KPFA - Hard Knock Radio

Davey D talks with writer and geographer Alex Werth about his new book On Loop: Black Sonic Politics in Oakland and how sound, race, and power collide in the town’s history. Werth explains that although he was trained by anthropologists, his grounding in geography helps him track how Oakland as a place has been made and remade through Black migration, music, and struggle. They open with Lake Merritt and the drum circles, digging into how increased patrols, ticketing, and “no cruising” zones function as coded ways to tell Black Oaklanders they are not welcome, even while officials claim the issue is noise or public order.

From there, Werth walks through the longer arc starting with the Second Great Migration, when Black Southerners brought blues and other rural sounds to West Oakland. Those sounds sparked moral panic among white residents and segments of the Black middle class, feeding nuisance laws and heavy regulation of Black nightlife along Seventh Street. Davey notes how the rhetoric from the nineteen forties and fifties sounds almost identical to current complaints about sideshows, scraper bikes, and drum circles. Werth frames this as history on loop: the repetition of anti Black policing alongside the equally persistent creativity and resilience of Black Oaklanders, from funk and Boogaloo to hip hop.

They spend a big chunk on the war on nuisance, broken windows policing, and the role of Oakland Police Department under Black political leadership in the post civil rights era. Werth shows how vague, race neutral language about “nuisance” lets the city target Black spaces like cruising zones without saying race out loud. The conversation then zeroes in on clubs, especially Geoffrey’s Inner Circle and Sweet Jimmy’s, as case studies of how Black owned venues were over policed, buried in fees, and squeezed through a special events permit regime that in practice focused on rap and Black crowds. Meanwhile the city markets Oakland as the home of jazz, funk, and now Tupac, profiting from Black culture it once criminalized. Werth closes by saying he wants readers to tune their ears to how sound itself is political, and to see that Black music and Black freedom struggles in Oakland are inseparable.

Hard Knock Radio is a drive-time Hip-Hop talk show on KPFA (94.1fm @ 4-5 pm Monday-Friday), a community radio station without corporate underwriting, hosted by Davey D and Anita Johnson.

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Host Davey D brings on Minneapolis–St. Paul journalist and activist Georgia Fort to dig into ICE raids, attacks on Somali communities, and the growing repression of journalists and protesters in Minnesota and beyond.

Georgia starts by describing a November 25 raid on St. Paul’s East Side where several hundred people showed up and three journalists were attacked, including one from NPR who had to be taken away by ambulance. She stresses that First Amendment rights to protest and a free press are being violated repeatedly, with no real consequences, and that local officials who should be defending residents are either afraid or complicit. She cites ProPublica’s figure that at least 170 U.S. citizens have been wrongfully detained by ICE.

Davey asks whether the media and the public “dropped the ball” after the George Floyd uprising, when reporters were already being arrested in Minneapolis. Georgia says yes, absolutely: Americans normalized constitutional violations, tolerated abuses aimed at Black people, and then allowed someone convicted of dozens of felonies to become president. She adds that even valid criticism of figures like Kamala Harris went nowhere because it wasn’t tied to any real strategy.

The conversation shifts to the Somali community and the narratives being pushed online. Davey describes seeing suddenly amplified social media accounts calling for ICE in Black neighborhoods and blaming immigrants. Georgia frames this as a “state of emergency” shaped by both racial terror and an information war: AI-generated or manipulated videos, algorithmic amplification, and social platforms aligned with Trump’s agenda. She points to examples like uncensored footage of Charlie Kirk being shot and asks what emotions and political outcomes that kind of content is meant to trigger.

Georgia pushes back on attempts to demonize Somali Minnesotans, noting they are deeply involved in academia, medicine, finance, and public life, and that fraud narratives conveniently erase the fact that a white woman led a major Minnesota scheme Trump pinned on Somalis. She draws a historical line from masked KKK terror to today’s masked federal agents and multi-agency immigration crackdowns, with unmarked cars, no badge numbers, no warrants, and U.S. citizens being swept up.

They talk about Minneapolis as a movement city: community members have sometimes successfully intervened in ICE actions, kept people safe, and supported lawsuits like those backed by the ACLU of Minnesota. Georgia notes Attorney General Keith Ellison’s many suits against the Trump administration, but says some officials are clearly scared after the assassination of Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband by someone posing as law enforcement, with an apparent hit list of other electeds.

In closing, Georgia urges listeners to follow her work at georgiafort.com and warns about the White House’s new “Media Offenders” page, which labels journalists and outlets as liars or lunatics. She fears that political violence will increasingly be directed at media workers. Her final message is that people cannot look away: this is about whether we are willing to defend civil and human rights, and what side of history each of us chooses to stand on.

Hard Knock Radio is a drive-time Hip-Hop talk show on KPFA (94.1fm @ 4-5 pm Monday-Friday), a community radio station without corporate underwriting, hosted by Davey D and Anita Johnson.

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Davey D opens by grounding listeners in the fight over ethnic studies in California, focusing on AB715 and how claims of antisemitism are being used to roll back gains and potentially chill K–12 ethnic studies. Sameer frames this as part of a larger right-wing strategy coming out of the Heritage Foundation’s “Project Esther,” a companion to Project 2025 that lays out how to shore up support for Israel and criminalize the Palestine solidarity movement. He argues that centrist and “resistance” Democrats like Gavin Newsom and Scott Wiener are, in practice, advancing that playbook.

A big chunk of the conversation is about how antisemitism is being redefined and weaponized. Sameer insists three things must be held at once: antisemitism is real and rising; it is also being misused to shut down legitimate criticism of Israel and Palestinian solidarity; and the political class is hyper-focused on antisemitism while ignoring anti-Palestinian racism and other forms of oppression. AB715 bakes into law a politicized definition of antisemitism drawn from federal policy that effectively equates criticism of Israel with hatred of Jews.

You both break down concrete dangers in the bill:

Sameer also highlights how AB715 was rushed through: introduced after deadlines, bypassing normal committee process, with no real input from teachers, students, or school boards, even as its own authors admitted the language was flawed and promised “ironclad” amendments that still have not materialized.

Toward the end, you dig into Zionism, with Sameer stressing it’s a political ideology, not synonymous with Judaism, and noting that many Zionists in the U.S. are non-Jewish Christian evangelicals whose support is rooted in apocalyptic theology and often explicit antisemitism. He points to figures like Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, and Elon Musk to show how openly antisemitic actors avoid scrutiny while Jewish students and Palestine organizers are targeted.

Sameer closes by calling on listeners to get organized: pressure legislators, demand fixes to AB715, defend ethnic studies, and treat the coming elections as a test of whether Californians will accept political censorship wrapped in “community safety” rhetoric.

Hard Knock Radio is a drive-time Hip-Hop talk show on KPFA (94.1fm @ 4-5 pm Monday-Friday), a community radio station without corporate underwriting, hosted by Davey D and Anita Johnson.

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Davey D opens Hard Knock Radio by framing housing and policing as intertwined crises, then centers the conversation on Rahim Kurwa’s book Indefensible Spaces: Policing and the Struggle for Housing. Kurwa begins with the story of Michelle Ross, a Section 8 voucher holder who moved from Los Angeles to Palmdale in 2008. Once there, she faced relentless harassment. City inspectors and sheriff’s deputies repeatedly raided her home, her address was posted on an I Hate Section 8 Facebook page, neighbors graffitied her house, and someone threw a bottle of urine at her children. Kurwa explains that Ross was one of thousands of tenants in Antelope Valley who were policed in this way.

To make sense of this, Kurwa lays out three threads. First, Antelope Valley functions as a “safety valve” for Los Angeles, absorbing defense industry jobs after World War II and later absorbing residents pushed out by rising housing costs. Second, shifts from public housing to vouchers pushed poor residents, especially Black families, into marginal suburban areas. Third, there is a long history of policing as a tool to maintain racial segregation and to regulate Black homes.

Kurwa and Davey pull the lens back to the deeper history of the region. Kurwa describes an early museum that twisted Indigenous history to erase Native presence and justify a white suburban origin story. He then highlights Black histories in the Valley, including Charles Graves, a formerly enslaved man who struck gold, founded an integrated school, and became postmaster. They trace the creation of Sun Village as an all Black town, built because Black families were shut out of Palmdale and Lancaster, and discuss its rise, decline, and recent revitalization around institutions like Jackie Robinson Park.

The conversation then returns to policing and housing policy. Kurwa connects historical “man in the house” rules and midnight welfare raids to contemporary voucher policing in Antelope Valley, where neighbors weaponize nuisance ordinances, Section 8 rules, and online platforms to surveil and evict tenants. He notes that local organizing and litigation led to a landmark Department of Justice case linking policing to Fair Housing Act violations, but enforcement has been weak and overpolicing continues.

They close by tying this local story to national patterns. Kurwa warns that crime free housing laws, school policing, gang databases, and immigration enforcement normalize everyday people acting as enforcers, turning homes and neighborhoods into contested, heavily surveilled spaces rather than places of safety and belonging.

Hard Knock Radio is a drive-time Hip-Hop talk show on KPFA (94.1fm @ 4-5 pm Monday-Friday), a community radio station without corporate underwriting, hosted by Davey D and Anita Johnson.

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On this episode of Hard Knock Radio, host Davey D sits down with Joshua Davis, a history professor at the University of Baltimore and author of Police Against the Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back. The conversation digs into a part of civil rights history that is usually blurred out of the frame: how local police departments, not just the FBI, designed and refined a playbook to crush Black freedom movements and the organizers who led them.

Davis explains that he started the book around 2017, when mainstream media kept branding Black Lives Matter as “the new civil rights movement,” as if the movements of the fifties and sixties never seriously challenged police violence. His research shows the opposite. Groups like SNCC and CORE were not just fighting for buses, counters and ballots. They were picketing stations, doing sit ins in precincts, shutting down bridges, and calling out false arrests, frame ups and constant surveillance.

A key part of the story is the rise of “political police” and the so called red squads. These secret intelligence units existed in big city departments from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles. They built massive files on activists, infiltrated groups, pushed entrapment schemes, and used humiliation and job loss as weapons. Davis highlights figures like communist councilman Ben Davis, who exposed police brutality in Harlem, and Ella Baker, who led a New York NAACP campaign against NYPD abuse years before Montgomery.

The conversation also draws sharp lines from that era to the present. Davey points out how the label “communist” then functions like “Antifa,” “terrorist,” or “gang” now. Davis walks through how felony charges, racketeering laws and national security language are used to criminalize protest, from the civil rights era to Stop Cop City and Palestine solidarity work.

Davis and Davey dig into examples of open collusion between police and white supremacist forces, from mobs attacking Freedom Riders while officers stood aside, to undercover cops sitting on those buses only to gather intelligence on activists. They also uplift resistance that has been buried, especially the courage of Birmingham leader Fred Shuttlesworth and the young people who confronted police in the streets.

By the end of the show, one point is clear. The civil rights movement did not ignore police violence. It met it head on, in courtrooms, on sidewalks, and inside jails. Remembering that history changes how we see both state repression and the radical work of those who came before Black Lives Matter.

Hard Knock Radio is a drive-time Hip-Hop talk show on KPFA (94.1fm @ 4-5 pm Monday-Friday), a community radio station without corporate underwriting, hosted by Davey D and Anita Johnson.

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A revealing look at how negative biases against women of color are embedded in search engine results and algorithms

Run a Google search for “Black girls”―what will you find? “Big Booty” and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms. But, if you type in “white girls,” the results are radically different. The suggested porn sites and un-moderated discussions about “why Black women are so sassy” or “why Black women are so angry” presents a disturbing portrait of Black womanhood in modern society.

In Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities. Data discrimination is a real social problem; Noble argues that the combination of private interests in promoting certain sites, along with the monopoly status of a relatively small number of Internet search engines, leads to a biased set of search algorithms that privilege whiteness and discriminate against people of color, specifically women of color.

Hard Knock Radio is a drive-time Hip-Hop talk show on KPFA (94.1fm @ 4-5 pm Monday-Friday), a community radio station without corporate underwriting, hosted by Davey D and Anita Johnson.

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On Hard Knock Radio, I sat down with Jelani Cobb—dean of Columbia’s Journalism School, longtime staff writer at The New Yorker, and a thinker rooted in Hip Hop’s habit of connecting dots across time. We talked about his new book, Three or More Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here (2012–2025). I called it “a book of books” on air for a reason: Cobb isn’t chasing hot takes; he’s building a historical map for a decade that feels like whiplash.

Cobb traces the spark back to his first New Yorker assignment: the killing of Trayvon Martin. An editor asked him to “keep track of where this story goes.” He’s still following it. Trayvon becomes a tuning fork, the vibration that carries forward into Black Lives Matter, into the massacre at Mother Emanuel, into the mainstreaming of extremist politics that now shapes the courts, policing, and public life. “We’re seeing masked agents roaming the streets with license to racially profile,” he says, linking scattered headlines to a single drift of power.

What separates this book from a clip file is the method. Cobb reports with history at his elbow. When he covered Sanford, Florida, he pulled the hidden thread to Harry and Harriet Moore—the NAACP organizers whose home was firebombed on Christmas 1951 for registering Black voters. When he sat through Dylann Roof’s trial, he read it alongside a 1947 lynching case previously covered in the same magazine. That’s the point: none of this started yesterday. To understand the “now,” you have to excavate the “again.”

We spent time on pop culture because movies teach history to millions—often badly. Cobb argues you can’t sell “alternate histories” to a public that refuses to face the real one. He broke down Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained as a revenge fantasy that turns the final boss of slavery into a Black character—“morally unconscionable” in a system designed and enforced by white power. Then he pivoted to Spielberg’s Lincoln, pushing past the saintly portrait to the actual politics: agitation from Frederick Douglass, the pressure of Radical Republicans like Thaddeus Stevens, and a president whose true heroism was stubborn, lonely resolve to hold the Union together—not divine emancipation from above. The lesson isn’t to cancel the films; it’s to treat them as texts—with footnotes, counters, and context.

Cobb’s title also carries history in its teeth. After the Stono Rebellion of 1739, South Carolina codified that “more than two Negroes outside the company of a white man” could be defined as insurrection. Centuries later, American law still leans on formulas that turn Black assembly into threat—“public mayhem committed by three or more,” the boilerplate of riot statutes. The title becomes a quiet indictment of how power names our gatherings, then polices them.

The book moves in acts—Obama’s second term, Trump’s first, then the Biden years sliding toward a second Trump administration—and connects political weather to the culture we breathe. There are portraits and moments: Harry Belafonte’s hard, principled eye on presidents (“What made you think that’s not what I’ve been doing?” he once said when asked to cut Obama some slack), Ruby Dee, Amiri Baraka, the Ferguson uprising, Stacey Abrams’s voting fight, even D-Nice turning quarantine into a civic commons. Cobb engages Ta-Nehisi Coates on reparations and memory, not as a side note but as an argument for how policy and imagination meet.

I asked whether he saw this crisis coming. He didn’t flinch. The rise of Trumpism and the Charleston massacre arrived within a day of each other in 2015, expressions of the same “redemptionist” current in American life—the old idea that white supremacy can restore itself through backlash. Cobb isn’t surprised we’re here; he’s concerned we don’t remember how we’ve gotten out of places like this before.

That’s his closing charge: Study history strategically. Not to feel good. Not for trivia night. For tactics. What did people do to fight lynching? To win voting rights? To crack segregation? Read the books—but also read the conditions under which those books were written, when Carter G. Woodson ran from mobs and W.E.B. Du Bois battled segregation just to reach the archives. If the Smithsonian is under attack and Black history is being shoved off the shelf, then the counter is to institutionalize memory elsewhere—and, yes, to put the receipts in a book the censors can’t quietly bury.

When Three or More Is a Riot hits shelves, my kids are getting chapters at the dinner table—same with yours, Jelani. Not because it’s fashionable homework, but because it’s a survival guide dressed like a reader. The past isn’t past in these pages; it’s a set of tools for the moment we’re in.

Hard Knock Radio is a drive-time Hip-Hop talk show on KPFA (94.1fm @ 4-5 pm Monday-Friday), a community radio station without corporate underwriting, hosted by Davey D and Anita Johnson.

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The conversation opens with Davey D breaking down a quiet but devastating move by the Trump Education Department that declared key careers like nursing and teaching as “non professional” for federal loans. He frames it as a slick attack on Black and Brown communities, women, and working class folks who rely on those pathways for stable work and community care.

Registered nurse and union vice president Jennifer Esteen explains why that ruling is both an insult and a direct economic strike. Nursing is mostly women and largely people of color, and nurses are the ones who actually keep patients alive and cared for. She connects this new policy to massive federal cuts, the long standing nursing shortage, and the racism she and her mother faced trying to enter and move up in the field. Jennifer stresses that this is about destroying the pipeline of Black and Brown providers while worsening medical disparities that were already clear during COVID.

Educator and author Christopher Emdin zooms out and names it as part of a larger project to strip value from soulful professions rooted in care. He argues that nursing and teaching are attacked precisely because they require humanity, empathy, and what he calls soul, something many of the people making policy lack. He links the move on loans to earlier signs, like putting unqualified leadership over education, and explains how Black students have used federal loans not only to pay tuition but to survive while studying. For him, this is an economic and political assault on Black resistance, because classrooms are the boot camp for fights against white supremacy.

Dr Norlissa Cooper, a nurse with a doctorate in health policy, brings in the academic side. She notes how advanced nursing degrees are already rare, especially among Black nurses, and this policy will choke off the future supply of professors and researchers who study and challenge health disparities. All three guests land on similar solutions. We have to turn back to community, build our own support systems, lean on unions, sororities, and Black institutions, and even look to models like the Black Panther clinics or Filipino labor unions that created their own funds. The conversation closes with a call for resilience, imagination, and collective responsibility to defend nursing, teaching, and the communities they serve.

Hard Knock Radio is a drive-time Hip-Hop talk show on KPFA (94.1fm @ 4-5 pm Monday-Friday), a community radio station without corporate underwriting, hosted by Davey D and Anita Johnson.

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The interview centers on the book Visualizing Palestine: A Chronicle of Colonialism and the Struggle for Liberation and the broader work of the Visualizing Palestine collective. You open by situating the book in a moment of media consolidation, censorship, and classroom bans, framing it as both an archive and a living tool for narrative struggle. Editor Jessica Anderson explains that VP has spent over a decade creating data-driven visuals, maps, and explainers on topics like settler colonialism, apartheid, water and ecological justice, political prisoners, disability justice, and freedom of expression. The book curates these hundreds of visuals into 12 themed chapters, each introduced by an essay, and had to be re-opened in late 2023 to account for Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza.

Designer Nas Abd Elal talks about the challenge of turning overwhelming numbers into visual stories that humanize Palestinians instead of numbing audiences. They describe organizing the work around core concepts such as apartheid, colonialism, ecological justice, and prisoners, and trying to balance rigorous data with powerful personal narratives. Key examples include the widely used visual “Six Wars Old, 16 Years of Childhood in Gaza,” which reframes life in Gaza beyond death tolls, and graphics that expose the tiered ID card system and jet fuel shipments from a single Texas company that enable Israel’s air war. These visuals help people see the concrete mechanics of genocide and corporate complicity, giving organizers points of pressure for campaigns and boycotts.

Throughout the conversation, you all return to the idea that this is fundamentally a narrative battle. Jessica and Nas describe increasing repression, algorithmic suppression, and legislative attacks on ethnic studies and specific terms like “apartheid” and “settler colonialism,” even as public opinion shifts toward recognizing a genocide and questioning U.S. support for Israel. They emphasize that VP’s primary audience is the “persuadable” and those not yet active, rather than hardened Zionist supporters. The project also strives to show Palestinians as whole people, highlighting resistance, food sovereignty, culture, and collective wisdom, not just victimization. The interview closes with an invitation for organizers to see the book and VP’s visuals as living tools for education, movement-building, and pushing toward a tipping point for justice in Palestine.

Hard Knock Radio is a drive-time Hip-Hop talk show on KPFA (94.1fm @ 4-5 pm Monday-Friday), a community radio station without corporate underwriting, hosted by Davey D and Anita Johnson.

The post Special Fund Drive Programming: Visualizing Palestine: A Chronicle of Colonialism and the Struggle for Liberation appeared first on KPFA.

Hard Knock Radio is a drive-time Hip-Hop talk show on KPFA (94.1fm @ 4-5 pm Monday-Friday), a community radio station without corporate underwriting, hosted by Davey D and Anita Johnson.

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