Academics Henry Jenkins and Colin Maclay use their combined knowledge to dig deeper and ask more ambitious questions than most pop culture podcasts out there – not doing recaps or just remaining on the level of entertainment coverage. For them, popular culture offers resources for asking questions about who we are and where we are going, questions that can be political, legal, technological, economic, or social, but often cut across all of the above.
https://www.howdoyoulikeitsofar.org/
episode 27: Critics of color: The added value of subtleties
In our third and final installment of the need for critics of color, Eric Deggans, NPR's first full-time TV critic and author of Race Baiter: How the Media Wields Dangerous Words to Divide a Nation, talks to Henry and Colin about his longtime trajectory in radio and print media. Our guest speaks about how his first encounter with white culture was through radio, and asserts that "podcasting is radio for young people" now. When starting he thought, how can we talk about culture in a unique way, of things that other people cannot see? In his case he thought not only about race, but also about other dimensions, such as being a musician. In terms of television, we talk about how critics of color are needed not only to understand the new shows that better represent minority culture, but also to make visible the prevalence of and default to white culture in general. He says that Luke Cage, for example, hit a few touchstones of growing up black in that time, creating a powerful feeling of nostalgia and understanding that he could not get, for example, with The Sopranos, which he enjoyed as an outsider.