How We Got Here

Gender and sexuality can feel natural and even immutable, but science and the lived experience of numerous humans tell us that these categories are far more variable than they may seem. At a time when dozens of states around the US have passed or are considering legislation to enforce rigid definitions of gender, queer theorist Jack Halberstam and journalist Zach Stafford discuss the fallaciousness of what scholars call the “gender binary.” Bringing an intersectional perspective, and looking at examples from women's sports, they invite journalists to speak truth to the power that is exercised, often violently, through an insistence on “normative” ideas of gender and sexuality.

The American Dream is often portrayed as the hook that pulls people to the United States. What is usually left out of the story is the hell many flee, sometimes a hell fed by the very country in which they seek refuge. The story of U.S. involvement in Central America is a classic example of wars inflicted on people by U.S. financed repressive regimes and later by gangs grown in the U.S. and deported wholesale to vulnerable nations. In this episode, a scholar sheds light on the invention of the “illegal alien,” its use and manipulation for the past 140 years (and counting) to exclude and exploit people of color and more recent notions of who and who is not deserving of legal admission into the United States.

Steel produced in Youngstown, Ohio, helped America win World War II, and it was used to build the bridges that we cross and the buildings in which we live. But in the 1970s, the mills began closing. Some 50,000 well-paid jobs were gone. There was a concurrent rise in anger as the workers and their children struggled to survive with minimum-wage jobs or in the gig economy. Youngstown represents the widening chasm of class division in the United States. Journalists need to understand how class informs politics and culture. In this episode we talk with a labor studies expert about how to cover the working class.

There is a long tradition of imperial denial in the United States. After all, Americans fought the British Empire and have always thought of themselves as different from European colonialists. They are Empire Slayers — why else would “Star Wars” and its fight against the Galactic Empire have such a hold on the popular imagination? In this episode, two scholars explain how, from the nation's birth, imperial expansion — first westward into Indian Country and later, overseas —was a defining character of the United States. The echoes of empire can be heard in today's news. It's impossible to talk about immigration, drone strikes, the attacks on Asian Americans, the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, etc., without understanding the history and projection of American power. What would journalism informed by the history of empire look like? MUSIC CREDITS Order of Entrance by Blue Dot Sessions Greyleaf Willow by Blue Dot Sessions Tapoco by Blue Dot Sessions Gra Landsby by Blue Dot Sessions Pencil Marks by Blue Dot Sessions Lunette by Blue Dot Sessions Watercool Quiet by Blue Dot Sessions Pukae by Blue Dot Sessions Checkered Blue by Blue Dot Sessions Ottol by Blue Dot Sessions

Whiteness in America isn't just the neutral norm against which racial minorities, particularly Black people, are measured. Whiteness in America means having the privilege and power that go along with being part of that supposed norm. And becoming white – not in terms of pigment but of social status – is a choice that nearly every immigrant or refugee group in America has had to embrace or reject. We talk with two scholars in the field of Whiteness Studies, Nell Irvin Painter and Eric Goldstein, about how understanding the construction of white identity in this polyglot country gives us keen insights into its troubled racial history. MUSIC CREDITS Turning to You by Blue Dot Sessions Our Only Lark by Blue Dot Sessions Heather by Blue Dot Sessions A Certain Lightness by Blue Dot Sessions The Crisper by Blue Dot Sessions Throughput by Blue Dot Sessions Pukae by Blue Dot Sessions Four and Fourteen by Blue Dot Sessions The Longshoreman by Blue Dot Sessions Ewa Valley by Blue Dot Sessions Careless Morning by Blue Dot Sessions Morning Glare by Blue Dot Sessions Lick Stick by Blue Dot Sessions