Black History Month Week: Capital B w/ Jelani Cobb

This Day in Esoteric Political History

Jody Avirgan & Radiotopia

History

4.6 • 982 Ratings

🗓️ 15 February 2022

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This week, we’re doing a number of episodes around the history of… Black History Month.

Over the course of this country’s history, the terms we use to describe black Americans have shifted and signified different things — from “colored” to “negro” to “African-American” and “black.” There’s now a debate about whether to capitalize the “b” in black.

Jody, NIki, and Kellie are joined by Jelani Cobb of the New Yorker to talk about the current debate, and the key moments in the shifting language.

Sign up for our newsletter! Find out more at thisdaypod.com

And don’t forget about Oprahdemics, hosted by Kellie, coming soon from Radiotopia.

This Day In Esoteric Political History is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX.

Your support helps foster independent, artist-owned podcasts and award-winning stories.

If you want to support the show directly, you can do so on our website: ThisDayPod.com

Get in touch if you have any ideas for future topics, or just want to say hello. Our website is thisdaypod.com Follow us on social @thisdaypod

Our team: Jacob Feldman, Researcher/Producer; Brittani Brown, Producer; Khawla Nakua, Transcripts; music by Teen Daze and Blue Dot Sessions; Julie Shapiro and Audrey Mardavich, Executive Producers at Radiotopia

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia.
0:07.0	My name is Jody Avergan.
0:10.0	This is part two of a three-part series we're doing all week looking at Black History Month and the questions about how Black History has been studied, celebrated, and involved in this country.
0:19.0	Last episode, as you may remember, was about Carter G. Wood Woodson who started Negro History Week in the
0:24.4	1920s which has evolved into Black History Month. So listeners you will note
0:28.6	a shift there from week to month but also from the word Negro to the word black and that is kind of what we're going to get into today
0:35.8	This really fascinating contested and complicated history of the terminology around
0:40.9	Black Americans from colored to Negro to African American to black.
0:45.0	There's a number of other terms circling around there as well, but as you may have noticed, there's also now a conversation breaking out about the capitalization of the word black.
0:52.8	And this, of course, plays out in academia,
0:55.2	in media, in popular culture.
0:57.2	And our guest for this episode
0:58.6	is someone who resides in all of those worlds.
1:00.9	Jalani Cobb, back on the show, staff writer for the New Yorker, professor at Columbia,
1:05.6	co-editor of The Matter of Black Lives, the New Yorker's anthology of writings on race,
1:10.6	and someone I should add, who responded to my email asking him to come on for this topic within like two minutes saying oh I have thoughts on this
1:19.9	Thank you for joining us
1:21.0	Thank you and of course with, Nicole Hammer of Columbia and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wellesley.
1:26.0	Hello there.
1:27.0	Hello Jody.
1:28.0	Hey there.
1:29.0	Kelly Carter Jackson, host the forthcoming Oprah Demix. I gotta keep saying that.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Jody Avirgan & Radiotopia, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Jody Avirgan & Radiotopia and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.