Melissa: Welcome to The Takeaway, I'm Melissa Harris-Perry.

It's good to have you with us as we continue to move toward our final episode on June 2nd. Now, during these weeks, we're taking you behind the scenes of The Takeaway and introducing you to the producers on our team. We're going to highlight some of the great stories they’ve brought to us.

Today, I'm joined by an award-winning sonic storyteller who's crafted some of the most complex, sophisticated, and memorable narratives that you've enjoyed here on The Takeaway. Welcome back to this side of the mic, Mary Steffenhagen.

Mary: Thanks, Melissa.

Melissa: All right, Mary, for listeners, radio can feel like magic but actually, it's a ton of work. What are some of the tasks that you do as a producer?

Mary: Every day is different, but I guess the main things are finding the guests for every interview, researching the stories, we prep you our host with all the info, we write the scripts so often the words that listeners are hearing Melissa say on air are written by me or another producer. Oh yes, we edit the tape, which is sometimes my favorite part. It's pretty Zen actually.

Melissa: Now, you've been with The Takeaway for just over a year now.

Mary: Yes. I started last May when I was hired as a temp and I was told at the time that I was just going to be there for the month but I kept asking to stay and you guys kept keeping me. Then in October, I officially became a permanent producer so here we are.

Melissa: Thank goodness, because if you weren't here, I don't know where we would be. What have you been up to?

Mary: There are a few beats and stories that I've kept coming back to over the past year. One of those is mass incarceration. I think it's really necessary when we talk about the criminal legal system to hear from people who've actually experienced it. There's definitely a place for experts like lawyers or academics, but sometimes you need to hear from someone who's an expert in their own experience. In January, we spoke with a woman named Keri who's currently incarcerated.

Keri: My name is Keri [unintelligible 00:02:09]. I'm in Mabel Bassett Correctional Center in McLoud, Oklahoma.

Melissa: Keri is in her late 30s and she called us from prison in Oklahoma. She's the mother of four children, children she now only gets to see once a month for two and a half hours.

Keri: We've been talking about gratitude a lot lately, and identity. We'll do little activities. Last time we had, they brought paint and canvases. We wrote our names and different traits that we like about ourselves and then we got the paint them. Mostly just talking on the phone and asking about what's going on in their lives. I try my best to be the best mother I can from here. It's very difficult to do, but I know other women have done it before me.

Melissa: She tries to be the best version of herself that she can be. She holds a job in prison and has developed some creative hobbies.

Keri: Well, I actually just got a new job where I'm going to be working in the laundry, but before I was what they call a tray orderly. I would go-- because I live on a unit with older people and some of them are not able to go up to the kitchen to eat, I’d go and I’d make sure they have the correct diet and I picked up the trays and bring them down here. I feel like I'm creative. I like to make things and I've been painting, which is something I'm very new to. I'm not good at it yet. [chuckles]

Melissa: This has been her life for the past six years.

Keri: I'm coming to the end of my sixth year. They had given me 30 years and I have to serve 85% of that, which is about 25 and a half years and so I would say another 19 years.

Melissa: Sentenced to 30 years and serving at least 25 and a half, her children will be grown long before she gets out, but Keri wasn't convicted for something she did. She was convicted for something the State of Oklahoma said she didn't do.

Keri: Because I really do feel like I did everything I could, but in this state, they believe that a woman is supposed to be able to, I don't know, take control of the situation like that and that is our job as mothers to protect our children. I agree with that, but whenever you're in a violent relationship like I was, you can only do so much, especially when you were under duress yourself and you've been abused for so long.

Mary: Keri had been in an abusive relationship. Her abuser was finally arrested and charged, but so was she. She was convicted of a crime called failure to protect. The state said that she was guilty of not protecting her children from his abuse. You heard that she was given 30 years’ time, but what's even more shocking is that her abuser got a lighter sentence.

Melissa: The details of her story are just sickening. We learned that her experience is not at all entirely unique.

Mary: That's right. I first learned of Keri’s story from a reporter at Mother Jones, Samantha Michaels. I got in touch with Samantha and she set up the conversation with Keri, so huge thanks to her. Samantha led an investigation into Oklahoma's failure to protect laws last year and she found that 90% of people incarcerated for this in the state are women.

Melissa: This isn't isolated to Oklahoma. It's part of an entire phenomenon called criminalized survival as we learned from Dr. Alisa Bierria, who is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender Studies at UCLA.

Dr. Alisa Bierria: People who experience the abuse to prison pipeline, there are a number of ways in which they find themselves in this pipeline trying to navigate the conditions of domestic violence such as acting in self-defense, removing children from abusive people, protecting children from abusive people, or being coerced into acting as an accomplice for their abusers, securing resources needed to live. There are a number of paths. If we think about survivors, how we treat survivors in our community. We know that we punish survivors of domestic and sexual violence regularly. We stigmatize them, blame them and so on.

This kind of thing merges into a really brutal criminal legal system that is mandated to essentially incarcerate as many people as possible for as long as possible. Those two things come together and very efficiently criminalizes survivors and puts them in prison. There's no way to disentangle the experience of gender-based violence and the experience of gender-based punishment.

Mary: When I spoke with Keri in Oklahoma, I just wanted to get to know her. We actually had some stuff in common, like we want to get better at painting and we hate how difficult oil paint can be. It's just one of the things that she does with her time.

Melissa: It reminds me of a conversation we had about doing time with a different Keri.

Mary: Yes, Keri Blakinger. She's a reporter at the LA Times and she's also formerly incarcerated. Let's listen to her read a bit from her memoir.

Keri Blakinger: Even when they're quiet, jails have a distinct sound. Every whisper ricochets off the cinderblock walls and heavy steel doors into a muffled cacophony, the echoing soundtrack of your mistakes in stereo.

Melissa: This is Keri Blakinger.

Keri Blakinger: I'm a reporter and the author of Corrections in Ink.

Melissa: Corrections in Ink is Blakinger's memoir and it's about the time she spent incarcerated in New York State.

Keri Blakinger: Time melts, watches are banned, there is no clock. Sometimes there's a microwave that you can use to tell time, but sometimes the guards take that away maybe because you've pissed them off or maybe because other inmates want it so instead, sound becomes your sundial.

Melissa: Growing up, Keri was a rising star in competitive figure skating but an eating disorder and drug addictions set her down a different path.

Keri Blakinger: The buzz clunk when the guards first pop the cell block door means it's 7:00 AM. The rolling lunch carts mean it's noon. The crackle of the intercom announcing count means it's 3:00 PM. Your day is metered out by the noises of incarceration, an inescapable score that restarts every day and plays on a seemingly endless loop.

Mary: I want to shout out our sound director Jake Howard here for that creative sound design. I remember I came to him like, "Hey, can you do some ambient clock sound?" and he just ran with that and he made this.

Melissa: This one was so powerful. You probably know my husband listens to our show every day, but growing up in Louisiana, when he was in his 20s, he was arrested for unpaid parking tickets. He was actually jailed for two nights and the experience was terrible. In fact, this story was so evocative he said he had to turn it off. He just couldn't even listen to the first broadcast.

Mary: Let's listen to a bit of your conversation with Keri.

Keri Blakinger: Solitary is like being buried alive. There's no clock, you have no sense of time. The only voices you're hearing are muffled echoes shouting through the vents or the toilet or whatever- -noise comes in under your door. It so fundamentally eats away at two of the really key things about what it means to be human, right? One of the ways that we see ourselves as human is in relation to other people, how we relate to other people, self versus other, and solitary cuts that off. You don't have that contact with other people anymore, and you also lose so much of your ability to have any agency.

Melissa: What does it mean to be human?

Kate Blakinger: Some of the moments that really stand out to me when I was locked up are these rare moments of communal joy, which do happen in prison. It's not every day, it's not all the time. It feels like you're stealing this moment of happiness from a place that is meant to prevent it, but there would be moments.

There was one time. I hadn't been in very long and I was hitting the gym. I was very new to prison. I'd just gone from county jail to state prison and I was very new. I was in the gym and I was there with another girl, who was also new. We were on the stair steppers, I think. We're just stepping away and there's music playing in the background. Then Kelly Clarkson's Since You've Been Gone comes on.

[music]

Kelly Clarkson: Guess you never felt that way.

But since you've been gone,

I can breathe for the first time.

I'm so moving on.

Kate Blakinger: It was so wild. It was like a flash mob almost, not dancing but just singing. Everybody started singing and you've got these tough women that have done a lot of time over by the weight piles and stuff and everybody was singing this. I looked at the girl next to me like, "Am I really seeing this? This is so wild, Prison the Musical?" It was just this moment of everybody singing along. That community, that ability to relate to other people and exist in community with other people I think is one of the most enduring things about being human that you reach for even in prison.

[music]

Kelly Clarkson: Since you've been gone.

Since you've been gone.

Melissa: Keri's voice is so memorable. We've had her on the show a few times now for her reporting for The Marshall Project and for The LA Times.

Mary: Yes, she does great work. I've always remembered something that another guest once said. That's Professor Marcus Kondkar, who works with men serving life without parole in Louisiana.

Professor Marcus Kondkar: It's one of the consequences of designing prisons to keep people in is that they keep the rest of us out. The people who are actually serving these very long sentences remain abstraction to us.

Mary: The system wants us to forget about them. Whenever we had an opportunity to hear from folks in the system directly, we took it. That's not always a priority in media. I'm really proud of The Takeaway for doing that.

[music]

Melissa: All right, Mary. What are we going to hear next?

Mary: I want to revisit a piece that has a lot of meaning for me, and I know it does for you too, Melissa. A year ago, we covered a pattern of sexual abuse and cover-ups in the Southern Baptist Convention detailed by a new third party investigation. We spoke with Robert Downing, who had been investigating the SBC at The Houston Chronicle. He's now a reporter at The Texas Tribune.

Robert Downing: One of the things that survivors have worn for years is that the lack of communication or consistent ordination standards or really anything had made the SBC a perfect system for predators to flourish. You get to be ordained at a small local church just by convincing a few people that God called you to service. Then you can just take that credential and move all across the country, all across the world, really. It gets progressively harder for people to track where you actually were ordained as you just keep moving through that system.

Mary: We also heard from Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Professor of History and Gender Studies at Calvin University. She's the author of Jesus and John Wayne, a book exploring how hyper-masculinity in evangelical circles allows abuse to flourish.

Kristin Kobes Du Mez: Why are we encountering such levels of egregious abuse within a religious organization? Not just any religious organization, but the Southern Baptist Convention has been at the forefront in American society for pushing for sexual morality. That has been an organizing principle. The SBC since the late '70s, through the conservative resurgence, the leadership of Paul Pressler and Paige Patterson, both men who have been implicated in abuse and covering up abuse now, has really dictated the direction of the SBC, very conservative, upholding patriarchal authority, the submission of women, and very strict norms of sexual morality.

This is the institution that is now, as we see, credibly accused of covering up for decades, their own pastor's abuse of women, of children, in some cases, of men as well. This is a crisis of faith for many survivors. It has been for a long time. They've known that this is the real SBC, that this is part of who the SBC is. Now, the rest of the church gets to see this is who they are.

[music]

Melissa: Listening to that has me angry all over again.

Mary: Same. It was only my second month at The Takeaway, and I think it was really the first time I got to work with you on a script in real time. It was really motivating to see the passion you were pouring into this.

Melissa: Yes. Fueled by some righteous anger.

Mary: Exactly.

Melissa: I felt it too, especially when we heard from two women who had been abused by church leaders and had their reports covered up and dismissed. We spoke with Christa Brown, a survivor who's been on the front lines of the fight for accountability for decades.

Christa Brown: Thank you for your anger because I think that is a righteous anger. I feel it too and I have felt it for years. That anger is what helps you give me hope because I believe that anger is a reflection of a faith I still hold in the shared bonds of a caring humanity. I am grateful for that.

It is all well and good for them to talk about what they will do in the future, to say that they will do better in the future, and maybe even to actually do better in the future. But there must also be a reckoning with the past and with the enormous harm that they allowed on their watch because no one should ever forget. Southern Baptist leaders knew. They knew that pastors were raping kids and congregants. They knew. They let it happen. They chose to do nothing. They knew. They let it happen. They chose to do nothing.

[music]

Mary: I was really moved when I heard that Christa's public fight gave another survivor the courage to speak up about her own abuse. This is Hannah-Kate Williams.

Hannah-Kate Williams: I have seen the example of Christa since I was just a kid. Christa was the only voice speaking into the Southern Baptist Convention's abuse that I ever witnessed as a child. She was at the convention where I attended with my abuser and she was speaking out truth. She was maligned and she was called crazy and she was disbelieved. It's honestly because of her example that I'm even alive today. When I see people threatening me, when I see people saying that I'm crazy, that my voice doesn't matter, I think back to being a kid and seeing Christa having the only visceral reaction to the abuse. I think she's why I keep going.

Christa Brown: Hannah-Kate, I love you. I feel as though across time and space that we stand together shoulder to shoulder. This fight, it is a long, long game, a multi-generational, ultra-marathon relay, and we are in it together. As much as you say that you looked to me, I also look to you because I know that you are the future of this fight and I am so grateful for you.

[music]

Melissa: The fact that Hannah-Kate was just a little girl when she saw this from Christa. It's just this pattern, this predatory pattern of abuse in the SBC has been going on for generations.

Mary: I actually heard from Hannah-Kate not long ago. She told me that out of the many media interviews that she's done over the past few years, her interview with The Takeaway was the most accurate and the most trauma-informed.

Melissa: That means a lot to me. It says a lot about the production that you did- -to get us to that moment because trying to talk with folks in some of the worst moments and about some of the worst moments of their life, it's tough, and we want people to lead that experience knowing that they are more than just a story.

[music]

Mary: One of the things that I've loved is the variety of quirky and surprising and weird stories I've been able to produce. So many of them came about just because I noticed something and asked, "Hey, what's up with this?” and you guys let me run with it.

Melissa: Give me an example.

Mary: Well, Melissa, remember when I asked, “Why do Americans love trains so much?”

Melissa: You had no idea how long I had been waiting for someone to ask me that question.

Mary: Your enthusiasm transformed this into a three-part mini-series about the impact of trains on America's labor and civil rights movements and our entire culture. That's all up at thetakeaway.org for anyone who wants to listen to the full story. Here's one of my favorite fun facts that I learned while producing this series.

Roger Grant: The railroads invented time zones.

Mary: In 1883, major railroads got together to sync up their clocks on a day forever known as the Day of Two Noons.

Melissa: That makes it sound like a bunch of guys moving their clocks ahead or behind a few hours was so dramatic.

Mary: I know, right? Probably overstating it. I was also really fascinated by this tidbit about how trains helped spread American religious practices from Bob Leinberger at Trains Magazine.

Bob Leinberger: Some of the larger organized faiths in our country, the Catholics, the Baptists, the Episcopalians seized on the idea, “Let's take a railroad car and turn it into a church.” There were a number of chapel cars that ran mainly through the western part of the US and in a lot of these up-and-coming emerging towns, that was the first church. Some of these, Melissa were fabulous, I mean, stained glass, ornate woodwork. There was at least one that I know of that still exists that has its original pump organ.

Mary: I can't forget about what started this whole freight train, the crucial role that rail workers played and still play in the fights for workers' rights. Here's Jeff Shirkey, assistant Professor of History at SUNY Empire State

Jeff Shirkey: Because the railroads themselves were this nationally integrated network, there can be a national movement of workers, but early on, it was messy, and spontaneous, and unpredictable. One of the most famous labor conflicts in US history was in the summer of 1877. It's often called The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 or The Great Upheaval, which started on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in Martinsburg, West Virginia, where the workers were told that they were getting a 10% wage cut just a few months after another wage cut that they had got.

The workers just among themselves organized in talking to themselves said that they weren't going to take this anymore and they decided to go on strike. Word of that spread along the tracks to Baltimore and then to Pittsburgh and New York, and then eventually Chicago and St. Louis. Workers, first railroad workers, and then workers in other industries started going on strike.

Mary: Melissa, what's your favorite train fun fact from this series?

Melissa: I think for me it was learning about how American artists and musicians were inspired by the movements and the sounds of the trains. We heard about that from Professor Manu Karuka at Barnard College.

Manu Karuka: If we think of the blues, the rhythms of different blues that could be actually directly associated with the rhythms of different train lines, the sounds of the whistles, which were modified or transposed into the form of melodies. One of the reasons why of course railroads were so important for blues is because of the movement of people, the freedom of Black people to move, to reconnect with family or just to move to a new place, a new freedom that didn't exist in time of slavery.

[music]

Melissa: Okay, so Mary, if you didn't love trains before you worked on this series, how do you feel about them now?

Mary: I don't think I've ever met anyone as obsessed with trains as you are, Melissa, but I definitely have a new appreciation for them and lots of fun facts to use as icebreakers at parties this summer.

[music]

Melissa: Don't go away, y'all. The Takeaway will be right back.

It's The Takeaway, I'm Melissa Harris Perry. Here with me is Mary Steffenhagen, Takeaway producer. We're looking back at some of her Takeaway favorites as part of our Producer Appreciation Weeks.

Mary: Looking back is bittersweet because it makes me think of all the projects I've wanted to do more of like this next one. It's an installment of Music in Their Own Words.

[music]

Amelia Meath: How can I be moved when everything is moving? It's about wanting to step off the train, wanting to have a moment of stillness, be able to absorb the enormity of life, but of course not being able to.

Mary: That's Amelia Meath, one-half of the electronic pop duo, Sylvan Esso. The other half is Nick Sandborn. I actually got to sit behind the mic in The Takeaway studio and talk with Amelia about their most recent album, No Rules Sandy, here's a bit from that piece.

[music]

Oh, I can't stop ringing it

Oh, I can't stop ringing it

Oh, I can't stop ringing it

Amelia Meath: But we kept on realizing that we had accidentally put roadblocks in front of ourselves, like trying to make a very commercially viable pop song or make better music than we've ever made, and also fighting our own fear.

[music]

(Oh yeah, oh yeah-I, oh yeah, oh yeah-I)

Feel the earth quakin', get the shivers

It would hit me like a train

(Oh yeah, oh yeah-I, oh yeah, oh yeah-I)

Amelia Meath: So with this one, the rules that were being disregarded were both editorial rules, but also just trying to go where the joy is.

[music]

Wouldn't she like to know how the story ends?

(Oh yeah, oh yeah-I, oh yeah, oh yeah) but then again

I didn't care

And I couldn't feel it in the air

I didn't know

Amelia Meath: We’re always seeking the way it feels as opposed to like the structure of the song looking perfect. Because we've agreed on that's how we write them. It's become much easier. Also, it means that when you split the song into its parts, it just looks like absolute chaos.

Mary: I'd like to talk about Cloud Walker.

Amelia Meath: My favorite song on the record.

[music]

Cloud walker

It doesn't make sense

But you've done it so many times

So we accept

Amelia Meath: Cloud Walker is about the absurdity of plane flight. Also just the wild decadence of being able to have a cocktail in the air, and everyone on the plane believing that the plane will fly through the air, and so it does.

[music]

Move as one

Step in step

There and gone

Hold that breath

Amelia Meath: The weird, the divine that is found within collective human intention.

[music]

Move as one

Step in step

There and gone

Hold that breath

Feel the sun

Hold it, hold it

But not too long

This is how you forget

Amelia Meath: Nick made this beat it's unlike anything that he's ever made before that I loved and he did not like, and I had to really work hard to convince him to keep it. Because of that, I wrote a small but very catchy chorus for it so that he would feel like he couldn't throw it away.

[music]

Every time you do it

Wilder you grows smaller still

And you're just walking like you do

Like you do

Amelia Meath: We've been working together for almost 10 years and we can pretty much say anything we need to, to each other. I mean we still offend each other all of the time, but there's a lot of trust there.

[music]

Like you're doing, doing it

Amelia Meath: It's like we invented a dance and we are really good at doing it together.

[music]

It doesn't make sense

But you've done it so many times

So we accept

Hold that breath

Move as one

Step in step

There and gone

Hold that breath

Feel the sun

Melissa: And Cloud Walker is about the absurdity of plane flight. Also just the wild

Mary: I loved getting to think about a radio piece in a different way. Instead of it being a conversation between a guest and a host, I wanted it to feel almost like a conversation between the artist and their own music.

Melissa: Mary, working with you has been very special, not only because you're incredibly talented, but also, I think the relationship between producer and host has to be firmly rooted in trust. I've been able to trust you to breathe life into some of the stories that are really profoundly personal for me, like this one that you produced on the Racial Politics of the fertility industry.

Mary: Thank you, Melissa. This one is actually a great example of another one of The Takeaway strengths, which is that we have the time to take a news headline and slow down a bit, and find the right people to untangle a controversial or a complicated issue. When I saw a headline about a shortage of Black sperm donors in the country, I wanted to know more about why, but also why race matters so much when people are building- -families this way, especially given that we understand race to be socially constructed, not biological. Let's take a listen.

Sandalow: It definitely wasn't in my plans to be a sperm donor. A close friend of mine asked and was very important for them to have a child who would also be read in the world and in particular by other Black people as Black. My name is Sandalow. I'm excited to have supported three queer families in conceiving and having kids.

Melissa: Sandalow is a Black man who donated sperm to families looking to conceive. It turns out that makes him pretty unique. According to a recent analysis by The Washington Post, fewer than 2% of the donors of the country's four largest sperm banks in fact, assisted reproduction clinics are reporting that the number of Black folks seeking their services has been steadily increasing with a sharp rise during the pandemic.

Now, we've talked before on this show about the disparities in prenatal and maternal healthcare for Black women, that we're three times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause than white women, that were more likely to have uterine fibroids and chronic stress that make pregnancy riskier, and the hospitals that serve majority Black populations tend to be under-resourced. The courage and love that it takes to even work to bring a Black child into this world cannot be overstated. Many Black folk face a barrier they weren't even aware of, this shortage of Black sperm donors. Some perspective parents go with donors of another race, others turn to friends as in Sandalow's story.

Sandalow: I think the way I described it was I was like, I feel like I'm just bringing a somewhat intimate gift. That other people are going to bring, I don't know, diapers or baby clothing, and I'm like, "I'm bringing sperm. Congratulations, have fun."

Melissa: It was just as important to Sandalow that the children resulting from his donation would have Black families as it was for the families to have Black children. Here's where it gets tricky because the categories that we call racial groups, they have no biological foundation. The best scientific evidence we currently have indicates there's no genetic basis for the idea of race. It's socially, politically, and culturally constructed, but that doesn't mean it's not real or that it doesn't matter to people when they're building their families, especially when they're using assisted reproductive technologies.

Sandalow: Whether or not you are read as Black can have really big impacts on you as an individual, on how people treat and read your family. To me, it was about offering ease to a Black mom and her multiracial family, not offering Black authenticity or Black biology.

Melissa: I spoke with a couple of people to help me untangle some of these big ideas.

Camisha Russell: Hi, I'm Camisha Russell, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon and author of The Assisted Reproduction of Race.

Regina Townsend: My name is Regina Townsend and I am the founder of the Broken Brown Egg.

Melissa: The Broken Brown Egg is a foundation and online community focused on reproductive justice and supporting Black folks and families on their assisted reproduction journeys.

Regina Townsend: When it comes to our sperm donor shortage, many men of color don't even know that that's a thing. They don't know that there's a need because we don't talk about this in our community. It is shrouded in shame and secrecy, and we've also got a deal with the impact of the stereotypes that we've been seeing for years. When you tell Black men that they're not good fathers, that they're absent, and then you tell them, “Oh, can you please give us your biology so that we can make children that you may never see?” There's a disconnect in that. There's also a very valid mistrust of the medical community. “What are you going to do with my biology? What are you going to do with me when I come into this clinic? Am I safe here?”

Melissa: Camisha I want to bring you in here. Can you help folks to understand where it is along the way or how it is that race is part of our reproduction?

Camisha Russell: What assisted reproductive technologies are is they are technologies of kinship. They're about making families and creating families. That in the US has always been so highly racialized. There's the fact that so many enslaved women bore the children of white men, and those children became slaves. There were laws passed, very early laws about the status of the child that would be born, and then the continuing policing of the making a family along racial lines with anti-miscegenation laws.

Then when you start to think about that and then you think about reproductive technologies as these kinship-making technologies, it's something that becomes, I think, more clear why it's so important for people to reproduce in ways that they see as matching themselves racially. It's a huge part of our identity as people who make families in this country and in this society.

Melissa: You actually write about race as a technology. Help us understand what you mean by that in the context of reproductive technologies.

Camisha Russell: What I try to do with the idea of race as a technology is to change the focus from what race is to what race does. How do people use race? I've mentioned some of this stuff in the history of family formation law in the US where race was used. We could see race in those situations as having been used to determine the status of children, who counts as a parent or not, who has responsibilities for children or not. It's used as this marker that dictates how the law is going to treat you.

I think one of the interesting outcomes of this history is that we see race as something that is part of who we are and, therefore, a way that we can build families and build connection.

[music]

Mary: To close out the show today, I'm excited to revisit some of my original reporting. For this story, I didn't have to look much further than my own backyard. Well, kind of. It's a Saturday in Brooklyn, finally a sunny day above 50 degrees. I'm taking my girlfriend Haley to one of my favorite spots in the city. Can you describe what we're looking at?

Hailey: A very gothic-looking gateway that looks like the front facade of a church.

Mary: Yes, it’s a cemetery, Brooklyn’s Greenwood Cemetery actually. It was founded in 1838 and it's become one of the most populated cemeteries in New York City. It was one of America's first rural cemeteries. Now it's surrounded by concrete jungle.

Hailey: Kind of bizarre that there are apartment buildings literally steps away from all these gravestones. I don't know if that would be very settling.

Mary: Now I find this juxtaposition actually pretty beautiful, but as we walk deeper into Greenwood, there was something else about the place that struck Hailey.

Hailey: Land is such a valuable thing, and while this is absolutely gorgeous and I do-- I'm really enjoying myself, it's hard not to think about how this land is now completely unusable for anything else.

Mary: New Yorkers like Hailey who share this concern might soon have another option, natural organic reduction or as it's perhaps more memorably known, human composting. This is an alternative to burial and cremation and it just became legal in New York State.

Melissa: Human composting is a strange phrase. Remind us of what it actually is.

Mary: Yes, it's just what it sounds like. It's a process to speed up the decomposition of a body using natural materials like straw and wood chips, but in a controlled environment. After a few months, a person's loved one can have this soil to keep and maybe plant a tree or scatter it in a significant place like with ashes.

Melissa: As an avid gardener, I love the idea of continuing to feed my plants even after I'm gone, but this isn't legal everywhere, is it?

Mary: Right. New York became the sixth state to legalize it this past December. I saw a lot of reporting about that, but not a lot on what actually has to happen next in order to make it a reality so I started digging. It turned out there are still a few big open questions. Cemeteries and funeral directors are competing over who is going to answer them.

David Fleming: The idea that you would allow a for-profit entity to swoop in and take one of the only revenue streams of a nonprofit is incredibly dangerous. My name is David Fleming. I'm the legislative director for the New York State Association of Cemeteries.

Mary: That association represents about 520 cemeteries and crematory services. David was- -fairly involved in drafting and lobbying for the bill that eventually passed. Without getting too technical basically, this bill applies the same regulations that exist for cremation to human composting, particularly on who is legally allowed to handle human remains in their very final disposition. Right now, only one kind of entity in New York State can do so, cemeteries.

The New York State Funeral Directors Association actually oppose the bill on human composting for this reason, but they told me they do support something new, an amendment proposed in the governor's executive budget for 2024. This would actually let funeral homes in on the human composting business. I explored a couple of other questions too, like where will people actually be able to put their human compost, and how much is it going to cost. Melissa, I have a question for you. Would you ever consider human composting?

Melissa: Oh, definitely. I'm not particularly attached to what happens to my body after my final transition. I think really, it's more about whatever makes my surviving loved ones feel good, and if sprinkling mom on the azaleas feels right for them, go for it. What about you, Mary?

Mary: I might be romanticizing it a bit, but I do really love the idea of becoming tree food. I actually learned something really fascinating about that from Katrina Spade. She's the founder of Recompose, which was the country's first human composting company. Here's what she told me.

Katrina Spade: One of the amazing things that happens during human composting is the body ceases to be human. We actually have a rearrangement of molecules and atoms and the material produced is very similar to plant compost that you would buy at a nursery in terms of its makeup and its biology. Early in my work, I thought the fact that we're making human compost means it must be extra special in some way. The soil biologist I work with and have worked with for several years was like, "No, Katrina. It's just compost. It's decent compost." I thought, "Oh, right, we're not so special actually as humans."

Mary: That idea that at some point it becomes on a molecular level, not human, that feels wild.

Katrina: Yes. It's powerful. It can be hard to really get your mind around and can even feel a little bit-- I think for some, it can feel a little bit scary to hear that, that we won't always be human but it's also the beautiful thing about composting ourselves, it means we actually get to rejoin the natural ecosystem. With human composting, we're finding lots of folks are deeply comforted and find meaning in the return to the earth. That in itself has profound meaning for families and friends and the individuals who are dying.

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Melissa: That's it for us today folks. Before we go, Mary, I got to say, I'm sort of at a loss for words, maybe because you didn't write any for me to say in this segment, but I want to tell you that you are a rare talent. It has been an honor to work with you during this last year. I know earlier in the show, you expressed some wistful remorse about all the work that we might have done together if The Takeaway had been allowed to continue. I absolutely feel that same sadness with you. I have definitely grieved over the loss of an opportunity to continue telling Sonic stories with you.

As I've thought about it, I realized that I'm being mostly selfish, because one thing I'm really certain of is that despite all your accomplishments on this show, your best and most impactful work is still ahead. The truth is, you're probably too skilled, too sharp, too careful, too creative, and too unique to be writing words for somebody else to say. I am just going to have so much joy watching, and listening, and reading as you take your rightful place in your own byline. I can't wait to encounter the stories that you're going to tell with your empathetic spirit, and your sharp intellect, and your flawless writing. These are your gifts and trust me, they cannot be taken away.

Mary: Okay, well now I'm tearing up. That really means a lot to me, Melissa, so thank you. There's a lot that I want to say. Also, I'll say that working with you and with all of Team Takeaway, I feel like has really made me a better journalist, and I think maybe even a better person. Is that what you would say? Thank you for being a teacher and a leader and really an example to me.

Melissa: Thanks so much to all of you for listening to us. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry here with Mary Steffenhagen, and this is The Takeaway.

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