Race Unwrapped

When you dance in protest, or to ask for justice, you’re putting your body itself on the line. And our guest on this episode says if you can move, you can dance. Ananya Chatterjea is a choreographer, a dance maker, and an educator. She’s a professor of dance at the University of Minnesota, and founder and artistic director of a dance company of all BIPOC women and femme artists called Ananya Dance...

Television writer, showrunner and Nkechi Okoro Carroll is a strong believer in the power of her medium to reach people’s hearts. “When people are watching TV, they're watching it to relax,” she says. “So their guards are down. Their minds are open. That’s where the beauty and the magic gets to come through.” Carroll is the showrunner and executive producer of “All American,” and creator, executive...

While her work is often rooted in choreography and movement, amara tabor-smith calls herself a performance maker. She’s the founder of Deep Waters Dance Theater and an educator at Stanford University, where she teaches not just dance, but a very sought-after class called Conjure Art 101: Performances of Ritual, Spirituality and Decolonial Black Feminist Magic.  Amara challenged us to reframe...

There's something so human about live theatre. Real people are telling a story in a shared space, while you share space with other people watching. It’s intimate. For playwright Gabriel Diego Hernández, it’s also a way to tell truths about, and poke fun at, race in the United States.  His play “ Quarter Rican ” explores his worldview as a mixed-race Puerto Rican man and father. In this episod...

There’s nothing like the right combination of music and lyrics to crystalize a moment... or a movement. It’s why we’re asking every guest this season their favorite protest songs: everyone has an answer to that question, because we all instinctively understand music’s power. In this episode, we talk with Dr. Chelsey Green, musician, educator, and the first Black woman to chair the Board of Trustee...

Most people know her as a political juggernaut. She’s a former minority leader of the Georgia state House, whose coalition building in that state became a blueprint for campaigns across the country. But Stacey Abrams is also a New York Times bestselling author, and NOT just of political nonfiction. Her series of legal thrillers follows protagonist Avery Keene through the inner workings of the U.S....

Race Unwrapped returns on June 3, with a season about art as an agent of social change. Over ten episodes, host Michelle Tyrene Johnson will speak with artists of color from many disciplines. Music, movement, literature, poetry, television and more. They’ll talk about how they use their art to foster social change, and how their art form has historically played a role in resistance and revolution....

Juneteenth is the perfect time to talk about community, resilience, and strategic organizing. Join host Michelle Tyrene Johnson and A'shanti Gholar, leader of Emerge, for a conversation about how we can rise to meet the challenges of the current political landscape. It's a Juneteenth special from Race Unwrapped.

The winter holidays are sneaking up on us again, and this year, more of you joined us on Race Unwrapped than ever before! To celebrate, and to thank you, we hope you don't mind a regift. We're resharing our holiday music special to bump it to the top of your podcast feed. We hope it brings you joy, and we thank you deeply for being a part of our podcast family!

Production was well underway on this season of Race Unwrapped when America experienced what our guest just calls “The Switch.” President Joe Biden dropped out of the race, and suddenly we were witnessing a history-making presidential run by Vice President Kamala Harris. So we reached out to Emerge , a national organization dedicated to recruiting, training, and empowering Democratic women to run f...

Back in the day, Jesse Jackson told us to keep hope alive . And when Barack Obama first ran for president, his image became almost synonymous with hope (maybe you still have one of the posters ). We’ve spent this season learning about all the obstacles standing between Black people and the ballot box. But hope IS alive. A 2022 poll by the African American Research Collaborative found Black America...

Four million people won’t be allowed to vote in the upcoming election because of laws in 48 states that restrict your right to vote if you’ve ever been convicted of a felony. Most of the folks affected have already served their sentences. And you can probably guess which race is disproportionately affected by these laws. Nicole Porter is a Senior Advocacy Director for The Sentencing Project. She j...

So you live in one of the states that require some form of ID to vote. Everyone has one, right? In fact, there are lots of reasons someone might not have a valid ID . And getting one takes time, transportation, specific paperwork, availability during business hours, and of course, money. VoteRiders is a nonprofit organization that helps people get IDs in states where they need them to vote. On thi...

So far this season we’ve learned a lot about voter suppression tactics and how they weaken our democracy. This episode and next, we’ll meet some folks who are working to reverse the damage and make voting more accessible. Caren Short is the Director of Legal and Research for the League of Women Voters , and she says there are many reasons to be hopeful. She joins us to talk about her organization’...

The Voting Rights act of 1965 said certain states had to check with the federal government before making any changes to their election laws. Sixteen states were subject to this “preclearance” process — all with an extensive history of racist voting practices. Just under 50 years later, the U.S. Supreme Court changed the rules, in a case called Shelby County v. Holder. On this episode, Dr. Kevin Mo...

Since the 15th Amendment gave Black men the right to vote in 1870, policy makers have thrown obstacles between marginalized voters and the ballot box. The tactics may change, but the erosion of democracy is relentless. Dr. Carol Anderson is a historian, educator and the author of "One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy." She joins us to help connect the dots between...

Race affects our world, whether we're thinking about it or not. And this season, we're unwrapping how it influences our democracy. From literacy tests in the Jim Crow era to the voter ID laws of today, so many gears in the American political machine are turning to keep Black folks away from the ballot box. So for the next 6 weeks, we're drawing a line from then to now. We'll give you the historica...

Hey y’all! Michelle Tyrene Johnson here. You usually hear from me in the summertime, but I’m popping in with “Gifting a Soulful Christmas,” an hour-long exploration of Black holiday music! I spoke to music experts and music lovers to share what makes Black Christmas and holiday music pull a little extra in your soul this time of year. Our experts include Otis Junior and Destiny Carter from 91.9FM...

Black don’t crack, except when it comes to cracking jokes. And Keith McGill does it for a living. McGill is a Louisville native and class clown who took it to a microphone for the first time when he was in his 20s.  Since then he has used comedy to talk about a range of tough topics — some tougher than others, depending on the audience. Being Black, being gay, grieving his partner of over 30 year...

On this episode of Race Unwrapped, we meet Pooja Reddy, a comedian and writer whose family immigrated from Hyderabad in southern India to Glasgow, Kentucky. Her humor draws heavily from her childhood experiences — in one bit, she describes herself as “personally victimized by the location of [her] parents’ green card sponsor.” Reddy unwraps how her childhood in rural Kentucky shaped her outlook an...

In the early 1980s, a young Eddie Murphy stepped into the national comedy scene and revitalized a flaccid “Saturday Night Live.” His career since then has been a fascinating reflection of how white American audiences relate to Black comedy. He was the lone Black man in fish-out-of-water movies like “Beverly Hills Cop,” then pivoted to movies like “Harlem Nights”  and “Coming to America” with...

Sometimes people just know their stuff. And in the case of Anne Libera, her stuff is comedy and she knows it well. Libera is a professor of comedy at Columbia University in Chicago. She’s also the director of comedy studies at Second City, and directs performances there.  This episode, we unwrap the anatomy of a comedy routine and how joking about serious topics has changed over time… and she pou...

A Black Baptist minister, a Chinese Buddhist monk and a White Presbyterian walk into a bar… and for more than one reason, they may not all laugh at how the joke ends.  This season of Race Unwrapped we’re focused on the tie between race and humor. On this episode, I talk with Dr. Lawrence Edwin Williams about how humor connects us as humans, and how it can help us deal with difficult situation...

Comedian Richard Pryor didn’t leave much on the cutting room floor when it came to comedy. Not sex, family, religion, or politics. Certainly not race, or being Black in America. Many of today’s comedians can trace their lineage of fearless humor right back to Richard Pryor, and that includes his own progeny. On this episode of Race Unwrapped, I talk with Rain Pryor, Richard Pryor’s daughter and an...

“How come I don’t get to say the word n……” That’s the sound of the forever question in American society about why white people can’t use the n-word.  Like mosquito bites in summer that you forget about in January, there is always some public controversy or private party chatter about why THAT word is straight-up off limits.  On this episode, I talk with University of Kentucky English and...