Notes from America with Kai Wright

Both President Biden and Donald Trump took campaign trips to Texas to visit the U.S. border in recent days. These simultaneous visits happened shortly after several polls found that immigration remains a top issue for voters. But the political discourse can often erase the lived experiences and realities of migrants throughout the country...

Host Kai Wright started his career covering the impact of HIV and AIDS on communities in America. A new project brings that experience full circle. Kai hosts the latest season of the Blindspot podcast, “The Plague In The Shadows,” which introduces listeners to people who were affected in the early years of the HIV and AIDS epidemics. 

Decades later, AIDS is still with us and its status as an epidemic remains accurate...

The latest season of the Blindspot podcast, “The Plague In The Shadows,” brings listeners the voices of people who were affected in the early years of the HIV and AIDS epidemics. It includes stories like that of Kia LaBeija, an artist and activist who was diagnosed with HIV as a child soon after her parents both tested positive...

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 racism and sexism in the South in the 1930s...

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...

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...

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 identified themselves as multiracial, almost a 300 percent increase from a decade before...

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 epidemics...

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 political baggage...

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...