Kai Wright Hosts Blindspot: The Plague In The Shadows
Notes from America with Kai Wright
WNYC Studios
4.4 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 26 January 2024
⏱️ 5 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The latest season of the Blindspot podcast brings listeners voices of people who were affected in the early years of the AIDS epidemic, when so little was known about HIV, and so much was misunderstood. It’s also hosted by a familiar voice – Kai Wright, who has covered the impact of HIV and AIDS in communities of color throughout his career as a journalist. Season three of the show, a co-production of The HISTORY Channel and WNYC Studios, is called “The Plague In The Shadows” and Kai introduces us to the series, which you can listen to and subscribe to here.
Tell us what you think. Email us at notes@wnyc.org. Send us a voice message by recording yourself on your phone and emailing us, or record one here. We’re also on Instagram and X (Twitter) @noteswithkai.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, it's Kai, and I want to tell you about a special project I've been working on for many months. |
| 0:08.6 | Some of you may know that for a lot of my career, my journalism, as a reporter and as an editor, was focused on covering the AIDS epidemic, |
| 0:17.4 | a public health crisis that was and still is having an outsized impact on my own communities both as a gay man and as a |
| 0:26.1 | black gay man. In that work I was blessed to meet so many remarkable people all |
| 0:31.9 | over the world who stood up in the fight against AIDS. |
| 0:36.0 | And I carried their stories with me over the past year or so as I joined my colleague Lizzy |
| 0:41.5 | Ratner in revisiting the early history of AIDS in America. |
| 0:44.9 | We've made a series called The Plague in the Shadows. It's the latest season of the |
| 0:50.0 | podcast BlindSpot from WNC and the History Channel and hosted by yours truly. |
| 0:56.4 | In it we look back at the onset of the epidemic and think about what could have been different |
| 1:01.3 | if more people had listened to those who rang the alarm. |
| 1:05.3 | And we meet a lot of the brave people who did in fact step up. |
| 1:10.0 | Here's a preview of what you'll find in the series. |
| 1:16.8 | In the late 1970s and 80s, New York City could be a dangerous place. |
| 1:19.5 | People just started like disappearing. |
| 1:21.5 | Like one day they were there and the next day they were gone. |
| 1:24.0 | Like where did they go? |
| 1:26.0 | New York plagued by violence, drugs and poverty. |
| 1:30.0 | These problems were manufactured by neglect. |
| 1:33.0 | It was not just that it was negligent, it was willful negligence. |
| 1:38.0 | And they gave cover to a new and deadly virus, HIV. |
| 1:44.5 | We said that people had the monster |
... |
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