Race and Class Archives - Open Source with Christopher Lydon

THIS WEEK'S SHOW: October 1, 2026

AI Apocalypse?

"A juvenility of moral imagination that is at the core of this."

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May 3-9PM, 2018

Marx at 200

A 19th Century Idea in a 21st Century World

A specter is haunting human affairs these days: it’s the thought that Karl Marx (on his 200th birthday this week) may have been more right than wrong about rich-get-richer bourgeois...

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, 2010

Nell Painter’s History of White People: it’s coming to an end

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Nell Irvin Painter. (27 minutes, 16 mb mp3) Nell Painter and I seem to have opposite takes on the great Ralph Waldo Emerson....

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, 2007

Mortgage Meltdown

People all over the country are losing their homes, in rather startling numbers. Because of a meltdown in the subprime mortgage market, in Detroit, one out of every 21 mortgages...

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, 2007

Ralph Ellison's America

Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) [This show records at 4:00pm Eastern to accommodate our guests’ schedules.] America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them...

, 2007

Race, Class, and Language

[Since we ended up covering many of these issues on our Ralph Ellison’s America show, we sent this one to the graveyard.] Leave it to nother to channel exactly what...

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, 2006

Race, Class and Racism

Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Eracism[Allie Holler / Flickr] In response to Martin Luther King’s assassination, schoolteacher Jane Elliott devised a simple yet revealing exercise that...

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, 2005

Race and Class: Hip-Hop

Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Two MCs and one DJ [Experience Music Project] Hip-hop is a major American cultural tour de force. It’s music, but it’s...

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, 2005

Race and Class: The Artists' Take

Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Mobility, by British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare. Image courtesy of James Cohan Gallery, NY. [Yinka Shonibare / James Cohan Gallery] The awful...

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, 2005

Racial Inequalities in Healthcare

Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) [sjaces / Flickr] The color line in America’s healthcare system has surfaced repeatedly in our ongoing series on race and class....

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, 2005

Race and Class in America

Listen to the Show Portrait of a New Orleans hurricane survivor.[Clayton James Cubitt] It’s kind of a no-no in America to talk about class. Our country’s supposed to be classless...

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, 2005

Race and Class: Glenn Loury

Listen to the Show Glenn Loury Glenn Loury, in his colleague Paul Krugman’s account, “has become what, say, Arthur Koestler or George Orwell was in another time and place: one...

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, 2005

Rethinking Race and Class: John McWhorter

Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) John McWhorter [The Teaching Company] Here’s the question: In four decades of unrelenting news and politics centered on “race,” what has...

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, 2005

Rethinking Race and Class