Kai: Hey, it's Kai. I am here to make good on a promise from a few weeks ago when we celebrated what would have been the hundredth birthday of James Baldwin. In a recent episode, I spoke with journalist and professor Razia Iqbal about a new audio series she's hosting called Notes on a Native Son. 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 still really resonates with them and inspires their own work.

I promised back then that you'd be able to hear that whole series right here in the podcast feed for Notes From America. I am happy to share episode one with you right now. Here's the first installment of Notes on a Native Son.

Razia Iqbal: Hello. My name is Razia Iqbal. Welcome to the first episode of a new podcast, Notes on a Native Son, 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.

James Baldwin: I was called all kinds of names. I had all kinds of labels on me before I was 19 years old. Well, you had to tell the world I'm not your label. The label belongs to you, it doesn't belong to me. I had to defeat the world's intentions. The only way I could do that was to make it very clear that I am not at all what I seem to be to you. I know what you are seeing, but I'm not that person. I will make you know it that I'm not that person. How did that make you know that? I'm Jimmy Baldwin.

Razia: Perhaps, Jimmy Baldwin, the iconoclast, is our subject. In each episode of Notes on a Native Son, we invite a well-known figure to choose a favorite or significant James Baldwin passage. The conversation that ensues tells us as much about Baldwin's story as it does about the person who loves Jimmy as he was known to all who loved him.

A quick word about why me and Baldwin. His words have been a generous gift my whole life. The Harlem-born preacher's son story and his luminous prose may seem like an unlikely insertion in the life of an immigrant South Asian girl growing up in a Muslim family in London. I, too, shunned labels, wanting expansiveness, a bigger sensibility. Baldwin's deep intelligence, his insights into humanity and inhumanity made my heart soar. He and his perspective have been my talisman, my touchstone.

I was a BBC journalist for many decades, and I now teach at Princeton University. After decades in London, today I live in New York, not far from where Jimmy once lived on West End Avenue, and not far from the little hills of stone he stood on in Central Park as a teenager, looking down onto the city that seemed so out of reach, but conquer it he did. No matter how successful Baldwin became, he carried with him Harlem and the history of being Black in the United States.

There are many writers who shun biographies, preferring through the lens of their work to be their own biographers. This podcast tries to get close to that. We have called it Notes on a Native Son after one of Baldwin's most famous autobiographical essays, Notes of a Native Son. The essay clarifies with profound power what he is and what America is on his terms.

Our first guest on Notes on a Native Son is Ta-Nehisi Coates. He is, for some, a writer who is Baldwin's natural heir. Toni Morrison said of him, "I've been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died. Clearly, it is Ta-Nehisi Coates." Coates, like Baldwin, is an essayist and a novelist. His book, Between the World and Me, won the National Book Award in 2015 and catapulted him into the stratosphere of celebrity writer. It had echoes of Baldwin's famous letter to his nephew, The Fire Next Time. Coates wrote to his son about whiteness, race, and what it means to be American.

In the wake of the killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida by an armed civilian, and Coates' school friend, Prince Jones, by police, the safety of Black bodies is also a theme. His critiques of America's first African American president resulted in face to face audiences with Barack Obama. He is a man who’s made a name for himself by taking on the big themes in the way that James Baldwin did.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: I'm reading from James Baldwin's On Being ‘White’…And Other Lies, "And have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion because they think they are white. Because they think they are white, they do not dare confront the ravage and the lie of their history. Because they think they are white, they cannot allow themselves to be tormented by the suspicion that all men are brothers. Because they think they are white, they are looking for or bombing into existence stable population, cheerful natives, and cheap labor because they think they are white."

Razia: Ta-Nehisi Coates, thank you so much for joining our podcast. The extract that you have chosen comes from an essay originally published in 1984 in Essence Magazine. Why did you choose it?

Ta-Nehisi: You know, Baldwin, he had this great ability to say political things beautifully. By beautifully, I don't mean ornately, I don't mean decoratively. I don't mean with purple holes, but in a way that was clarifying. What he's really talking about is what we call today the social construction of race. The social construction of race, of course, is a much clunkier notion.

What he's really talking about in that essay, and really in that quote, is the power of that "construction", the power of the lie of being white to destroy, and really the power of the notion of race itself to destroy. This was a key, key part of Between The World and Me for me in terms of writing it, and it's just been a key part. It's something that I come back to over and over and over again. I mean, literally, in the book I'm writing right now or finishing right now, I find myself coming back to it over and over and over again.

Razia: When did you first start reading James Baldwin? When did you first encounter him?

Ta-Nehisi: In college. Really in college, when I was in college at Howard University. I probably was about 18 or 19 years old. I think the first thing I read was Everybody's Protest Novel because as I recall, I had an English class and you had to read Notes of a Native Son. I can't say that I quite understood him. I didn't quite get what I was reading, but the beauty of the prose struck me, I did get that. I understood that I was reading a great writer.

It struck me in a way that other writers who I was reading at the time did not necessarily strike me. I was aware that there was something different that he was doing, even if I could not quite articulate his politics at the time.

Razia: When you started thinking about writing the book, Between the World and Me, by which time I'm presuming you understood that essay and you understood what he was trying to say in his ideas of the construction, the social construction of race, how did that then be the thing that was going to inform that book? Of course, it also has echoes of his essay, The Fire Next Time, which was written to his nephew and so on, and Between the World and Me is written to your son. How did it clarify your mind? At what stage were you at where you thought, this is the letter I want to write, this is what I want to say?

Ta-Nehisi: Part of the problem is you find yourself in a system that is created by the people or the group that has enslaved, oppressed, segregated, et cetera. They haven't just enslaved, oppressed, and segregated, they have ordered reality. I think one of the tasks of those of us who really seek to write in an original way with an original politics is, how do you write against your oppressor, your enslaver, your segregator, however you want to call it, without their language because that language has ordered your reality?

I speak very specifically because Between the World and Me is very much about that. It's about the words we use to describe things. How do you say it differently? What are going to be the new words? Step one is you say, okay, the frame is fine, the capitalism is fine, the sexism is fine, the homophobia is fine. If I can just paint the world black, then I'll be okay. Then you start looking a little deeper, and you say, no, that's wrong, that's wrong, that's wrong. How do I create a politic that integrates all of that?

For me as a writer, how do I create a politic that integrates all of that and says it in a way that is beautiful? Once again, I do not mean in a way that is flowery and ornate. I mean, in a way that really, really clarifies, that illuminates. It makes you feel like you've seen something that you did not see before because that really is the task. It is extremely, extremely difficult to do. You are trying not to repeat the mistakes of a society that you've been raised in and suffused in.

Razia: The book that you wrote, which is suffused with this idea of the quote that you've chosen from On Being ‘White’…And Other Lies is also an actual letter to your son. I wonder, at what point did you think, this is the way I want to do it because this is about him as much as it is about what I think and what I think is going on in society?

Ta-Nehisi: That was a decision that was made relatively late. To be honest with you, it was a literary decision. It was because I was trying to focus my words. I think, like with any piece of writing, I know what I'm trying to do is I'm really trying to pull the reader as close to me as I can to make it a very, very intimate experience. How do you do that? The way I chose to do with Between the World and Me was to think of the person that was probably closest to me in terms of who I would be having this discussion with.

Razia: When you think about the moment when you started to understand what his writing was saying, so beyond being 18 and at Howard, did you go back to those essays or did you start reading his novel?

Ta-Nehisi: I did. Actually, I don't think I reread Baldwin again. I mean, I would read them here and there. There were certain essays I read, but I don't think I really did a serious study again until 2011, 2012, so about the time I started thinking about Between the World and Me. You know what I felt? I felt like, A, to be candid. I'm not saying this was true, but I felt like there wasn't really-- like that we had lost something, that there wasn't anybody really writing like that. That's what I felt like.

I felt like there were people whose politics were insightful and their political writing was really, really insightful. I felt like there were novelists and poets who wrote beautifully, but this idea that the essay should be a beautiful thing, that it really should be a work of literature, and that fact could be married to a kind of immediacy where one felt our politics was, I felt like that was not there. It's a crazy thing to feel that, and then to think, well, why don't I try it? That's what I thought.

There have been, I think, a lot of people who have tried, and if I may be so bold, I think the thing that they miss is because Baldwin has become such a huge figure, because the idea of him has become so huge, because he's on posters, because there's art about him, because there are clips shared about him, it is really easy to miss the fact that he was one of the greatest essayists of the 20th century, and maybe the greatest. He was a phenomenal writer, and the image obscures that.

I think there are a lot of people maybe who say, okay, I'm going to do what he did, but they don't realize that the seed of it really is the words. It's sentences, it's verbs, it's an understanding of punctuation, it's rhythm, it's all that. It actually is quite technical and very fundamental. It is not a matter. I mean, he was a great speaker, I'm not degrading that, but the thing that I really believe that lives is the words.

Razia: I'm so interested in the moment that you decided that you were going to make an attempt at trying to write the way in which you were feeling about that particular idea of race. So in the way in which you were living these ideas, you were living them under the first African-American president in the United States. I mean, how much did that inform your desire to try and talk about race as a construct in the way that you chose to do it in that moment?

Ta-Nehisi: I mean, it informed it a lot. I think what I remember is there were a couple things going on. First, we had a Black president, and Trayvon Martin had been killed. I was thinking about that. President Obama used to have this tradition where he would call in our reporters and journalists, and they would have off the record conversations. I had criticized him a couple times, and he would make a point of calling folks in who had maybe had written something about him. Once I had come in and he had brought up the criticism.

Second time I came back, we had this back and forth, and I was walking home. Actually, I'm sorry. I decided to walk from the White House to Union Station 'cause I was trying to get my thoughts right. I just sat here with the first Black president. That was about the time I was rereading The Fire Next Time. It's just all these thoughts were mixing in my head. Then at the same time, there was something that was much, much older, and that was the killing of my friend Prince Jones, the murder of Prince Jones. That was in my head, too. I felt like I had never really dealt with that like I should.

I got to Union Station, and I called my editor, Chris Jackson and I talked about it. Most people have book ideas. They say, okay, this is the idea for the book. I didn't really have that. I just felt like this is a moment, and there should be something in this moment that really commemorates the time.

Razia: I can't allow us to be in this moment in the conversation without asking you if you would be willing to say something of the nature of that conversation between you and President Obama.

Ta-Nehisi: He had this habit of, when he talked to Black audiences, really harping on-- How do I put this? I want to put this in the best light. Really talking about the need for a collective morality among them and asserting that that collective morality would, in fact, be key in remedying some of the socioeconomic gaps between Black people and America. I just didn't think that was true. I think it's less true even today than I did then. I really just thought it was completely untrue. I wrote that and I phrased it very aggressively.

As I recall, he had gone to Morehouse and said this, and then his wife, Michelle Obama, the first lady, had done the same at Bowie, and so I just said it. I don't think I was disrespectful or anything, but I said it very directly and very clearly, and he didn't appreciate it. I get it. I don't know how you're the first Black president and be any other way. If that's what the aim is, then I get it. As writers, like I said, our job is to clarify. Part of my job is to point out when that rhetoric does not quite match reality. I felt that very strongly.

He wasn't rude. It wasn't like he brought me in there and cursed me out or x, y, and z. I was a lot younger, and I think I probably was not-- I didn't understand what I was walking into or I didn't understand quite what was going on. He just made his disagreement clear. We went back and forth a couple times. As I'm thinking about it, that actually was the first one, and the second one was something else I criticized him on. That really was the one. That was one where he was extremely contentious back.

I don't want to paint the wrong pictures, not like he was rude or anything. I think he was very appreciative of the debate, but the fact that it had happened, it just really struck me, and I just felt like I was in the middle of something. I didn't know what it was, and I didn't know what I was going to write. I called my editor, and then I called my agent, Gloria Loomis, who actually knew Baldwin.

Razia: Wow.

Ta-Nehisi: I told her, I said, "I'm rereading The Fire Next Time. My God, this is incredible. Why aren't people writing like this now?" She said, 'Well, you know, there was only one Jimmy. There was only one Jimmy." She said, "Listen, nobody can be Jimmy." She said, "But I think you might be able to do it." [laughs] That's what she said to me. She said, "Well, you want to try? I think, look, a lot of people try to [unintelligible 00:20:38], but I think you might--"

My agent has said the same thing. He said, "Well, the road is littered with writers, all these attempts to redo Fire Next Time, the fire this time, the fire that. The water, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The road is littered with people trying to do this. He said, "I think you might be on to something." That meant a lot.

Razia: I'm sure it did, and it obviously was the spur for you to write what you did go on to write. I'm so interested in this position you found yourself in, in that moment because I'm thinking so much about Baldwin in his time. He knew all the leading figures inside the civil rights movement. He also knew Robert Kennedy. There was this space that he occupied, which feels, in the context of what your agent said to you was, there is only one Jimmy. I think we can all agree, there is a consensus that he was indeed a unique figure.

It does feel as though both the reception of the book, as well as what Toni Morrison said about you, that she was worried about the void that Baldwin's death left and that you were the natural inheritor of that. What's your view of that, that coupling of you with Baldwin in that way?

Ta-Nehisi: I take it as a high honor. Like I said, he was the inspiration, so it's not like I can run away from it. No writer's going to be the same as another writer. You're never going to be the same. If I had to pick an essayist who was the biggest inspiration for my nonfiction, if I had to pick lineage, that's who it would be. He would be my grandfather or my father, whatever. That's what I would say.

The fact that Toni Morrison, who, again, knew Baldwin, saw that without prompting. I had never talked to her about this. We had not had a conversation about this. She didn't do a ton of blurbs. For somebody who knew him, read him, et cetera, to say that, I accept it, and the way I accept it is not just as a compliment but as a charge. I've always said this, to me, that meant that I had to live that out. I had to make myself worthy of it. That was how I felt. I felt like I had to make myself worthy of it, and I still feel like that.

Razia: We'll take a short break now. More from Ta-Nehisi Coates when we come back. This is Notes on a Native Sun with me, Razia Iqbal. Let's remind ourselves of that quote that Ta-Nehisi Coates has chosen, "And have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion because they think they are white. Because they think they are white, they do not dare confront the ravage and the lie of their history. Because they think they are white, they cannot allow themselves to be tormented by the suspicion that all men are brothers because they think they are white, they are looking for or bombing into existence stable populations, cheerful natives, and cheap labor because they think they are white."

You're listening to Notes on a Native Son with Razia Iqbal.

Just going back to the quote that you chose and the essay it appears in, so this was very much towards the end of James Baldwin's life when he wrote this essay. I wonder about the shift for you that had taken place in him because in earlier essays, there were similar themes in so many of the essays he wrote about race. In this one, it feels as though he is basically outlining what he had always thought, which was that being Black was something that white people imposed on Black people. That construct allowed them to subjugate Black people, but it felt like a clarifying exposition of his ideas that he had been playing around with in different scenarios for many, many decades.

Ta-Nehisi: I think it's hard to find the words. It's really, really hard to find the words. It's very difficult. Sometimes it takes decades, sometimes it takes years to just realize, oh, wait, this is a lie. The word I'm looking for is lie. To say something as radical as to be white is a lie. One of the things he does that is quite beautiful is the subtext of that essay is he does not say white people themselves, in their essence, are lies. He says, listen, there were Jewish people who came here. There were Scottish people that came here. There were people who came. He is differentiating between ethnicity and race.

What he's saying is, in order to become white, you had to leave all of that behind, you had to leave your ethnicity behind for the power of being white, which is very different from being Black, because to be Black American is an ethnicity as much as it is a racial characterization. Within the racial characterization of Black, of course, there are all sorts of ethnicity, Jamaican-Americans who come here, there are Nigerian-Americans who come here. They're Black Americans from the south. They're black Americans from the Mid-Atlantic, like I am. They're black Americans from West Coast. All of us bringing our ethnic identity with us.

In that, when I read that, something really clarified for me, and that is, I live for the day when I am no longer racially Black. I live for that. I don't live for the day when Black ethnicity or Black culture is extinguished. I'm not looking for that anymore that I would want the culture of any other group extinguished. This notion that we belong to races, it's a lie. It's really, really important to state that, I think, repeatedly.

Razia: In your book, you alluded to the death of your friend, Prince Jones, and also Trayvon Martin. Since then, of course, we've seen other murders of young Black men at the hands of the state, the police, et cetera. The most notorious of all, of course, the murder of George Floyd. When you reflect on what you have learned from Baldwin, from writing your own book, how much do you think about what's required in order for those sorts of things to shift, for that to stop happening time and time again?

Ta-Nehisi: A lot. I think about it a lot. I probably think about it personally a lot because I think about what's required of me. It's not small, it's not small at all because the forces that seek to uphold these systems or this system, you are outnumbered and you are outgunned, and there's not much time. Time is not on your side. We live in an era where the planet is on fire and you can't extract that fact from everything else, from all these other systems.

I think at the root of it, it's the notion that every single resource, be it human, be it material, can be used, can be plundered, can be exploited for profit, can be put on a market in some way that that ultimately is the ruling ideal. In that way, you can see it all connected. How do you reject that? How do you create a world in which that is not the ruling notion? That’s hard, but I think writers have a real important role to play in that because writers create language. They create ways of talking, and thus, ways of clarifying things. I actually think the writer's role in that is sacred.

Razia: Earlier on in the conversation, I would expect you to talk about when people compare you to Baldwin, that you see it as an honor. I wonder what you feel on a day-to-day basis. Is he a talisman for you? Is he somebody whose spirit you have with you as a writer?

Ta-Nehisi: Yes, every day. It's just a reminder to write harder. Finding that language, it is excruciating. It feels like physical labor. You write a sentence, and it's like, no, that's not it. Then you rewrite the sentence, no, that's not it. No, that's not it. You just do that for hours on end. I have days where I got to lay on the bed afterwards, days when my head hurts from doing it so much.

Then I read something, like I started this interview reading, and you think, oh, wow, that's what you're trying to get to. That's the place you're trying to get to. It's extremely, extremely difficult to know something, to reach the understanding of something, and then to find language for it is hard. I need people who've done it before me to remind me that it is a possible thing.

Razia: It's so powerful to hear you talk about his presence for you. He obviously matters a great deal to so many people. You had alluded earlier to this idea of the memes, the clips, the t-shirts, the mugs, whatever, the posters. It is ubiquitous. I wonder how you reflect on his place in society beyond what he means to you very personally as a writer, but also very politically as a writer, as you've articulated.

Ta-Nehisi: That's a hard question because I don't think-- and maybe it's because of the nature of my word. I see the image of him, but when I think of Baldwin, I think of his words. That's just, I think, because of who I am. If you were talking to somebody from the LGBT community, for instance, who was not a writer, they might say something totally-- They might say that the fact that this guy was out here and he was public and he was gay and he did not-- that meant a lot to me and that gave me courage. I think maybe for other people from other walks of life with other professions, they probably can see other things, but for me, it really just comes back to the writing at the end of the day.

Razia: Is it the essays more than the novels for you, because you also have written both?

Ta-Nehisi: It's probably the essays more than the fiction. To be honest with you, I read some of Baldwin's fiction again when I was much younger. Just like I did the essays, I probably need to go through a period of studying the fiction. To be honest, I'm a little scared because a number of people, the prevailing opinion is that the essays are better. I don't want to be disappointed. You know what I mean? I have avoided them for that reason, which is not a good reason, man. That's not really charitable either.

Razia: I would say to you, as someone who has read his novels time and again, I think he is an exceptional novelist.

Ta-Nehisi: Thank you for saying that.

Razia: I really do think he is. For me, his ambition in those first two novels, Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni's Room, feel to me like a writer who is embodying being a writer in a way that is so transformative for the reader. He is so ambitious. Go Tell It on the Mountain is clearly autobiographical, and Giovanni's Room, of course, is informed by the fact that he wants to explore the relationship between two men. What does he do? He explores the relationship between two white men. I would urge you to go back, and I don't think you'll be disappointed with the novels.

Ta-Nehisi: Thank you. I appreciate that. I've gotten scared off, but I appreciate that, and I need to do it. I really do need to do it.

Razia: I want to ask you about your son because Between the World and Me was written to him, and you explained the kind of development of that. It wasn't originally meant to be that. I wonder to what extent, given that he is the next generation, you also impart to him your love for Baldwin and your love for the ideas that Baldwin continues to teach us about.

Ta-Nehisi: That's such a great question. When he was younger, I always gave him books, and I don't think I ever gave him a James Baldwin book. I had Kurt Vonnegut, I gave him Doctorow, Toni Morrison. He's read a lot, but I never gave-- That's a great question. I've actually never said, yo, you should read this. Maybe I'll do that. I don't know if he's ever read The Fire Next Time. I actually don't know.

Razia: Presumably he has read Between the World and Me.

Ta-Nehisi: Yes. He read it before it came out because I wanted him to be okay with it.

Razia: The nature of your conversations about that book, if you would be willing to share some.

Ta-Nehisi: Sure. I mean, they weren't very profound because most of what was in the book, I had already told them. Like I said, it was so much of a literary device that, you know, it was not real new information in the book for him.

Razia: I'm imagining that you get asked to speak to young people often. I don't know how often you take up that role, but it seems to me that I'm sure you are in much demand. When you do speak to young people, not least at Howard, I wonder the extent to which that Mecca that you described in Between the World and Me has changed and how much optimism and hope you have in the context of the way in which young people are informed about these issues.

Ta-Nehisi: There's no probably place where I feel more hopeful than when I'm on my way to class there. It's a beautiful thing because you're in a country where you are bombarded with images and ideas of young Black people doing wrong. You walk onto a few acres in the nation's capital, and you're surrounded by young Black people who are just trying to improve themselves. It's a remarkable thing. Then to walk into a classroom and they're trying to write.

I've had moments when I was having a bad day because of something else in my profession, and I've just sat out on the yard and just watched young folks walk by. It's a very, very beautiful and powerful thing.

Razia: Does it ever feel like a burden for you, even ever so slightly, that you were talked about in the same breath as Baldwin, seen as somebody who carried that mantle, or is it just a kind of welcome responsibility that you're happy to take on?

Ta-Nehisi: No, it doesn't feel like a burden. I think what I feel sometimes is, I think-- I was telling my wife this yesterday. I think a lot of times I have difficulty seeing myself. I think sometimes when I'm writing about things or saying things, it's just hard for me to believe that I'm actually the person doing it, as weird as that sounds.

Razia: Well, I was just going to ask you what you meant by you having difficulty seeing yourself because the perception people have of you in the world, the literary world, the political world, the journalistic world, is very present and well-defined. I wonder what you mean by that.

Ta-Nehisi: Whatever that thing is, it probably is not recognizable to me, which doesn't mean it's not true, by the way, but it's become clear to me that I really am hostage to my own head. Between the World and Me was published when I was 40, I was going on 40 years old. By that time, I was a pretty well-formed person, and so my notions of who I was or who I am are probably locked in right there. Whereas the idea of who I am to the rest of the world came after that. There's this distance between that and who I feel myself to be. I'm sometimes very uncomfortable with that.

Razia: I often think this about Baldwin to bring it back to him. I think that very often, people see him through the lens of politics, as opposed to through the lens of him being a writer. They see him as emblematic and a spokesperson, et cetera, as opposed to seeing him as a writer. The life, of course, informs the writing, but it's the writing that makes the life.

Ta-Nehisi: I think the other part of this is your identity is not solely up to you, and that's just the truth. You don't get to always name yourself. You're part of it, but if folks look at James Baldwin talking and they see something of themselves in him, or they see a painting or a portrait of him and they see something that they recognize or something that they find is beautiful, that's their right to do that, too.

One of the things that I got really clear on is, look, the books belong to me during a period in which I'm writing them, and then they don't anymore. That's true of everything. That's true of this interview. People will listen to this interview and they'll hear things. Whether that was what I intended to say or not is only partially relevant. I think part of it is just being okay with that.

Razia: Ta-Nehisi Coates. Thank you so much for speaking with us.

Ta-Nehisi: Thank you. It's a pleasure.

Razia: Ta-Nehisi Coates, speaking to me, Razia Iqbal. This has been Notes on a Native Son, a new podcast about James Baldwin, brought to you by WNYC Studios and sponsored by the School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University. In the next episode, we'll hear from the civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson. It is a Sea Salt and Mango Production produced by Tony Phillips. The researcher is Navani Rachumallu. Lindsay Foster Thomas is the executive producer for WNYC Studios, and Karen Frillman is our editor. Original music is by Gary Washington. The sound designer and engineer is Axel Kacoutié. Special thanks to Dean Amani Jamal of Princeton University.

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.