Rebroadcast: Race and Class

Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)

Open Source is off this week, so we’re re-broadcasting five shows we developed last year the month after Katrina hit as part of an ongoing series on race and class. Tonight the first in the series, Rethinking Race and Class.

From Chris’s original billboard:

The evangelist Bishop T. D. Jakes, with President and Mrs. Bush at the National Cathedral last week, said we’re a country “that overlooks the poor and the suffering and continues past the ghetto on our way to the Mardi Gras,?? and he wasn’t speaking just of New Orleans. We’re a country that dabbles now and then in a “race conversation,?? as Bill Clinton called his, but we tend to recoil from hard evidence of inequality, like the 6-year gap in life expectancy between black and white America, or the infant mortality among blacks that’s double the rate among whites. Or else the talk gets stuck in old grooves about Big Government and cultures of poverty, and then we tune out until a shock like Katrina shows us, day after day on television, the stark class and color lines that run through all the good and bad news about our country. But suppose the wake up call worked, and we kept our eyes, ears and minds open to new insight, even new action.

Chris Lydon, Open Source, September 19, 2005

See you after Labor Day!