Notes from America with Kai Wright

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.  A recent Pew Research Center survey, among others, revealed that Bl

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. Ari Berman, senior reporter at Mother Jones and author of “Give Us the Ballot: The Modern S

A first draft of history for 2020, told through three very personal efforts to find -- and keep -- human connection amid a pandemic.  We hear from 13-year-old Adiva Kaisary about how 2020 has complicated her relationships with her school friends and new

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? We explore these questions by revisiting a story from Arun Venugopal, senior

January 6, 2021, offered a hyper-condensed version of our country’s entire political history--with all of its complexity, inspiration, and terror. In a special national radio broadcast of our show, we walk through a day that began with the historic elect

And what MLK’s uniquely Black theology can teach us about the relationship between faith and politics in 2021. Rev. Dr. Yolanda Pierce, dean of the Howard University School of Divinity and author of the forthcoming book “In My Grandmother's House: Black

Kai checks in with poet Jericho Brown, historian Kidada Williams, and listeners as we all try to transition out of the Trump presidency.  Jericho Brown, recipient of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, reads his new work ‘Inaugural,’ and reflects upon th

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. Producer Veralyn Williams invites us into a lively conversation about he

Cultural historian 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.  The MacArthur fellow is the author of “Wayward Lives, Bea

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?  Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Blight returns to the show to help Kai put