A Few of My Favorite Podcasts (Part Five): Minority Reports

My interest in the opening of the National Museum of African-American History and Culture also led me to the Still Processing podcast. Each week Wesley Morris and Jenna Wortham, both African-American, offer their perspectives on current events and especially popular culture. The contents might range from an in-depth interview with RuPaul to a frank discussion of our culture's ongoing obsession with the black penis. But their strongest episode to date describes their first impressions of the new Smithsonian Museum and culminates with an extensive interview with one of the Museum's curators which helps us to understand the logic by which the Institute set out to build and display this remarkable collection. Having gotten to know the hosts over more mundane matters, it was all the more moving to hear them describe the impact this new Museum had on their sense of themselves and their appreciation of their own history. Given how often discussions of race in America center only on the black-white divide, I was excited to discover Code Switch, which has brought together a whole generation of young journalist of color currently working for National Public Radio. Code Switch brings a multiracial and often intersectional perspective to current events. For me, the highlight so far was an episode entitled "A letter from a Young Asian American to Her Parents about Black Lives Matter", which was surprisingly frank in exploring historic divides between African-Americans and Asian Americans. A special holiday episode had reporters of various ethnicities describe traditional foods that cause them particular discomfort. Following the Orlando shootings, Code Switch explored what the events meant to GLBT, Latino, and American Muslim residents of the city. More recently, they launched a series examining Obama's legacy. In the first episode they dug deep into the ways racialized rhetoric consistently shaped critiques of his public policies, including the ways that his critics crossed the lines traditionally protecting children from such public discourse. Yet they also talked about their own divided loyalties since many felt Obama had not gone far enough in addressing issues of civil rights and immigration reform.

In our recent book, By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism, my co-author Sangita Shresthova provides an overview of the political lives of American Muslim youth. She tells us that these young Muslims were politicized in the wake of 9/11 whether they wanted to be or not: they are often forced to defend their cultural and religious identities. She describes a range of storytelling projects in the American Muslim community where these young activists find their voice and express their perspectives on changing times. Podcast are one of the many ways that we can begin to listen to what these young people have to say. #Good Muslim, Bad Muslim represents a particularly vivid example. Tanzila 'Taz' Ahmed is a LA-based activist and storyteller and her cohost Zahra Noorbakhsh is a San Francisco comedian actor and writer. These two young women share intimate aspects of their lives with their listeners as they describe their shared experience as Muslim women living in California. They explain the program's title:

"To the Muslim community, we are "bad" Muslims - we listen to music, we don't pray regularly, we date or get married to white men (Zahra), identify as punks and radicals (Taz), we perform and share our lives with comedy and writing. So we are bad. So so bad. To non-Muslims, we are "good" - we don't drink, we don't do drugs, we are not criminals, we are social justice activists and community leaders. We are successful, published, accomplished. But then of course, on the flipside, because we are brown Muslims living in a post 9/11 islamophobia funded world, we are also villanized by Western society, too. No matter how you look at it, we are bad Muslims. There's no winning!!!! As Muslim American women, we are walking this fine line between what it means to be good and bad. "

What they share is funny and alarming in equal measures and that's part of the point. Often they are turning the words of Islamiaphobes against themselves:they declare Fatawa against mundane aspects of the world around, showcase what they call Creeping Sharia -- examples of support from unexpected corners, or share awkward conversations with the non-Muslim world and debunk common microaggressions directed against them.

Another useful podcast for gaining some insights into the American Muslim experience is See Something, Say Something. I especially enjoyed a series of episodes dealing with what it is to be an American Muslim fan, including one devoted to the recent Star Wars films entitled "Wookies are Muslim." Other recent episodes of interest focused on memes as a means of challenging dominant representations or another centered on how Muslims decide whether or not to celebrate Christmas. All of these speak to the challenges of living as Muslims in a country that often wants to declare itself emphatically Christian – how to maintain your own identity while embracing aspects of the culture around you.

How to Be A Girl is perhaps the most intimate of the podcast identified today – – told from the perspective of a young mother with a transgender daughter. The podcast lacks the technical polish of the NPR podcasts but for that reason it often has an authenticity and sincerity that is refreshing as we engage in debates around gender and sexuality. We sometimes hear the young daughter's rambling stories told into a tape recorder alongside her mother's attempt to provide a fuller context of what it means to grow up transgender in the current public education system. A great episode has her grilling her friends with the questions she most often gets asked about how she knows her daughter's gender and what she will do if she changes her mind later. Along the way, the mother becomes more and more of a public educator and activist around transgender issues, but she never stops being a dedicated and proud mother who was there to support her daughter during her first steps into an unfamiliar territory. Thanks to Jonathan Gray for bringing this particular podcast to my attention.

Making Gay History is an extraordinary resource for any of us who want to understand the changing sexual politics of this country. Historian Eric Marcus shares recordings made decades ago with some of the leaders and founders of the GLBT movement as part of his research for the book, Making Gay History. Each episode to date has been a treasure -- a voice from the past -- which provides a immediate sense of the struggle which has had to be fought to reach the current moment and how much work still remains to be done.