Blackness (Un)interrupted

Notes from America with Kai Wright

WNYC Studios

News Commentary, Politics, History, News

4.4 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 22 February 2021

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Our Future of Black History series concludes with conversations about self-expression. Because when you carry a collective history in your identity, it can be hard to find yourself. We reflect on the life, language and legacy of renowned writer Zora Neale Hurston with Bernice McFadden, a novelist and contributor to the new anthology, Four Hundred Souls: A Community History Of African America, 1619-2019. Producer Veralyn Williams then brings us a story about a deep division that continues to plague the Black community today, despite being a remnant of chattel slavery: colorism. Through a candid conversation with her sister who lives with vitiligo, she learns how one’s outlook on life and love of self changes when you’ve lived as both a lighter and darker-skinned woman. Companion listening for this episode: “The Origin Story of Black History Month” (02/01/2021) 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. “The ‘Beautiful Experiments’ Left Out of Black History” (02/08/2021) 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 United States of Anxiety” airs live on Sunday evenings at 6pm ET. The podcast episodes are lightly edited from our live broadcasts. To catch all the action, tune into the show on Sunday nights via the stream on WNYC.org/anxiety or tell your smart speakers to play WNYC.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This is the United States of Anxiety, a show about the unfinished business of our history and its
0:07.4	grip on our future.
0:08.4	I've listened to black Americans and it's the most amazing use of the English language
0:12.1	I've ever come across in my life.
0:14.0	I want more of your street no filter.
0:17.0	I'm already having the body language.
0:19.0	To me, we are the most beautiful creatures in the whole world.
0:22.0	Black people. Zora, she was always... most beautiful.
0:23.0	Zorra, she was always unapologetically, southern, unabashedly black.
0:28.0	Black is beautiful.
0:30.0	Greenhood.
0:32.0	They want me to be like this and dealing with just because they're scared to me.
0:37.0	But I don't feel like that's my job to humble myself to show you that I'm not a threat.
0:41.0	We've been under siege and it has forced us into some quite distorted,
0:46.1	self-conceptions.
0:47.1	Being brave to me about going outside and being confident in my skin
0:52.1	implies that there's a problem with my skin.
0:57.0	Welcome to the show, I'm Kai Wright.
1:00.0	As we've been poking at the idea of Black History Month all this February, I've been thinking about Zora Neil Hurston,
1:06.5	and particularly about her use of language, how she used it on the page, but also how she used it herself, the way she danced with words.
1:15.5	There's this great radio interview in the WNYC Archives. It's a
1:19.2	1943 conversation between her and the famous radio personality Mary Margaret McBride from a
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

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

Generated transcripts are the property of WNYC Studios and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.