70 Million: Tribal Land, Banishment, Rehabilitation and Re-Entry
This week on Making Contact – with assistance from our podcast partners, 70 million – we head to the state of Alaska, where statewide increases in violent crime and substance abuse have led to increased incarceration rates among Native Americans. Making use of their legal sovereignty, some Alaska Native leaders issue “blue tickets,” documents that sentence offenders to legal expulsion. Journalist Emily Schwing looks...
The Agony and the Ecstasy: Race and the Future of the Love Story Part 2 (ENCORE)
PART 2….In 2019 a well known romance writer began tweeting about other writers in her community and concerns about racism. It led to a huge reckoning within an organization called the Romance Writers of America, which is still unfolding. And although the online debate seemed to be isolated to a specific community of romance writers and their fans, it was really a microcosm of what’s been happening all over the US....
The Agony and the Ecstasy: Race and the Future of the Love Story Part 1 (ENCORE)
In 2019 a well known romance writer began tweeting about other writers in her community and concerns about racism. It led to a huge reckoning within an organization called the Romance Writers of America, which is still unfolding. And although the online debate seemed to be isolated to a specific community of romance writers and their fans, it was really a microcosm of what’s been happening all over the US. In this episode...
Viva Brother Nagi from Kerning Cultures
Nagi Daifallah was a young farm worker from Yemen who moved to California in the early 1970s when he was just 20 years old. He went on to become one of the organizers of the infamous 1973 grape strike in California, led by Cesar Chavez. But one night in 1973, after a day of striking he was beaten to death by a local county sheriff outside a restaurant in Lamont, California. Although the sheriff who killed him never faced justice,...
Hunger Strike! How Immigrant Taxi Drivers Took on City Hall
When Augustine Tang’s father passed away, Augustine decided to inherit his taxi medallion – the license that had allowed his father to drive a yellow taxi cab in New York City for decades. But the medallion came with a $530,000 debt trap and years of struggling to escape it. So Tang joined a push by the local taxi drivers’ union, to campaign for debt relief. And eventually, city resistance to worker demands culminated in a...
Escape to Cairo from Kerning Cultures
In October 1960, the walls were closing in for Patrice Lumumba. Months earlier, he had been celebrated as the Congo’s first democratically elected prime minister after decades of brutal colonial rule. But now, he had been overthrown in a coup and was being kept under house arrest by his political opponent. With Lumumba’s life at risk, the Egyptian government under Gamal Abdel Nasser proposed a dangerous and unusual plan to have...
