Institutionalized racism is a complex and systemic issue, perniciously affecting generations of victims’ health and well-being. Therefore, to frame racism as merely an economic problem...well, that’s not helpful. And yet, to move forward to a more equitable future for all—a truly just future—requires our society to understand and to counteract all the times in our history that the labor of Black Americans has been stolen, devalued, or prevented from growing into prosperity.
To ask one of the many questions facing our society: What are we, as Americans, talking about when we talk about economic justice? While the complexities of reparative justice are many and the facts are harsh, the listens are stellar, with great storytelling and performances. These illuminating narratives about Black contributions to the American economy and the financial and legal legacy of slavery and racism are told through Pulitzer-Prize winning nonfiction and poetry, theater, and podcasting, so there's something for just about every kind of listener on this list.
The Radical King offers listeners the opportunity to hear King’s speeches, as organized and edited by activist Cornel West, in the voices of an assortment of Black artists and performers, including Gabourey Sidibe, Wanda Sykes, Levar Burton, and Michael K. Williams...
Americans tend to cast slavery as a pre-modern institution—the nation's original sin, perhaps, but isolated in time and divorced from America's later success. But to do so robs the millions who suffered in bondage of their full legacy. As historian Edward E. Baptist reveals in The Half Has Never Been Told...
The epic history of African American women's pursuit of political power - and how it transformed America....
James Baldwin grew disillusioned by the failure of the civil rights movement to force America to confront its lies about race....
In Olio Live - a very special one-night performance recorded live at the Minetta Lane Theater in February, 2019 - poet Tyehimba Jess introduces listeners to his 2017 Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, Olio....
In this groundbreaking historical expose, Douglas A. Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history.....
In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein explodes the myth that America's cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation....
In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history....
Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of the Marshall Project....
In this brilliant, heartbreaking book, Matthew Desmond takes us into the poorest neighborhoods of Milwaukee to tell the story of eight families on the edge....
Born into slavery, Henrietta Wood was taken to Cincinnati and legally freed in 1848. In 1853, a Kentucky deputy sheriff named Zebulon Ward colluded with Wood's employer, abducted her, and sold her back into bondage....
A major literary event: a never-before-published work from the author of the American classic Their Eyes Were Watching God that brilliantly illuminates the horror and injustices of slavery as it tells the true story of one of the last known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade....
It begins with a birth in an African village in 1750, and ends two centuries later at a funeral in Arkansas....
The astonishing untold history of America's first black millionaires - former slaves who endured incredible challenges to amass and maintain their wealth for a century....
Chad Sanders is a writer on the brink of wealth, whose world is changing fast. This podcast brings us along on his dizzying ride to the top, exploring everything that happens to Black people who get rich through a series of illuminating, honest, funny, and moving conversations with Black Hollywood power players like Issa Rae, Charles King, Soledad O'Brien, and Gabrielle Union, as well as Black entrepreneurial stars like Slutty Vegan founder Pinky Cole, NFL quarterback guru Quincy Avery, and others in a quest to understand the unique, fraught, and fascinating relationship that Black people have with money.
