Podcast Roundup Week #25

This week I listened to 44 episodes.  Here are some noteables.

In the Dark is a podcast published by American Public Media. Its first season covered the disappearance of Jacob Wetterling, a boy from Minnesota who went missing in 1989.  The podcast was wrapping up production as, coincidentally, the case was solved 27 years after Wetterling went missing and, it turned out, was murdered. The first season was a scathing indictment of the mishandling of the case from the very beginning. It was an excellent listen and I highly recommend it.

But the second season is currently being released once a week and it is amazing.  It tells the story of the murder of four people in a furniture store in Winona, Mississippi and the man who has been found guilty of the murder and the district attorney who wants that man to be put to death. There's police misconduct, evidence mishandling, racism, prosecutorial misconduct, jail informants, witness tampering, and a crazy amount of talk about juries.  It's so good.  I mean, you might have a stroke as you listen to it (did that guy just say that in 2018?!), but it's a reminder that although the 1960s were a long time ago, it's longer ago in some places than others.

I know that not too long ago, I told you to listen to all the episodes of Order 9066 (incidentally another American Public Media project, along with the Smithsonian's National Museum of Ameircan History) and I really think you should, but I think you should definitely listen to the episode called "Resistance" if you're on the fence. In 1943, the US government sent out a "loyalty questionnaire" to the population of the concentration camps. Basically, the government wanted to start recruiting some of the men for the Army and they wanted to know who would do so. And many didn't want to because they'd been held prisoner by this government - why would they want to fight?

I'd never heard of this questionnaire and I certainly was not privy to information about how the questionnaire divided the camps into people who were loyal and those who were not. It divided families, generations, and created a long-lasting impression on those who fought their draft.  I'm consistently dumbfounded by how glossed over history is. I'd heard of "internment camps," but this podcast is careful to call them "work camps" or "concentration camps" and the way the US government treated people was horrific. It's even more horrific to know that Korematsu v. US (1944) is still the law of the land. What recourse do we have if the federal government wants to round up Muslims (or Jews or blacks or college professors or dentists?) and throw them into a camp?  It's scary times.

I find it hard to believe that I have yet to preach about Code Switch, NPR's race and identity podcast, but I mostly just write sidenotes to myself about how I want to use episodes in my race and politics classes.  I don't always love this podcast or agree with what the hosts say, but I do think it's generally interesting and forces me to think and articulate my thoughts on race and identity.  The recent episode called "What We Inherit" looks at intergenerational trauma.  Say a generation of your family suffers a trauma (like war or slavery or all kids are sent to boarding schools against their will or integration of schools), but somehow the family survives. There's an impact from that trauma on the next generation. Maybe the parents are scared of all white people and pass that down (slavery). Maybe the parents have lost their religious and cultural ties and feel a lack of identity and become addicts to deal with it and their kids must raise themselves (boarding schools).  What is the impact of this intergenerational trauma and how can we fix it or prevent it?

I feel like a lot of my students (mostly white middle- to low-income) just don't understand why people "don't get over it" when it comes to issues of race, religion, and sexuality and discrimination. Maybe this episode could begin to show them that it doesn't really end when the particular trauma does.