Hey, Lulu here, whether we are romping through science, music, politics, technology, or feelings,

we seek to leave you seeing the world anew. Radio Lab adventures right on the edge of what we think

we know wherever you get podcasts. This is the takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. What does it mean to

resist oppression? Now, we're able to recognize the direct

forms of resistance, the ordinary people who rise up in rebellion, the workers who refuse to labor

in brutal conditions, the enslaved who steal away in the night risking everything to seek freedom.

But when we look back in our history, searching for these forms of overt resistance,

we sometimes miss the more subtle, hidden ones.

The decision to love, to laugh, to create, and in doing so to claim a right to the fullness of

humanity, even when systems and structures are built to strip that humanity away. Being fully human,

with an interior life all your own, that too is resistance to oppression.

And it is the interior life of the enslaved, which our next guest went searching for in her new

scholarly book.

My name is Tara Bynum, and I'm an assistant professor of English and African American

Studies at the University of Iowa.

In her book, Reading Pleasures, Everyday Black Living in Early America, Professor Bynum

pushes us towards a deeper understanding of the everyday lives of black Americans.

People like Phyllis Wheatley, Minister John Merritt, and pamphleteer David Walker.

She pulls us into their internal worlds and demands we recognize the pleasures our ancestors enjoyed as they lived, even in the context of oppression.

I read this interiority as an invitation into a different story of selfhood, literacy,

and community that pursues a kind of genealogy and ways of reading that privilege matters

of feeling. I read for this interiority because it helps determine just what matters more.

...