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Hey it's Kai and I am here to make good on a promise from a few weeks ago when we celebrated

what would have been the 100th birthday of James Baldwin.

So in a recent episode, I spoke with journalist and Professor Rosia Iqbal about a new audio series she's hosting called

Notes on a Native Sun.

It's a collection of conversations with some really heavy hitters in which

she asked them to cite a passage from Baldwin's work that

whole series really resonates with them and inspires their own work.

And I promised back then that you'd be able to hear that whole series right here in the

podcast feed for Notes from America, so I am happy to share episode one with you right now.

Here's the first installment of Notes on a Native Sun.

Hello, my name is Razzier Iqbal.

Welcome to the first episode of a new podcast,

Notes on a Native Sun, about James Baldwin.

This year marks the 100th birth anniversary of a man unique in American

letters. Novelist, essayist, activist, achingly prescient about race and racial politics in America, but also those

connecting ideas, the idealized notion of the American dream and what it means to be

an American.

The list of who James Baldwin is and what he meant is long,

and it also goes completely against what Baldwin might say about himself.

I was called all kinds of names. I had all kinds of labels on me before I was 19 years old.

You had to tell the world I'm not your label. The label belongs to you, it doesn't belong to me.

...