Race Unwrapped

So far this season we’ve learned a lot about voter suppression tactics and how they weaken our democracy. This episode and next, we’ll meet some folks who are working to reverse the damage and make voting more accessible. Caren Short is the Director of Legal and Research for the League of Women Voters, and she says there are many reasons to be hopeful. She joins us to talk about her organization’s work to empower voters, and the influence each of us has to make positive change.

The Voting Rights act of 1965 said certain states had to check with the federal government before making any changes to their election laws. Sixteen states were subject to this “preclearance” process — all with an extensive history of racist voting practices. Just under 50 years later, the U.S. Supreme Court changed the rules, in a case called Shelby County v. Holder. On this episode, Dr. Kevin Morris talks us through the consequences of that decision, which he says were dire for equal voting access. He’s a Senior Research Fellow and Voting Policy Scholar at the Brennan Center for Justice.

Since the 15th Amendment gave Black men the right to vote in 1870, policy makers have thrown obstacles between marginalized voters and the ballot box. The tactics may change, but the erosion of democracy is relentless. Dr. Carol Anderson is a historian, educator and the author of "One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy." She joins us to help connect the dots between historical and modern factors that keep Black voters from being heard.

Race affects our world, whether we're thinking about it or not. And this season, we're unwrapping how it influences our democracy. From literacy tests in the Jim Crow era to the voter ID laws of today, so many gears in the American political machine are turning to keep Black folks away from the ballot box. So for the next 6 weeks, we're drawing a line from then to now. We'll give you the historical context you need to understand how race impacts voting today. And we'll meet some of the people who are fighting to make voting more accessible to all. Coming September 18, from Louisville Public Media.

Hey y’all! Michelle Tyrene Johnson here. You usually hear from me in the summertime, but I’m popping in with “Gifting a Soulful Christmas,” an hour-long exploration of Black holiday music!

I spoke to music experts and music lovers to share what makes Black Christmas and holiday music pull a little extra in your soul this time of year. Our experts include Otis Junior and Destiny Carter from 91.9FM WFPK and Kiana Del from 90.5FM WUOL, some of your favorite Louisville Public Media hosts.

As an extra little present under your tree, here’s a Spotify Christmas Music playlist includes the songs mentioned in the special, and some other personal favorites of mine. Enjoy!

Black don’t crack, except when it comes to cracking jokes. And Keith McGill does it for a living. McGill is a Louisville native and class clown who took it to a microphone for the first time when he was in his 20s.

Since then he has used comedy to talk about a range of tough topics — some tougher than others, depending on the audience. Being Black, being gay, grieving his partner of over 30 years... He believes if you set it up right, you can use humor to talk about anything. In fact, sometimes humor is the only way to talk about what hurts us the most.

On this episode of Race Unwrapped, we meet Pooja Reddy, a comedian and writer whose family immigrated from Hyderabad in southern India to Glasgow, Kentucky. Her humor draws heavily from her childhood experiences — in one bit, she describes herself as “personally victimized by the location of [her] parents’ green card sponsor.”

Reddy unwraps how her childhood in rural Kentucky shaped her outlook and fuels her humor. And she talks about pivoting to comedy after leaving the straight-laced government job that made her family proud (I mean, she worked for the Obamas, but a government job is a government job).

In the early 1980s, a young Eddie Murphy stepped into the national comedy scene and revitalized a flaccid “Saturday Night Live.” His career since then has been a fascinating reflection of how white American audiences relate to Black comedy. He was the lone Black man in fish-out-of-water movies like “Beverly Hills Cop,” then pivoted to movies like “Harlem Nights” and “Coming to America” with largely Black casts, catering to Black audiences. And though his early works like “Eddie Murphy Raw” were famously edgy, it was later family-friendly stuff that brought his career back from a slump… and seemed to make him more palatable to white folks. On this episode, NPR’s TV critic and media analyst Eric Deggans joins host Michelle Tyrene Johnson to explore what Eddie Murphy’s career can teach us about how Black humor fits into American culture.

Sometimes people just know their stuff. And in the case of Anne Libera, her stuff is comedy and she knows it well. Libera is a professor of comedy at Columbia University in Chicago. She’s also the director of comedy studies at Second City, and directs performances there.

This episode, we unwrap the anatomy of a comedy routine and how joking about serious topics has changed over time… and she pours a little bit of tea on some of her more famous students.

A Black Baptist minister, a Chinese Buddhist monk and a White Presbyterian walk into a bar… and for more than one reason, they may not all laugh at how the joke ends.

This season of Race Unwrapped we’re focused on the tie between race and humor. On this episode, I talk with Dr. Lawrence Edwin Williams about how humor connects us as humans, and how it can help us deal with difficult situations.

Williams teaches marketing at the University of Colorado and received his Ph. D. in Psychology at Yale. By studying with colleagues how people used humor to cope with Hurricane Sandy, he found that there is a certain degree of time that needs to pass before tragedy becomes comedy.

As a Black man himself, he has plenty of insight to share about how his findings apply to race, how people of color can use humor to connect with other people who have shared racial experiences, and how humor and time can soften tragedy and help you heal from it.