Repairing A Nation And Fighting Online Disinformation

06/10/22 • 50 min

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This week, Farai speaks to the filmmakers of a new documentary The Big Payback Erika Alexander and Whitney Dow along with a key voice from the film founder and executive director of FirstRepair, Robin Rue Simmons. The film follows the growing movement for reparations for centuries of government policies blocking Black wealth. Then in the “Our Body Politics Presents...” series, we feature a conversation between “This Day in Esoteric Political History” podcast hosts Jody Avirgan, Nicole “Niki” Hemmer, and Kellie Carter Jackson with special guest Jelani Cobb, New Yorker writer, about the evolving language used to describe Black Americans. Plus, in our weekly segment, Sippin’ the Political Tea, Farai speaks to Mutale Nkonde, CEO of AI for the People and Kelsey Butler, equality reporter for Bloomberg News about the growing presence and impact of disinformation online and how the government could effectively intervene and curb it.

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Finding Joy in Stories, Service, and the Great Outdoors

This week, we are revisiting some of OBP’s most joyous interviews starting with Farai’s conversation with two publishers of color, Elizabeth Méndez Berry, vice president and executive editor at One World, an imprint at Penguin Random House, and Lisa Lucas, senior vice president and publisher at Pantheon and Schocken Books on celebrating the work of BIPOC authors and critics. Then public health professionals and sisters Nilufar Kayhani and Nazineen Kandahari share the inspiration and beauty behind starting the Afghan Clinic, an online space that serves the health needs of fellow Afghans. Farai then speaks with Rue Mapp, founder of Outdoor Afro, about finding joy in the great outdoors and encouraging others to do the same. And in the weekly roundtable Sippin’ the Political Tea, Farai talks with fellow women of color journalists, S. Mitra Kalita, founder and publisher of Epicenter NYC, and Jenni Monet, CEO of URL Media and author of newsletter Indigenously about what it means to identify as women of color and why identifying as one can evoke both personally powerful and political implications.

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Remembering Urvashi Vaid and Creating Liberation

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This week, Our Body Politic honors politics and pride, featuring a past interview between Farai and the late intersectional activist, lawyer, educator and author Urvashi Vaid who led movements for a range of progressive issues, including AIDS advocacy, LGBT rights and prison reform. The pair discuss Vaid’s legacy as a leading figure in social change and what it truly takes to change the lived experience of everyone— to achieve lived equality. Then in our series, “Our Body Politics Presents...” we feature the podcast Truth Be Told with host Tonya Mosley who interviews minister and writer Danté Stewart about how to cultivate “little experiments of liberation” while experiencing and navigating repetitive acts of American violence.