celie and wife to Celie’s stepson Harpo, who tarnishes their relationship with violence. But what is most notable about Sofia is that she will not stand down, even against the backdrop of...

Hisham Awartani was visiting family in Vermont over Thanksgiving break in 2023 when he and two of his friends were shot . All three victims are of Palestinian descent and were wearing traditional Palestinian scarves when the attack happened. While his friends made full physical recoveries, 20-year-old Awartani now has to grapple with a new life that involves using a wheelchair. In this episode, pr...

From the very earliest days of the epidemic, women got infected with HIV and died from AIDS — just like men. But from the earliest days, this undeniable fact was largely ignored — by the public, the government and even the medical establishment. The consequences of this blindspot were profound. Many women didn’t know they could get HIV. But in the late 1980s, something remarkable happened. At a ma...

We’re living in polarized times – particularly, when it comes to questions of identity, such as race and culture and gender. At the same time, our growing cultural diversity is at this point baked into the future. Within the next 20 years, the majority of Americans will identify as something other than white; that’s already the case in four states. In the 2020 Census, nearly 40 million people iden...

It’s the 1980s — Harlem, USA — and the 17th floor of the area’s struggling public hospital is filling up with infants and children who arrive and then never leave. Some spend their whole lives on the pediatric ward, celebrating birthdays, first steps and first words with the nurses and doctors who’ve become their surrogate family. Welcome to Harlem Hospital at the height of the HIV and AIDS epidem...

With the Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries behind us , the 2024 election cycle is well underway.  Donald J. Trump isn’t the 2024 Republican presidential candidate yet , but his victories in Iowa and New Hampshire suggest that it will be smooth sailing to the GOP nomination for the former president once again — notwithstanding his several impending criminal cases and tons of politica...

Valerie Reyes-Jimenez called it “The Monster.” That’s how some people described HIV and AIDS in the 1980s. Valerie thinks as many as 75 people from her block on New York City’s Lower East Side died. They were succumbing to an illness that was not recognized as the same virus that was killing young, white, gay men just across town in the West Village. At the same time, in Washington, D.C., Gil Gera...

If you were Black with mental illness in the early 1900s, you couldn’t seek help just anywhere. You’d have to go to a segregated asylum like Maryland’s Crownsville Hospital, formerly known as the Hospital for the Negro Insane. The facility opened in 1911 when 12 men were brought into the woods outside of Baltimore and told to start working. They were tasked with creating one of the first asylums f...

The latest season of the Blindspot podcast brings listeners voices of people who were affected in the early years of the AIDS epidemic, when so little was known about HIV, and so much was misunderstood. It’s also hosted by a familiar voice – Kai Wright, who has covered the impact of HIV and AIDS in communities of color throughout his career as a journalist. Season three of the show, a co-productio...

The hottest year on record was 2023, but we're expected to make the same claim at the end of this calendar year. As the world warms and reports of historic flooding, wildfires, tornadoes and droughts continue to permeate the news, it's easy to feel burdened with anxiety about the future of our planet. But there are moments of hope to hold on to. Are they enough to shift to an optimistic outlook ab...

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s final Sunday sermon was titled, “Remaining Awake Through A Great Revolution.” In other words, he was advising us to stay woke. Today, that term has become a political slur. “Woke” is at the very center of our culture wars – especially as we enter a contentious election year. But like a lot of slang words, woke has an origin story that’s got little to do with how it’s u...

Interest in Ozempic as a way to lose weight has only been outmatched by demand for the drug, which has been in short supply as celebrities and social media influencers continue to popularize its use. The Type 2 diabetes treatment, which was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2017, has become a catch-all term for a class of medications now used to treat obesity, including Wegovy, Zepbo...

Raoul Peck  became known for his filmmaking and fight for racial justice with the released of his Academy Award-nominated film  I Am Not Your Negro  which attempts to complete James Baldwin's unfinished book about the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Medgar Evers. It was followed by another documentary series,  Exterminate All the Brutes . In his latest film,  Silver Dollar Roa...

In  Safiya Sinclair’s  new memoir, “How to Say Babylon: A Memoir,” the award-winning poet and essayist is revisiting her youth as a Rastafari girl.  Being Rasta is about so much more than what shows up in American pop culture — it’s an anti-colonial, pro-Black way of life that was deeply important to Safiya’s father. But for her, it was a set of rules and dictates that tried to shrink the world fo...

When Fanta Kaba was growing up, her family moved around a lot: Harlem, Queens, the Bronx, even North Carolina for a while. But when they moved into public housing, they finally found stability. Now, a controversial plan is changing the way public housing operates — and a lot of residents are scared about the future of their homes.  On this week’s show, Fanta — a reporter for WNYC’s Radio Rookies —...

The FDA’s approval of gene-editing therapy to effectively treat sickle cell disease has many people hopeful while also thinking about the many lives lost to the disease. One of the most high profile people in the entertainment world with sickle cell was hip-hop artist Prodigy, who died of related complications in 2017. Kai invites you to listen back to an episode of WYNC’s podcast “ The Realness ,...

The Food and Drug Administration has approved gene therapy as a treatment for sickle cell disease, effectively making a cure available to many people affected by the genetic disease. Sickle cell disease is a group of inherited red blood cell disorders and is the most common form of an inherited blood disorder.  In this episode, Kai is joined by Ashley Valentine of   Sick Cells , which seeks to ele...

This week on Notes from America, host Kai Wright talks with  Dr. Joy Buolamwini , a computer scientist who uses art and research to illuminate the social implications of artificial intelligence. The self-described “poet of code” warns that A.I. could write the biases of today’s world into algorithms and even regress the progress of U.S. civil rights in everything from medicine to loan applications...

Playwright Lynn Nottage says it’s in her nature to be optimistic. And if it’s true what they say that you can manifest good things by thinking positively, well, it’s worked out for her in myriad ways. Nottage is the first and only woman to have won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice, and she’s one of today’s most produced playwrights. Her work, though, explores the experiences of Americans existing...

Boston's Big Dig started as a vision for a large-scale highway tunnel system that became a cautionary tale about American infrastructure. Guest host  Nancy Solomon  speaks with  Ian Coss , host of  The Big Dig  podcast from WGBH and PRX, which dives into the history behind some of the most notable infrastructure projects in the Greater Boston area leading up to The Big Dig, which became “a symbol...

Guest host Janae Pierre sits down with legendary poet and activist Nikki Giovanni, who is the subject of a new documentary, Going To Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project . Giovanni reflects on the legacy of Black storytelling, gospel music, what she describes as original libraries, and why she’s working to get more Black women involved in space travel. Plus, we hear from Kai as he pays a visit to Kimb...

It’s been 10 years since the Black Lives Matter was founded i in response to the acquittal of the man who fatally shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. Kai Wright speaks with organizer Chelsea Miller about the impact the movement has had on a generation of young people. She makes the case for why we must keep telling the story of Black life and death in America and saying the names of those killed as a...

The events of October 7th shook the world and greatly impacted different intersections of people. Arab Americans sit at a unique intersection. As an Arab American journalist, Notes From America producer  Suzanne Gaber  set out to find a place for her to process the complex emotions she’s been feeling since that day. She visits the  Palestinian American Community Center  in Clifton, NJ and speaks w...

Imminent Danger, a new series from NYC NOW, looks into the role state medical boards had in how one doctor was allowed to keep practicing despite consistently bad outcomes. Marquita Baird has kept a bootbox full of medical records on a shelf in her home in Shawnee, Oklahoma for over two decades in the hope that, someday, someone would ask about what happened after an OB-GYN named Thomas J. Byrne p...

Killers of the Flower Moon, a new film directed by Martin Scorcese based on the bestselling book of the same name, tells the story of how greed and profound injustice took the lives of so many Osage. The film has helped people like Damon Waters, an Osage filmmaker and actor reconnect with his roots and imagine a different future for Fairfax, Okla., where the film takes place. Damon joins us to dis...