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Thanks so much. This is our body politic.

I'm Farai Chidea.

This week, we dive deeper into reproductive rights in Texas

and try to figure out what's really going on with Facebook

and what that will mean for communities of color especially.

First, a conversation with the MacArthur Fellow.

Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet, lawyer, and 2021 MacArthur Fellow.

He spent over eight years in prison and told me how reading books really planted the seed

of what his career

would become. Right before the 2020 election, Betts published an op-ed in the New York Times

magazine, knitting together his experience of prison, a traumatic harm done to his mother, and the history

of politicians who impact the criminal legal system, like then candidate for Vice President

Kamala Harris. I asked him on to tell me about how he thinks about the intricacies of the topic

and his poetry. Welcome to our body politic, Duane. Thank you. I'm excited to be here.

About a year ago, you wrote that piece. It came out October 20th of 2020. And among other things,

you talk about your mom having been sexually assaulted. Why did you decide to write about that

in that New York Times piece? And part of it is if you go back to 1984, if you go back to the early 1990s, when we talked

about national policy, even though it had a real direct influence on how I lived my life,

...