Rap On Trial

Code Switch

NPR

Society & Culture

4.6 • 14.5K Ratings

🗓️ 18 July 2018

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Olutosin Oduwole was a college student and aspiring hip hop star when he was charged with "attempting to make a terrorist threat." Did public perceptions of rap music play a role? This week we're tagging in our friends at Hidden Brain to tell this story.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Code Switch listeners, we've got some brand new content headed your way that were
0:03.4	hard at work on.
0:04.8	So this week, we're bringing you a story from our colleague and play cousin, Shankar
0:08.8	Vidhan Thoms podcast, Hidden Brain.
0:11.5	He tells all kinds of stories about the way unconscious bias shapes human behavior.
0:16.2	But just a heads up, there's some language in this episode, some people may find offensive.
0:24.3	On the campus of Southern Illinois University, please find a piece of paper in an unattended
0:29.0	car with some rap lyrics on it and what looks like a threat.
0:33.8	Send two dollars to and then it's a PayPal account.
0:38.8	If the money doesn't reach $50,000 in the next seven days, then a murderous rampage similar
0:46.8	to the Virginia Tech shooting will occur at another highly populated university and then
0:52.8	in all capital letters, this is not a joke.
0:56.1	People on enforcement take this discovery very seriously because the deadliest campus
1:00.7	shooting in US history happened at Virginia Tech just a few months earlier.
1:05.9	And a Southern Illinois undergrad who was an aspiring rapper and producer ends up in custody.
1:11.8	I'm thinking, okay, maybe I have a warrant for it.
1:15.8	Ticket or I really didn't know what was going on.
1:18.8	And so I asked them several times that, hey, can I call my dad?
1:21.8	Like, I'm going to call my dad just to let him know what's going on.
1:24.5	And I call my older brother and they wouldn't let me make any phone calls.
1:28.6	More than a decade later, people still disagree over what really went down.
1:34.3	I'll let Shankar Vedantam take it from here.
	...

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