This week, Brett docks the conversation in the uneasy space between celebrity culture, liberation politics, and the question of what we do when the heroes we admire turn out to be deeply compromised. Brett and Nicole start from the familiar tension of loving the work while wrestling with the artist, then push further into a harder question: if we’re serious about liberation, do we have to kill our heroes?

From Timothy Busfield to César Chávez and Dolores Huerta, they think through what happens when public figures tied to justice and movement work are revealed to have caused harm. They ask how to hold accountability without flattening history, why movements often get reduced to figureheads, and what it means to remember collective struggle without deifying the people at the top.

CW: sexual violence, child abuse, abuse, accountability.

Doc to Dock is co-hosted, written, produced, and edited by Dr. Brett S. Goldberg and Dr. Nicole K. Mayberry. 

Original music by Matt Bogdanow; artwork by Andre Gonzalez. 

Doc to Dock is recorded between Washington, D.C., and Orange County, CA. We record on Nacotchtank/Anacostan, Piscataway, Pamunkey, Hashemann, and Tongva lands.