The Takeaway

Satya Rhodes-Conway is the mayor of Madison, Wisconsin, population 270,000. When she was first elected in 2019, Mayor Rhodes-Conway became the first out LGBTQ person to serve as Madison’s mayor. She is also the chair of the Climate Mayors, an appointed position from the EPA’s Local Government Advisory Committee.

Host Melissa Harris-Perry recently visited Madison, Wisconsin, and spoke with Mayor Rhodes-Conway in Madison.  They toured a Madison landmark, and had a conversation about what makes cities great, the specific challenges Madison faces, and more.

Recent reporting by The New York Times investigative reporter Hannah Dreier highlighted the issues with migrant children who are forced to work in the U.S., but this wasn’t the first time someone reported on this problem.

We’ll hear from Daffodil Altan, an investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker who produced the film Trafficked in America in 2018, and we'll hear from Margaret Wurth, Senior Researcher in the Children’s Rights Division at Human Rights Watch, about legal farm child labor. 

At the beginning of the 20th century, Black people owned more than 16 million acres of farmland across the United States. Now, more than 90% of that land has been lost. 

This land loss is, in part, due to the USDA's systemic racial discrimination of Black farmers. While advocates have struggled to preserve the tradition of Black farming across the United States through a concerted movement of both legal and policy measures, Black farmers have not seen real relief. And Black ownership of farmland continues to dwindle. 

President of the National Black Farmers Association, Mr. John Boyd Jr., joins us to talk through updates in the fight against the extinction of Black farmers across the country. 

While certain Asian American conservatives like Nikki Haley and Young Kim have gained prominence in recent years, they didn’t come out of nowhere. Conservative political traditions in Asian American communities have developed organically for decades, reflecting complex relationships between such communities, their heritage countries, and the U.S. itself. 

The UCLA’s Amerasia Journal explores these understudied but multifaceted stories in a new special issue titled, “Conservatisms and Fascisms in Asian America.” We speak with the co-editors: Jane Hong, associate professor of history at Occidental College, and Adrian De Leon, assistant professor of American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California.

We talk to Professor Anita Hill, about her fight for justice and her new book, Believing: Our Thirty-Year Journey to End Gender Violence

ABC mockumentary Abbott Elementary takes us to a public school in Philadelphia, where the teachers do their best to educate their students in spite of a lack of resources and funding. Sheryl Lee Ralph plays a no-nonsense, veteran teacher and mentor to second-grade teacher Janine Teagues, played by the show’s creator Quinta Brunson.

Ralph has won Emmy for best supporting actress, a SAG award, and a Critics Choice award all for her role in Abbott Elementary. 

While the reality of the public school system is no joke, Abbott Elementary allows us to laugh at the absurdity of a dire situation and root for the unsung heroes of the public school system. We speak with Sheryl Lee Ralph about activism, education, and Abbott Elementary.

For almost three years the amount of aid provided to low-income families increased. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, additional benefit allotments allowed SNAP households to receive more money in monthly benefits per person. But as of March 1st, those benefits are gone nationwide. 

We look back at our conversation with Jamila Michener, associate professor in the department of Government at Cornell University, Co-Director of the Cornell Center for Health Equity, and Author of, Fragmented Democracy: Medicaid, Federalism, and Unequal Politics. 

Kinetic Light, a disability art collective, performed a duet called Under Momentum at Lincoln Center in February. The performance shows the joys of continuous motion, the allure of speed, and the beautiful futility of resisting gravity and is performed on a series of ramps, and the artists interchange between wheelchair and floor movement. We speak with Alice Sheppard, founder of Kinetic Light, who performed in Under Momentum, about the performance, the joys of moving the body, and access in the arts.

In this audio story you'll also hear audio descriptions from Under Momentum that describe the visual experience of the performance for those who are blind or have low vision. These are not just an add-on to the show, but a full and complete way of experiencing the performance. Audimance, Kinetic Light's signature approach to audio description was created by artist/engineer Laurel Lawson.You'll also hear from Miranda Hoffner, the associate director of accessibility at Lincoln Center. Under Momentum is an experience curated by disabled performers for a disabled audience and Kinetic Light worked with Lincoln Center to provide several access points to the performance including deaf and hearing ASL interpreters, captioning for hard of hearing or deaf folks, haptic wires that people could touch to feel vibrations during the performance, and a quiet room for people who might become overstimulated. There was also a “choose what you pay model” for tickets, because cost is also a barrier to accessing art.

Image Descriptions:Alice is a multiracial Black woman with short curly hair. Laurel is a white person with cropped teal hair. They both wear shimmery metallic costumes. In the photo Alice Sheppard kneels at the base of the ramp, with her back and wheels facing the camera. She reaches her arms high in a V. Laurel Lawson peers at her from behind the ramp. 

The Columbia River runs for over 1,200 miles through the Pacific Northwest, from the Canadian Rockies, through Idaho, then Washington, and through Oregon before finally emptying in the Pacific Ocean.

For thousands of years, Native Tribes along the Columbia River have depended on the river, and its bountiful stocks of salmon for sustenance, and for their livelihood, and the salmon are engrained in their cultural identity, and their spiritual practices. So much so, that the Columbia River Basin tribes today proudly refer to themselves as "Salmon People."

While there were once 10 million salmon that returned to the Columbia River's spawning grounds, extensive damming, overfishing, habitat loss, and now climate change, have decimated salmon populations.  Today, just around 1 million salmon make the return trip up the Columbia and through its tributaries.

A new documentary from ProPublica and Oregon Public Broadcasting directed by Katie Campbell titled Salmon People: A Native Fishing Family’s Fight to Preserve a Way of Life, tells the story of Randy Settler and his family, who are from the Yakama Tribe, as they fight to preserve the depleting salmon populations, and preserve their way of life.

We speak with Katie Campbell, documentary filmmaker with ProPublica and director of the film Salmon People, A Native Fishing Family's Fight to Preserve a Way of Life, and Randy Settler, Yakama Tribal fisherman, about the fight to protect the salmon of the Columbia River, and the fight to preserve the way of life of the "Salmon People."

For more, check out ProPublica and Oregon Public Broadcasting's multi-part reporting series "Broken Promises," and watch the documentary online for free.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court heard two arguments over whether President Biden has the authority to forgive millions of dollars in federal student loan debt. 

These legal challenges come after Biden announced a plan last year that would forgive up to $20,000 in debt for some borrowers. This could affect an estimated 40 million borrowers across the country, and wipe out more than 400 billion in federal student debt. 

The Department of Education has said that 26 million people already applied for the debt relief last year after the plan was announced, but it was put on temporary hold by the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in November. These legal challenges are asking whether the Biden Administration has the authority to forgive student loan debt under the 2003 law called the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students, also known as the HEROES Act.

Supporters and advocates for student debt cancellation gathered outside of the Supreme Court building ahead of arguments, and one person there was Kat Welbeck, Director of Advocacy & Civil Rights Counsel at the Student Borrower Protection Center. She joined to discuss the arguments.