Let's Grab Coffee

In 1990, Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), a federal civil rights law banning discrimination against people with disabilities in many areas of life. However, despite the ADA and more precisely the work of the disability rights movement in bringing public visibility to the injustices faced by disabled folks, the law doesn’t cover accessibility or inclusion in every area of life nor does it change ableist attitudes. And because ableism is ubiquitous in our social world, we must be active in challenging our bias. Today I’m chatting with Dr. Ashley Shew, author of Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement. We discuss ableism, disability, technology, and accessibility.

According to the US Census, the United States is home to more than 45 million immigrants, about 14% of the total US population. And while this country’s origin story is one of immigration, there have almost always been anti-immigration attitudes, deep misconceptions about the immigration process, and biases about who is worthy of belonging. On today’s show I’m joined by Alejandra Oliva, author of Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith, and Migration. We’ll talk about experience of immigration and interpreting at the US-Mexico border and at an asylum application clinic.

Child welfare services, including adoption and foster care, are often framed around the “best interests of the child,” but who gets to decide what’s best and who’s best for the child? What happens in cases of adoptive parent and foster parent abuse, neglect, and murder? On this episode, I sit down with Roxanna Asgarian, author of _We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America. _Through her investigative journalism, she challenges some of the assumptions around child welfare and adoption, centers the birth families whose children were murdered by their adoptive parents in a highly-publicized 2018 murder-suicide, and exposes the harms baked into the child welfare system.

In the U.S. coffee is commonly associated with Starbucks, a daily pick-me-up taken on the go, or a fancy specialty coffee shop often located in a gentrified neighborhood. However coffee has a deeply Black and deeply communal history. What would it mean to understand coffee’s Black history and its Black future? Cxffeeblack is on a mission to find out.

On this episode, I’m joined by Bartholomew Jones, a Memphis-born entrepreneur who in late 2018 co-founded Cxffeeblack, a Black social enterprise alongside his wife, Renata Henderson, Memphis’ first Black female coffee roaster.

Doctors are trained to save the lives of countless patients but what happens when the person who needs saving is themselves? On today’s show I’m joined by Dr. Anthony Chin-Quee, author of I Can’t Save You. In this memoir, Anthony gives us an intimate look at one doctor’s journey into and out of medicine.

Anthony Chin-Quee, M.D., is a board-certified otolaryngologist with degrees from Harvard University and Emory University School of Medicine. An award-winning storyteller with The Moth, he has been on the writing staff of FOX’s The Resident and a medical adviser for, none other than, ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy. He has published opinions in Forbes and been interviewed by NPR on the topic of systemic racism in medical education.

Have you ever expensed a lunch that wasn’t solely a business meeting or maybe added a little extra time on your timesheet? If so, that’s fraud. Fraud is not just identity theft, ponzi schemes, or embezzling millions of dollars. Fraud is all around us and maybe even happening to us without our knowledge. On today’s show, I sit down with Dr. Kelly Richmond Pope author of Fool Me Once: Scams, Stories, and Secrets from the Trillion-Dollar Fraud Industry.

Kelly Richmond Pope is the Dr. Barry Jay Epstein Endowed Professor of Forensic Accounting at DePaul University in Chicago, IL. Her research on executive misconduct culminated in directing and producing the award-winning documentary, All the Queen's Horses which explores the largest municipal fraud in U.S. history. Her TED Talk entitled "How Whistle-blowers Shape History” has been viewed over 1.6 million times, translated into 20 languages, and serves as a resource to help organizations and individuals embrace internal whistleblowing.

In the last few years, loss and grief have become a shared collective experience, particularly in the wake of the COVID19 pandemic. This period has also put the inequities in the U.S. healthcare system front and center along with the ways that what has been “normal” has often been harmful or unsustainable. In _A Living Remedy: A Memoir, _Nicole Chung shares her personal experience of loss and grief and connects it to the broader systemic failures that countless Americans have encountered and are one emergency away from encountering. 

Nicole Chung is the author the national bestseller All You Can Ever Know, _which was named a Best Book of the Year by over twenty outlets, including NPR, _The Washington Post, _and _Time. She is currently a contributing writer at The Atlantic, a Time contributor, and a _Slate _columnist.

Recent acts of racial violence are often explained aways as isolated incidents yet a longer view of our nation’s history provides much-needed context to understand our present moment and what may lay ahead. In his latest book, American Whitelash: A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress, Wesley Lowery brings together insights from history, interviews, data, and a close examination of six cases of white racial violence that occurred in the decade following Obama’s election. He demonstrates how periods of white racist backlash have occurred after moments of social progress.

SunAh revisits her conversation with Dr. Victor Ray about his book On Critical Race Theory: Why It Matters & Why You Should Care. Dr. Victor Ray, Associate Professor in the Departments of Sociology and Criminology and African American Studies at the University of Iowa and and a Nonresident Fellow in Governance Studies at The Brookings Institution.. Over the past couple years, we’ve seen a moral panic around “critical race theory” resulting in changes to K-12 curriculum and legislation around divisive concepts in higher education. But, what exactly is critical race theory? Dr. Ray breaks it down in easy-to-understand language with real world applications.

What does it feel like to be visible and invisible, American and presumed foreigner, neither Black nor White? What does it feel like to be Asian in America? In Biting the Hand: Growing Up Asian in Black and White America, Julia Lee takes readers on a personal journey of finding her place in the U.S. It is a journey of rage, shame, and grace, a journey that will be familiar to many marginalized folks in the U.S.