Israel’s genocidal destruction of Gaza is the culmination of a violent settler-colonial project that goes all the way back to the Nakba (“Catastrophe”) of 1948. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, former political prisoner and Black Panther Mansa Musa speaks with award-winning Palestinian author and former political prisoner Basem Khandakji about the decades-long destruction of Palestinian society and mass displacement of Palestinians from their homeland, as well as the perseverance of Palestinian prisoners under the totalitarian conditions of Israeli prisons.

Guests:

• Basem Khandakji, born in 1983 in Nablus, is a Palestinian novelist, poet, and journalist. Arrested in 2004 at the age of twenty-one for his political activities, he continued to write from prison, producing a body of work that has earned wide recognition across the Arab world. Khandakji was released from Israeli prison in 2025, one year after his novel A Mask the Color of the Sky won the prestigious International Prize for Arabic Fiction.

Credits:

• Producer / Videographer / Editor: Cameron Granadino

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From the dawn of the digital age to the current era of “artificial intelligence,” the future of literacy, reading, and book publishing is facing an existential threat. But Paul Coates—legendary activist, publisher, former Baltimore Black Panther Party member, and founder of Black Classic Press—has some critical wisdom to share in these perilous times about the revolutionary necessity of books. At a live event organized by Tubman House and Eddie’s Front Porch and recorded at the TRNN studio in Baltimore, MD, on March 6, 2026, community organizer and creator of Healing Justices Erica Woodland sits down with Coates for a wide-ranging discussion about propaganda, publishing, Black literary production, and the past and present of revolutionary politics.

Guests:

• W. Paul Coates is the founder of Black Classic Press and BCP Digital Printing. Black Classic Press, established in 1978, specializes in republishing obscure and significant works by and about people of African descent. A former member of the Black Panther Party, Coates led the effort to establish the Black Panther Archives at Howard University.

Credits:

• Producer / Editor: Cameron Granadino
• Videographer: Phil Glaser

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2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the American Revolutionary War. While the national mythology behind the “America at 250” celebrations focuses on the 18th-century battle between Patriot and Loyalist elites, what does the story of the American Revolution and the founding of the United States look like through the eyes of enslaved people? In this episode of Rattling the Bars, host Mansa Musa speaks with Professor Justene Hill Edwards, author of Unfree Markets: The Slaves’ Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina.

Guests:

• Justene Hill Edwards is an associate professor of History in the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia. Her research explores the intersection of African American history, the history of slavery, and the history of American capitalism. She is the author of Unfree Markets: The Slaves’ Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina and Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s Bank.

Credits:

• Producer / Videographer / Editor: Cameron Granadino

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Former political prisoner Mahmoud al-Arda was first arrested by Israeli occupation forces in 1992 due to his involvement in the First Intifada and his membership in Islamic Jihad. Since then, for the past three decades, al-Arda has been incarcerated in different Israeli prisons, and he made international headlines in 2021 after leading a daring, successful, but short-lived escape from the maximum-security Gilboa Prison. In this blockbuster episode of Rattling the Bars, host Mansa Musa—a former Black Panther and political prisoner in the US—speaks with al-Arda after he and 2,000 other Palestinian prisoners were finally released from incarceration in Israel in 2025.

Additional Links/Info

• B’Tselem, Statistics on Palestinians in Israeli Custody
• B’Tselem, “Welcome to Hell”: The Israeli Prison System as a Network of Torture Camps (Report)
• Mansa Musa, TRNN, “Inside Israel’s Prison Regime”
• Ruwaida Amer, Electronic Intifada, “Freedom is the eternal dream”
• Aseel Mousa, Middle East Eye, “Jailbreak, freedom, exile: Life of Mahmoud al-Arda, architect of daring Israeli prison escape”

Credits 

• Videography: Ruwaida Amer, Cameron Granadino
• Producer / Editor: Cameron Granadino
• Voiceover: Danny Bou-Maroun

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While international attention has decreased in recent months, the horrors Israel continues to systematically unleash on Palestinians in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank have not. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, host Mansa Musa—a former Black Panther and political prisoner—speaks with renowned scholar-activist Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi about Israel’s apartheid system of incarceration and the urgent fight to free Palestinian political prisoners detained by Israel.

Producer / Videographer / Editor: Cameron Granadino

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When state violence and systemic denial of full citizenship by the state makes true belonging impossible for Black people, Black anarchists have envisioned and fought for a free life beyond the state. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, author William C. Anderson explores the rich, radical tradition of Black anarchism and its connection to prison abolitionist movements.

Guests:

• William C. Anderson is a writer and activist from Birmingham, AL. His work has appeared in outlets ranging from The Guardian, MTV, Truthout, British Journal of Photography, to Pitchfork. He is the author of The Nation on No Map: Black Anarchism and Abolition, and co-author of As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation. He’s also the co-founder of Offshoot Journal and provides creative direction as a producer of the Black Autonomy Podcast.

Credits:

• Producer / Videographer / Editor: Cameron Granadino

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A new report from The Marshall Project reveals that the daily number of kids in ICE detention has increased sixfold under the second Trump administration. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, host Mansa Musa speaks with Shannon Heffernan and Anna Flagg of The Marshall Project about the the human cost of Trump’s mass deportation campaign, and about the horrifying reality inside the South Texas Family Processing Center—the "black box" facility in Dilley, TX, where children are subjected to substandard food, medical deprivation, and prolonged detention beyond legal limits.

Guests:

• Anna Flagg is a senior data reporter at The Marshall Project and works with data to report on detention, deaths in custody, crime, race, policing and immigration. Her reporting has appeared in The Marshall Project, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, ProPublica, Politico, The Guardian, The Associated Press, Al Jazeera, and others.
• Shannon Heffernan is a staff writer at The Marshall Project whose work focuses on prisons and jails across the US, as well as sexual and gender-based violence, immigration and mental health, and how arts and culture shape (and are shaped by) crime and punishment.

Additional links/info:

• Anna Flagg & Shannon Heffernan, The Marshall Project, “‘Why is this happening to us?’ Daily number of kids in ICE detention jumps 6x under Trump”
• Maximillian Alvarez, TRNN, “Texas’ one-of-a-kind concentration camp for children and families”

Credits:

• Producer / Videographer / Editor: Cameron Granadino

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The term “mass incarceration” is inaccurate and misleading, Distinguished Professor and author Dylan Rodríguez says: “The masses are not being policed, targeted, and incarcerated; it's a targeted war with asymmetrical casualties.” In this episode of Rattling the Bars, Rodríguez speaks with former political prisoner and Black Panther Mansa Musa about the horrifying truth behind the US prison-industrial complex—and about the "pseudo-abolitionist" politics that often dilute the power of radical movements trying to dismantle it.

Guests:

• Dylan Rodríguez is a teacher, scholar, organizer, and collaborator who has worked at the University of California-Riverside since 200. He is a Distinguished Professor in the recently created Department of Black Study as well as the Department of Media and Cultural Studies. He is the author of three books: Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime; Suspended Apocalypse: White Supremacy, Genocide, and the Filipino Condition; and White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logic of Racial Genocide, which won the 2022 Frantz Fanon Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association.

Additional links/info:

• Mansa Musa, Ratting the Bars / TRNN, “Manifest Destiny never ended: the domestic war for white supremacy”

Credits:

• Producer, Videographer, Editor: Cameron Granadino

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How did the promise of Black wealth become a tool for white elites? In this Black History Month special of Rattling the Bars, Mansa Musa speaks with UVA Professor and author Justene Hill Edwards about the tragic history of the Freedman’s Bank. They dive into the economic intelligence of enslaved people and how they navigated the inherent violence of the slave economy. Professor Hill Edwards also breaks down the betrayal detailed in her book, Savings and Trust, revealing how a bank built for the formerly enslaved was redirected to fund D.C. infrastructure and white elite interests.

Get the book at this link on bookshop.com.

Host: Mansa Musa Videographer / Editor / Producer: Cameron Granadino

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From the very beginning, the United States of America has been at war—not just abroad, but domestically. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, host Mansa Musa speaks with scholar and author Dylan Rodríguez about how the US operates as a nation in a perpetual state of internal war, and how the white supremacist legacy of domestic warfare has reached terrifying new heights in the Trump era.

Resource Links:

• Purchase Dylan Rodríguez’s book White Reconstruction
• Revolt against the carceral world
• COVID-19 pandemic illuminates anti-Chinese racism and xenophobia
• Why corporate media doesn’t talk honestly about racism

Credits:

• Producer / Videographer / Editor: Cameron Granadino

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/rattling-the-bars--4799829/support.

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