Kinda Sorta Brown

KSB has spent the season talking about some of the recent headlines that captivated us and significantly impacted Black and Brown communities. But why stop there? In this finale of Season 3 of Kinda Sorta Brown, we have one question: what headlines are living in our guests’ minds rent-free? Take a trip with host Lena Diasti through an imagined day of very real news stories (about everything from Critical Race Theory to UK regulations on chronic pain) as encountered and described by past guest speakers and our own KSB team members, from London to Washington, D.C. and back to Chicago. Now, we turn the question over to you. What headlines are living in your mind rent-free? Our guest speakers for this episode, in the order they appear, are as follows:
Jameisha Prescod, London based filmmaker and chronic illness advocate
Narvella Sefah, rising sophomore at UChicago and KSB Front-End Team contributor
Professor Robert L. Tsai, author and Professor of Law at the Boston University School of Law
Nicole Maria Mateo, rising sophomore at UChicago and KSB Audio Engineer Team contributor
Fernanda Ponce, rising junior at UChicago and KSB Content Creation Team contributor
Mireya Gutierrez, Intake Specialist at Instituto del Progreso Latino

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This Episode’s Host: Lena Diasti (Executive Producer, https://www.instagram.com/lenadiasti/)

Join the KSFam! We saved you a seat at the table. Link up with us on all available social media platforms:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kindasortabrown/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/kindasortabrown
Facebook: https://facebook.com/kindasortabrown/
For further inquiries, email us: [email protected]

Audio transcriptions of KSB episodes are here! Access this episode’s transcription PDF using this folder: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1XNBWRGMWaP5l2FzmHItG3ap-p0AOEkpM

Lead Contributors: Lena Diasti (Executive Producer), Hope Houston (Production Manager), Jon Brooks (Social Media Coordinator), Dinah Clottey (Outreach Manager), Chase Leito (Audio Engineer), and Daisy Okoye (Content Creator).

Supporting Contributors: Narvella Sefah (Front-End Team), Fernanda Ponce (Content Team), Nicole Maria Mateo (Audio Team).

Out of 4,000 GLOBAL submissions, KSB was chosen as a WINNER of the SPOTIFY NEXT WAVE PODCAST COMPETITION!! See us on the Spotify Student Hub page here:
https://open.spotify.com/genre/student-page

KSB was a TOP 10 FINALIST for NPR’s 2021 College Podcast Competition! Check out our entry “PWI-ing While Black” on SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/user-306628760/pwi-ing-while-black

Kinda Sorta Brown is a University of Chicago Public Policy Podcast, as shown here: https://www.uc3p.org/kindasortabrown

After years of Trump’s blatantly bigoted, anti-immigrant rhetoric, a new tide has turned - or has it? In the midst of Trump-era immigration policy reversals by the Biden administration, VP Kamala Harris recently told Guatamalens “do not come,” in her first trip overseas, sending mixed signals in a situation that serves as a microcosmic example of America’s long history of hypocrisy on the subject. Within one breath, America touts itself as a country that has long-welcomed immigrants, and then openly discourages them from coming in the next. Which immigrants have America historically “welcomed,” and how does America’s immigration past connect to harmful narratives that are perpetuated presently? How have narratives surrounding immigration changed, and how have policies affected those narratives? What happens when immigration leaves the front page, and what happens to immigrants when cameras stop rolling? Join our hosts Chase and Jon as they tackle these questions and discuss how you can support immigrant communities of color with our special guest, Mireya Gutierrez of Instituto Del Progreso Latino.

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This Episode’s Guest Speaker: Mireya Gutierrez of Instituto Del Progreso Latino

This Episode’s Host: Chase Leito (Audio Engineer) and Jon Brooks (Social Media Coordinator).

Join the KSFam! We saved you a seat at the table. Link up with us on all available social media platforms:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kindasortabrown/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/kindasortabrown
Facebook: https://facebook.com/kindasortabrown/
For further inquiries, email us: [email protected]

Audio transcriptions of KSB episodes are here! Access this episode’s transcription PDF using this folder: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1XNBWRGMWaP5l2FzmHItG3ap-p0AOEkpM

Lead Contributors: Lena Diasti (Executive Producer), Hope Houston (Production Manager), Jon Brooks (Social Media Coordinator), Dinah Clottey (Outreach Manager), Chase Leito (Audio Engineer), and Daisy Okoye (Content Creator).

Supporting Contributors: Narvella Sefah (Front-End Team), Fernanda Ponce (Content Team), Nicole Maria Mateo (Audio Team)

Out of 4,000 GLOBAL submissions, KSB was chosen as a WINNER of the SPOTIFY NEXT WAVE PODCAST COMPETITION!! See us on the Spotify Student Hub page here:
https://open.spotify.com/genre/student-page

KSB was a TOP 10 FINALIST for NPR’s 2021 College Podcast Competition! Check out our entry “PWI-ing While Black” on SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/user-306628760/pwi-ing-while-black

Kinda Sorta Brown is a University of Chicago Public Policy Podcast, as shown here: https://www.uc3p.org/kindasortabrown

In a country founded on principles of free speech, one where Fox News finished 2020 claiming the title of “most-watched cable news channel in history”, the outcry of “silenced conservatism” may sound ironic. But is there truth to this sentiment? What do Twitter and the Facebook Supreme Court have to do with it? What could it mean for minority groups, people of color, those with historically ignored voices when we vest silencing power in private organizations? Let’s take a ride through the Constitution, a cause mutual to civil rights activists and white supremacists, fires of free speech under private companies, and the marketplace of ideas to find out. Daisy will discuss these topics and more in conversation with Professor and Law Alumni Scholar Robert L. Tsai of the Boston University School of Law, a prolific author who is well-versed in everything from civil rights and social movements to the First Amendment itself.
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This Episode’s Guest Speaker: Professor Robert L. Tsai at the Boston University School of Law (https://twitter.com/robertltsai)

This Episode’s Host: Daisy Okoye (Content Creator, https://www.instagram.com/daisyokoye/ https://twitter.com/daisyinperil ).

Join the KSFam! We saved you a seat at the table. Link up with us on all available social media platforms:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kindasortabrown/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/kindasortabrown
Facebook: https://facebook.com/kindasortabrown/
For further inquiries, email us: [email protected]

Audio transcriptions of KSB episodes are here! Access this episode’s transcription PDF using this folder: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1XNBWRGMWaP5l2FzmHItG3ap-p0AOEkpM

Lead Contributors: Lena Diasti (Executive Producer), Hope Houston (Production Manager), Jon Brooks (Social Media Coordinator), Dinah Clottey (Outreach Manager), Chase Leito (Audio Engineer), and Daisy Okoye (Content Creator).

Supporting Contributors: Narvella Sefah (Front-End Team), Fernanda Ponce (Content Team), Nicole Maria Mateo (Audio Team).

Out of 4,000 GLOBAL submissions, KSB was chosen as a WINNER of the SPOTIFY NEXT WAVE PODCAST COMPETITION!! See us on the Spotify Student Hub page here:
https://open.spotify.com/genre/student-page

KSB was a TOP 10 FINALIST for NPR’s 2021 College Podcast Competition! Check out our entry “PWI-ing While Black” on SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/user-306628760/pwi-ing-while-black

Kinda Sorta Brown is a University of Chicago Public Policy Podcast, as shown here: https://www.uc3p.org/kindasortabrown

In our haste to digitize, computerize, and distill our world into comma-separated values and JSON files, necessities of diversity, diversity in data collection, and diversity in programmers gets lost in the mix and is deemed unimportant. So, when a Black man and his friends are tagged as “gorillas” by Google Photos’ facial recognition software, when a TikTok story book semblance filter turns white people into royalty and POC into animals or monsters, when the implicit and explicit biases of the people behind the lines of code appear in the user interface of these public programs, we are left to ask, is social media racist?! Just as children can be taught to be racist through socialization, artificial intelligence and machine learning models learn to be racist as they reflect the biases of their “parent” programmers. It is critical that we ask ourselves to examine and interrogate the data beyond the typical performance tests. Who is building these models, and what kinds of data collection shortcomings could give such skewed results as the mis-categorization of humans as primates? How can we retrace and reconnect the end product outputs and programs to the prejudice that leads to discriminatory tendencies? In other words, how do we work to fix this data-driven world? Our hosts Lena and Dinah are joined by special guest Dr. Michael C. Dawson, a Professor of Political Science here at the University of Chicago. In this episode, we are getting down into the true essence of coding hate and the ways in which technology and social media input data from the real world and reproduce these biases online. But technology does not have to rule our world. One way or another, we are reclaiming our data and taking a stance against online prejudice.


This Episode’s Hosts: Dinah Clottey (Outreach Manager) and Lena Diasti (Executive Producer)

Join the KSFam! We saved you a seat at the table. Link up with us on all available social media platforms:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kindasortabrown/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/kindasortabrown
Facebook: https://facebook.com/kindasortabrown/
For further inquiries, email us: [email protected]

Audio transcriptions of KSB episodes are here! Access this episode’s transcription PDF here: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1XNBWRGMWaP5l2FzmHItG3ap-p0AOEkpM

Or, look through our Google Drive of transcriptions here: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1XNBWRGMWaP5l2FzmHItG3ap-p0AOEkpM

Lead Contributors: Lena Diasti (Executive Producer), Hope Houston (Production Manager), Jon Brooks (Social Media Coordinator), Dinah Clottey (Outreach Manager), Chase Leito (Audio Engineer), and Daisy Okoye (Content Creator).

Supporting Contributors: Narvella Sefah (Front-End Team), Fernanda Ponce (Content Team), Nicole Maria Mateo (Audio Team).

KSB was a TOP 10 FINALIST for NPR’s 2021 College Podcast Competition! Check out our entry “PWI-ing While Black” on SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/user-306628760/pwi-ing-while-black

Kinda Sorta Brown is a University of Chicago Public Policy Podcast, as shown here: https://www.uc3p.org/kindasortabrown

There are numerous variations of American English, yet none suffer the amount of stigma that African American Vernacular English (AAVE) does. “Unprofessional” and “uneducated” are only some of the words that often brand those who speak it. Yet, not everyone bears the burden of this linguistic prejudice equally. While non-Black people capitalize off of AAVE under the guise of “internet slang,” Black people often find themselves policing their use of the dialect -- a common phenomenon known as “code-switching” -- in favor of what is considered to be “Standard American English”, which, unlike other variations of English, is spoken nowhere. Join host Jon in his first mini episode with special guest (and *new KSB team member*) Narvella, as they dive into the co-opting of AAVE online and why you should think harder the next time you use “internet slang” in your vocabulary. This episode will have you questioning the validity of any “standard” language and Credit Karma's problematic use of AAVE.
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This Episode’s Host: Jon Brooks (Communication Director)

Join the KSFam! We saved you a seat at the table. Link up with us on all available social media platforms:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kindasortabrown/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/kindasortabrown
Facebook: https://facebook.com/kindasortabrown/
For further inquiries, email us: [email protected]

Audio transcriptions of KSB episodes are here! Access this episode’s transcription PDF here: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1XNBWRGMWaP5l2FzmHItG3ap-p0AOEkpM

Or, look through our Google Drive of transcriptions here: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1XNBWRGMWaP5l2FzmHItG3ap-p0AOEkpM

Lead Contributors: Lena Diasti (Executive Producer), Hope Houston (Production Manager), Jon Brooks (Social Media Coordinator), Dinah Clottey (Outreach Manager), Chase Leito (Audio Engineer), and Daisy Okoye (Content Creator).

Supporting Contributors: Narvella Sefah (Front-End Team), Fernanda Ponce (Content Team), Nicole Maria Mateo (Audio Team).

The disabled population is the LARGEST minority group in the world. But have you even heard about the Disability Civil Rights Movement or the diverse culture and identities created by people with disabilities? Probably not. We live in a world that still gives Hollywood the O.K. on “cripface” (most notably with Sia’s 2020 movie “Music”). A world where police brutality afflicts people with “underlying conditions” all too often. TikTok mods are told to penalize disabled people for looking “unappealing”. Major items, like work-from-home jobs, on the agenda of disability advocates are only realized when able-bodied people demand it. We're all ableists to some degree, and it’s high time to get educated. Join Hope and Daisy as they take an eye-opening trip through disability advocacy history, art, accessibility, identity, and activism in Chicago and the United States, with special guests Cassidy Medina (Co-President of UChicago’s Students for Disability Justice) and Candace Coleman (Community Development Organizer on Racial Justice for Access Living).
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This Episode’s Hosts: Hope Houston (Production Manager, https://www.instagram.com/hhnh810/) and Daisy Okoye (Content Creator, https://www.instagram.com/daisyokoye/ ).

Join the KSFam! We saved you a seat at the table. Link up with us on all available social media platforms:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kindasortabrown/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/kindasortabrown
Facebook: https://facebook.com/kindasortabrown/
For further inquiries, email us: [email protected]

Audio transcriptions of KSB episodes are here! Access this episode’s transcription PDF here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1P_OfagO5sR9hsvCz_5mrE0YsPDPKf2vH/view

Or, look through our Google Drive of transcriptions here: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1XNBWRGMWaP5l2FzmHItG3ap-p0AOEkpM

Lead Contributors: Lena Diasti (Executive Producer), Hope Houston (Production Manager), Jon Brooks (Social Media Coordinator), Dinah Clottey (Outreach Manager), Chase Leito (Audio Engineer), and Daisy Okoye (Content Creator).

Supporting Contributors: Narvella Sefah (Front-End Team), Fernanda Ponce (Content Team), Nicole Maria Mateo (Audio Team).


KSB was a TOP 10 FINALIST for NPR’s 2021 College Podcast Competition! Check out our entry “PWI-ing While Black” on SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/user-306628760/pwi-ing-while-black

Kinda Sorta Brown is a University of Chicago Public Policy Podcast, as shown here: https://www.uc3p.org/kindasortabrown

Season 3: Color Between the Headlines -- Your favorite podcast is finally back! Spring is in the air, and our hosts have been hard at work creating new material for you all to resonate with and reflect on. Speaking of which... media overload is tooo real right now. News articles, social media posts, echo chambers, “For You” pages, content, content, content, REPEAT. But what happens to all of those headlines, the stories impacting diverse communities of color, that fall to the bottom of the digital news pile? On this third season of KSB, titled “Color Between the Headlines”, we’ll strive to elevate those stories once again, in conversation with incredible humans on the frontlines of the issues at hand. On this particular episode, join your hosts Lena, Hope, Jon, Dinah, Chase, and Daisy (supported by our new team members, Narvella, Fernanda, and Nicole) as they jump into a convo about 2020’s surge of (performative) activism, echo chambers, social media fatigue, and our own podcast’s position in the world of the media.
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Join the KSFam! We saved you a seat at the table. Link up with us on all available social media platforms:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kindasortabrown/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/kindasortabrown
Facebook: https://facebook.com/kindasortabrown/
For further inquiries, email us: [email protected]

Audio transcriptions of KSB episodes will be available in the upcoming days. Please check back for a google drive link with all of our transcriptions!

This Episode’s Hosts: Lena Diasti (Executive Producer), Hope Houston (Production Manager), Jon Brooks (Social Media Coordinator), Dinah Clottey (Outreach Manager), Chase Leito (Audio Engineer), and Daisy Okoye (Content Creator).

Supporting Contributors: Narvella Sefah (Front-End Team)), Fernanda Ponce (Content Team), Nicole Maria Mateo (Audio Team)

Check out the NPR College Podcast Competition entry “PWI-ing While Black” that got us to our top 10 finalist award! Listen on SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/user-306628760/pwi-ing-while-black

Kinda Sorta Brown is a University of Chicago Public Policy Podcast, as shown here: https://www.uc3p.org/kindasortabrown

Throughout the season we’ve discussed how different issues — from housing to policing — can bring about unrest within our communities. Despite the unrest, we’ve seen how communities build unity to address these issues and fight back against the problems they cause. Lex Thompson, our guest speaker, joins us to address what about when we are excluded from our own communities? How do we grapple with accepting ourselves when our community doesn’t because of our sexual orientation or gender? On this week’s episode, Chase revisits the concept of intersectionality, how our different identities intersect, and how these intersections can further marginalize people within their own community. You won’t want to miss the season finale of the CommuniTEA: Unity and Unrest with a surprise announcement at the end. Stay tuned and stay close KSFam.

Who are the homeless? Maybe it’s someone you know. Housing insecurity is real, pervasive, and traumatic. As the COVID-19 pandemic drags on, more and more people are teetering on the edge of homelessness. But what historical factors impact where traditionally segregated groups of people choose (or are forced) to reside in the first place? What policies have made it especially difficult for Black and Brown people to own property in high-resource neighborhoods? On this Chicago-centric episode of the Kinda Sorta Brown podcast, jump in with Dinah and Daisy as they navigate the evolution of housing segregation. Then, tune in for a “Homeless 101” conversation with the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless guest speakers Claudia Cabrera and Maxica Williams, the Special Projects Organizer and a passionate Speakers Bureau Advocate, respectively. Join us to find out how their fascinating heritages and unique identities as a cancer survivor, a person with a disability, Black and Latinx women, and an immigrant fuel their passion for advocacy and social work.

It has been less than 70 years since the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education desegregated America’s education system, yet education still seems to be largely divided along racial lines. Achievement gaps have proven that marginalized students are being left behind--underserved, under-supported and under-resourced--and in the age of COVID-19 and online learning, this chasm is widening. Join hosts Hope and Jon as they delve into the intersection of race, wealth, and education, in conversation with educators Tavonda Palmer and Isaiah Melendez to reimagine the education system and discuss community-building in the classroom.