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Hello and welcome to our national conversation about conversations about race.

This is the bi-weekly multiracial podcast where we discuss the ways we can't talk,

don't talk, would rather not talk, but intermittently, fitfully, embarrassingly do talk about culture, identity, politics, power, and privilege in our pre-post, yet still very

racial America.

You could say all that or just call this show about race.

I'm Baratune Day Thurston, author of How to Be Black, and joining me here in the Panoply

Studios in New York City are my co-host, Tanner Colby, author of Some of My Best Friends

Are Black, the Strange Story of Integration in America. Hello, Tanner. Hello, author of some of my best friends are Black, the strange story of integration in America.

Hello, Tanner.

Hello, sir.

And Anand Girdardas, who is here filling in for our regular co-host, the wonderful boxer Raquel Sepeda,

who's away on assignment for the New York Times at Havasu Falls and the Havasu Pai Reservation at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

Anand is the author of, most recently, The True American, Murder and Mercy in Texas.

This book just won the 2015 New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism.

And a few months ago, he delivered a standing ovation receiving TED Talk on the subject of

this book, a tale of two Americas.

In true Asian-American hyper-achieving fashion, he also happens to be a columnist for the New York

Times.

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