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Notes from America with Kai Wright

The Dawn of ‘Anti-Racist’ America

Notes from America with Kai Wright

WNYC Studios

News Commentary, Politics, History, News

4.41.5K Ratings

🗓️ 7 June 2021

⏱️ 51 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Ibram X. Kendi reflects on a shifting political culture -- and the fierce backlash against it. Plus, a remembrance of the 1921 Tulsa massacre. With five best-selling books, including How to Be an Antiracist and Four Hundred Souls, Kendi has been at the center of the nation’s racial reckoning over the past year. He talks with Kai about the ideas people have found most challenging, and about his new podcast, Be Antiracist, which launches on June 9th. Then, listeners tell us what they’ve learned about the 1921 massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, as Kai talks with KalaLea, host and producer of Blindspot: Tulsa Burning. The six-episode season from The HISTORY® Channel and WNYC Studios explores the racial terror that destroyed the Greenwood district - and its continued impact today - through conversations with descendants, historians, and local activists. Companion listening for this episode: The ‘Beautiful Experiments’ Left Out of Black History (Feb 8, 2021) Saidiya Hartman introduces Kai to the young women whose radical lives were obscured by respectability politics, in the second installment of our Future of Black History series. One Family’s Land of Opportunity (Nov 30, 2020) A family’s legend about "40 acres and a mule” takes host Kai Wright on a fact checking mission to the Mississippi Delta. He finds an unexpected solution to wealth inequality in the U.S. “The United States of Anxiety” airs live on Sunday evenings at 6pm ET. The podcast episodes are lightly edited from our live broadcasts. To catch all the action, tune into the show on Sunday nights via the stream on WNYC.org/anxiety or tell your smart speakers to play WNYC. We want to hear from you! Connect with us on Twitter @WNYC using the hashtag #USofAnxiety or email us at [email protected].

Transcript

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0:00.0

This is the United States of Anxiety, a show about the unfinished business of our history and its grip on our future.

0:08.0

When somebody tells me that they don't see race, I say, I mean, that's fine. You can choose not to see the sky, but it exists.

0:15.0

There are a lot of things wrong with anti-racism. There are some good things, but they're just as many that hold us back from helping black people who need help.

0:22.7

I might be complicit in this system.

0:25.2

I might be sustaining that same white supremacy

0:28.0

and passing it on to my students.

0:29.6

Show me the bad child.

0:31.0

Why is he the bad child? Because he is black? We live in the land of the free and the

0:35.4

home of the brave. White people are the free and people of color have to be

0:38.8

brave. I want this situation to change. So there are a lot of people who thrive in this system,

0:44.0

but a lot of times they are killed, murdered, chased away.

0:47.4

I have lived through the massacre every day.

0:50.5

Our country may forget this history, but I cannot. I will not.

0:57.0

Welcome to the show. I'm Ky Wright. I have spent my entire adult life as a journalist trying to foster smarter, better

1:05.2

conversations about racial inequity for about 25 years now and I have

1:09.8

genuinely never seen as many people ready to meaningfully engage on this as over the past year.

1:16.3

Frankly, the intensity of the backlash is proof enough that something has shifted.

1:21.5

And one big reason for that shift is often cited,

1:25.0

the pressure cooker of the past year,

1:27.0

after four years of a Trump presidency,

1:29.0

made a lot of people ready to hear new ideas.

1:32.0

But here's what's said less often.

...

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