“Hey, yeah we the same brothas from a long time ago
We was talkin’ about television and doin’ it on the radio
What we did was to help our generation realize
They got to get busy,’cause it wasn’t gonna be televised
We got respect for young rappers and the way they’re freewayin’
But if you’re gonna be teaching’ folks things, make sure you know what you’re sayin’”

Gil Scott-Heron, “Message to the Messengers”

In his examination of the decolonizing impact of The Voice Of Fighting Algeria, Frantz Fanon writes: “We shall have occasion to show throughout this book that the challenging of the very principle of foreign domination brings about essential mutations in the consciousness of the colonized.”¹ Building on the analogy between podcasts and revolutionary radio, with its ability to challenge “the very principle of foreign domination,” this chapter focuses on how decolonial podcasters “challenge,” interrogate, and critique dominant ideologies and structures of power in America.

Our analysis is framed by the processes of listening, interrogating, critiquing, and interpreting – processes that Algerian listeners participated in as they engaged with the Voice of Fighting Algeria. Fanon eloquently narrates the story of an Algerian “operator” or listener pressing his ear against the radio to catch from “the Voice” news of battles on the revolutionary front, then translates it to the Algerians in the room; and they in turn, as a community, question that interpretation of events and arrive at a reconstruction of their own. Fanon writes:

Very often only the operator, his ear glued to the receiver, had the unhoped-for opportunity of hearing the Voice. The other Algerians present in the room would receive the echo of this voice through the privileged interpreter who, at the end of the broadcast, was literally besieged. Specific questions would then be asked of this incarnated voice. Those present wanted to know about a particular battle mentioned by the French press in the last twenty-four hours, and the interpreter, embarrassed, feeling guilty, would sometimes have to admit that the Voice had not mentioned it. But by common consent, after an exchange of views, it would be decided that the Voice had in fact spoken of these events, but that the interpreter had not caught the transmitted information. A real task of reconstruction would then begin. Everyone would participate, and the battles of yesterday and the day before would be re-fought in accordance with the deep aspirations and the unshakable faith of the group. The listener would compensate for the fragmentary nature of the news by an autonomous creation of information.²

We are concerned with similar processes in contemporary podcasting, where content producers and communities of listeners engage in the interrogation and critique of dominant ideologies and ultimately arrive at their own reconstruction of the truth. Scholars have noted that decolonization involves raising critical questions about “identities, social location, representations, and material conditions of subaltern populations.”³ Antonia Darder for example observes:

Central to the qualitative labor of a decolonizing interpretive approach are radical processes of social inquiry, critique, and cultural reformulation (or reinvention, as Paulo Freire would say) that strike at the very heart of dominant ideologies linked to persistent asymmetrical practices – practices that, wittingly or unwittingly, reproduce classed, racialized, gendered, sexual, abled, religious, and other social and material formations that sustain fundamental inequalities and exclusions.⁴

Indeed, the podcasters we surveyed confront dominant ideologies through a process of inquiry, critique, and cultural reformulation that focuses on the expressions of the power invested in identity.

In this sense, to critique is to question the values and beliefs that legitimize power and to reveal the often hidden or opaque logic of power at work.⁵ “Interrogation” is a term applied, often narrowly, in law enforcement, in contexts where state agents ask tough questions of captives.⁶ Insofar as it relates to decolonization, the process of interrogation involves questioning, too – but questioning sources of power rather than individuals.⁷ Decolonization uses interrogation as a means of deconstructing dominant power structures for the purposes of liberation;⁸ as Darder explains, interrogation “functions in the interest of deconstructing and reconstructing conditions for transformative practice and social empowerment.”⁹

Echoing these findings in the scholarship on decolonization, the podcasters we surveyed focus on cross-examining normative identity constructs and dominant ideologies of neoliberalism, racism, sexism and male patriarchy, heterosexism, classism, and ableism.¹⁰ In addition, they explore in their programming identity and its relation to power. At the heart of these efforts is a desire to be liberated from the colonial structures that perpetuate societal inequities and ideological conformity. In this chapter we will provide an analysis of the interrogation and critique offered by podcasters in each of these specific domains.

Normative Identity Constructs

Podcasters who seek to present alternative perspectives embrace non-normative identity constructs that challenge the way we think about a huge range of things, from race and gender to education or food consumption. Our research indicates that, generally speaking, podcasters question normative identity constructs with a critical eye, by exploring race, gender, class, ethnic, sexuality, religious, and intersectional identities as expressions of power. They also offer broad critiques of the most intimate aspects of identity construction. Such critiques should function as a means of deconstructing the taken-for-granted assumptions of American social, cultural, and political life and of destabilizing invisible and underreported relations of power.

Decolonial podcasters contend that the power relations ensconced in identity are expressed in all the facets of American society. For example, the Self Evident: Asian America’s Stories podcast offers “intimate conversations [that] reveal how we deal with changes to our most deeply rooted identities, and how we tell the people who matter most.”¹¹ Host Cathy Erway’s real stories of immigration, domestic abuse, intercultural alliances and interviews with Asian American activists and legislators underscore the limitations and absurdities of normative Asian racial constructs as a means of understanding the lived experiences of the communities she serves. Erway effectively scrutinizes and dismantles orientalist tropes and provides spaces for rethinking the complexity of Asian American identities.

With respect to racial identity, decolonial podcasters offer substantive critiques of the concept of “race” itself, deconstructing its presumed “reality” and treating it as an ideological construct linked to systems of power. Notable podcasts in this area include Gene Demby and Shereen Marisol Meraji’s Code Switch, an Apple award-winning podcast from National Public Radio (NPR) that “explores how race intersects with every aspect of our lives.”¹² In episode 206, titled “What’s in a ‘Karen?,’” Gene and Shereen interview Karen Grisley Bates and Meredith Clark and discuss San Francisco’s CAREN (Caution against Racially Exploitative Non-emergencies) Act, which fines people for frivolous calls to the police.

GENE: All right, so you all remember Amy Cooper from a few weeks ago…

SHEREEN: God, how could we forget?

GENE: Oh yeah, if you did forget… she was a white woman who called the police on a Black man in New York City Central Park. She said that a Black man was threatening her.

SHEREEN: He was not, he was asking her to put a leash on her dog and as we all should know by now, calling the cops on a Black man can have serious… sometimes deadly consequences.

GENE: Recognizing just how big a problem this can be, Shaman Walton, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, introduced a new ordinance that would fine people who called the police for help in situations like Amy Cooper’s.

AUDIO: EXCERPTS: At this point, because it’s leading to death and people being harmed. There should be some type of fine for using resources and leading to the harm of people from these phone calls.

GENE: It’s called the CAREN Act, Caution against Racially Exploitive Non-emergencies. It’s CAREN with a “C” because they couldn’t find the right word to sync with the “K.” Look, you can’t say “caution” with a “K” and because politicians, just like rappers from the 90s, love using acronyms.

SHEREEN: So, it’s official, Gene. Amy Cooper is a “Karen.”

GENE: Right?

SHEREEN: You know Karen? She wants to speak to your manager, she swears at you if you ask her to wear a mask in public, she tells you to go back to where you came from, she calls the police on you for just about anything!

AUDIO: EXCERPTS: Get out now! There’re three numbers I could dial, 911. Police, on an eight-year-old little girl yeah… and illegally selling water without a permit… yeah, I’d like to report that someone is illegally using a charcoal grill… oh, I need a description of them? What race are they? Um, African Americans. And how old?

GENE: So, as you might have summarized this week, we’re talking about Karens. To do so, we’re bringing on our very own Karen: Karen Grisley Bates.

SHEREEN: Karen, explain your “people.”

KAREN: Hey Shereen, hey Gene, and let’s be really clear, they are not my people! But as a Karen, but not that kind of “Karen,” I felt it was my civic duty to get us all some answers.

GENE: Hashtag “Not all Karens.” So, we know that “Karens” [are] our thing obviously, but is there a proto-Karen?

KAREN: As a matter of fact, there is. Karens are part of a lineage of entitled white women going back a couple centuries in this country. Before Karen was “Karen,” there was a forerunner in the 90s: Becky.

AUDIO: EXCERPTS: “Oh my God, Becky look at her butt! It is so big, she must be one of those rap guys’ girlfriends.”

SHEREEN: Obviously, for those of you who are very familiar with hip hop from the 90s, that was the beginning of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Backy,” yep!

KAREN: But long before Becky, there was another category of woman, an original “Karen.” And to lay out her history, I called in a little bit of help from someone who has deep knowledge of Karen and her ancestors.

MEREDITH: My name is Meredith Clark.

SHEREEN: Damn Karen, I was really hoping her name was also “Karen”!

KAREN: Yeah, that would have been too much!

MEREDITH: I’m an assistant professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia.

KAREN: Meredith says “Karen” is part of a continuum, that before there were Karens and Beckys there was Miss Anne.

MEREDITH: But all of those names go back to as far as I can tell to Jim Crow era times and even earlier right, but specifically in Jim Crow, Black folks were not permitted to respond or to talk to white men and white women by their first names. They had to give them an honorific one, and the same privilege was not afforded to Black men and Black women. And so, you would also often hear about Black folks talking about white folks with this honorific and referring to the things that they experience with them. Like I remember my grandmother was a domestic talking about Miss Anne and Mr. Charlie who is a white man and a white woman. And using those to refer to these people without directly referring to them. Kind of when Black folks are talking about one thing but saying another.

KAREN: “Miss Anne” was a kind of “cheeky in-group” shorthand among Black people. You might say something like, “Oh, you do not want to cross Miss Anne today, she is in a mood.”

MEREDITH: Yeah, it’s like when you call any annoying white guy “Chad,” there you go.

KAREN: Meredith says the exact names might change over the decades, but there’s a consistent line that runs from Miss Anne to Becky to Karen.

MEREDITH: The thing that makes Miss Anne “Miss Anne” is that she recognizes her privilege and she uses it almost as a cudgel or weapon to keep certain folks in their place, to keep Black people in particular in their quote unquote place and, as we even saw with someone like Amy Cooper, Miss Anne knows what her place is in society today, and she uses it to her advantage.¹³

Our National Conversation about Conversations about Race, likewise, hosts discussions on “identity, politics, power, and privilege in our pre–post,” yet still very racial, America. In 2021, a caller agreed with the show’s hosts that in the United States racial power rests with whites, and thus they have a role to play in dismantling racism.

CALLER If the power is there, you have to go where the power is and change the forces of power. If that lies with White people, you have to do that in some way, shape or form. Even though it is not fair, it is racist. The system has been racist. It is not a surprise to most people of color that is the way they are.¹⁴

In the same episode, the hosts discussed how essentialist thinking about race had produced expectations that hinder attempts to discuss race in a meaningful way.

TANNER COLBY People, listeners at home, project their own thing onto what we are doing here. And, for them, racial conversations are so fraught, and there are all these politics and rules that are supposed to accord [with] it, that we do away with here, which is kind of the point of the show. But we get so many emails, a lot are from white people that Tanner needs to shut up, and stop whitesplaining and mansplaining, because they have internalized “I am white and I am not supposed to say anything.”

A. C. VALDER (PRODUCER) Conversely, we also get ones about cutting people off as I just did to you.

TANNER Then I went to brunch with a bunch of my friends who listen to the show.

ANNA HOLMES [laughing] Oh no!

TANNER And they were like “all the people on the show gang up on you and it’s not fair.”

ANNA Are these your white friends?

TANNER Yeah, these are my white friends. It is part of the problem why these conversations are so fraught, [so] out [of] the real world – because you cannot have them like real conversations.¹⁵

Their conversation revealed the complex and consequential legacy of colonial power structures that serve to hinder meaningful discourse about race as an expression of power.

With respect to gender and sexuality, the podcasters whom we surveyed are concerned with exposing the false “reality” of a binary gendered hierarchy and a normative heterosexual settler monogamy and with effectively clearing the path towards understanding the vast and fluid spectrum of gender identities expressed by lived experience. For example, Tai Jacob, the host of Gender Blender,¹⁶ integrates two-spirit, trans, and gender non-conforming voices into that podcast. Jacob describes the program as “exploring gender with everyday people – what shapes it, how we define it, and the strange and sometimes silly ways it shows up in our lives.”¹⁷ Feminists Ruin Everything relies on sports to investigate gendered identities by spotlighting stories of women in a series titled “Womxn in Athletics.”¹⁸ Some podcasts used popular culture to explore race and racism; good examples are The Brilliant Idiots’s discussions about Dave Chapelle’s comedy special, the need for more Black villains in the Batman series, “50 Cent vs. T.I.,” and the BET Awards.¹⁹ Others, such as Mansplaining, interrogate and critique the narrow ways in which gender identities are expressed and conveyed to the audience in popular films past and present, especially action films.²⁰ The four hosts of Food 4 Thot, who describe themselves as resembling “three brown queers and one rainbow brite,” reframe poetry in a way that allows them to cross-examine sexual identity.²¹ They claim to have “forged a beautiful friendship over their shared love of literature, rosé, and butt-stuff.” Their description of their own identity and friendship elucidates their emphasis on sexual identity. They refer to what they do as “hoetry,” which they say is their “favorite literary practice of all.” The hoetry segments see the hosts describe what poems mean to them as “readers, writers, thinkers, and sluts.”²²

Podcasts centered on issues of class and labor interrogate and critique the ubiquity of classist narratives across US politics.²³ For example, All Things Equal investigate how aspects of “homelessness, domestic violence, drug use, abuse,” and more contribute to inequities related to educational outcomes.²⁴ Verity Firth, its host, questions and undermines the “blame the victim” framing of poverty and homelessness in American political discourse, on the grounds that it dehumanizes the experiences and struggles of the poor. Krystal Kyle & Friends saw Krystal Ball and Kyle Kulinski host the historian and author Thomas Frank in order to delve into and reveal to us the ways in which elitist political culture shapes popular political discourses. Frank claimed that today’s elitism derives from the eugenics rhetoric of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, but casts it in “slightly more subtle terms.” Frank and the hosts agreed that elites want to bring about a “utopia of scolding,” in which they essentially shame the majority of Americans into adopting their ideology:²⁵

FRANK When you see one of those yard signs that says “Respect science.” Well, you and I have been to college, that is not what the scientific method is. It is not a matter of respect.

KYLE Yeah.

KRYSTAL BALL Right, unquestioning fealty, yeah.

FRANK Trying to poke holes in a hypothesis etc. Testing an idea. They’re talking about science means respect credentials, respect me, [and] know your place.²⁶

Their analysis suggests that audiences should view corporate media as a tool for elites to normalize and legitimize their power through colonial mentalities masked as insightful commentary.

Our research revealed that decolonial podcasters often use food as a tool in a mechanism for interrogating cultural assumptions and practices. Latinos Who Lunch discusses Latinx cultures with the help of food, in an episode titled “Chicano Eats” where Esteban Castillo presents recipes from his cookbook of Mexican American cuisine.²⁷ Likewise, the hosts of See Something, Say Something use food to interrogate a series of intersectional identities – ethnic, racial, and religious – in an exploration of Trinidadian cuisine, which they regard as creating a dialogue between Indian and African cultures.²⁸ It is our contention that the close relationship between food and culture is a significant starting point for podcasters, because it offers a tangible and relatable example of the ways in which colonial mentalities persist. In another episode of See Something, Say Something, the hosts explored the political economy of food and its impact on Pakistani culture by investigating the “underbelly of the secretive mango distribution industry,” in order to uncover the “historical and economic reasons [why] importing mangoes from Pakistan has been so difficult.” Food was a means to interrogate and critique no just ethnic identities, but racial ones as well. For example, The Racist Sandwich treats food as a window into racism and connects the two in every possible way, from “discussions about racism in food photography to interviews with chefs of color about their experiences in the restaurant world.”²⁹

Just as it is important to understand how decolonial podcasters interrogate and critique, it is equally important to understand what it is that they investigate. The ideologies that they decide to analyze and deconstruct are instructive for determining the nature and range of their interests.

Elite Culture and Neoliberal Ideology

Our critical analysis of podcasts revealed a consistent interrogation and critique of the dominant consensus about and preference for neoliberal ideology in elite culture. Neoliberalism is a political and economic ideology that has dominated western thinking since the 1970s. It is focused upon mitigating threats to the economy – which it identifies as deficits, inflation, inefficiency, and high taxes – by reducing government regulation and spending, by lowering the taxes, by expanding access to credit, and by relying upon meritocratic structures.³⁰ Despite their antipathy for public spending, neoliberals contend that governments exist in order to protect the market in two ways: through a domestic monetary policy that is friendly to business interests, for example a policy of low taxes and little to no regulation; and through an international monetary policy that makes it possible for industry to open new markets as a way to produce global growth, for example a policy of interlocking trade agreements.³¹ One of the ways in which podcasters critique elite cultural media analysis in this space is by brining on guests whose life and perspective stand in direct confrontation with the values of elite culture: documentarians and journalists such as Gray, Sirotta, Shakir, Ryan Grim, Maximillian Alvarez, Michael Moore, Abby Martin, Glenn Greenwald, and Aaron Matte. Many scholars appear on these programs to critique elite culture as well: Cornel West, Thomas Frank, Adolph Reed, and Noam Chomsky.

The critique of decolonial podcasters largely centers around the issue of persistent wealth inequality. Pitchfork Economics gathers some of “the world’s leading economic and political thinkers in an exploration of who gets what and why.”³² Eat the Rich could not be clearer in its self-presentation: it is “[a] podcast about income inequality and the political and cultural standards that directly benefit America’s wealthiest, most powerful, and most edible.³³ Society and culture with a humor bent.” This kind of criticism has proven especially valuable during the COVID-19 pandemic. Parallax Views, hosted by the economist Jack Rasmus, asks how neoliberal ideology resulted in the governing class’ providing socialism for the wealthy and laissez-faire capitalism for the poor during the COVID-19 crisis.³⁴ One episode offered a response to the federal government’s disproportionate distribution of economic relief to industry during the COVID-19 crisis. Similarly, an episode of Pitchfork Economics investigated “why Wall Street gets a bailout and you don’t.” Podcasts such as Capitalisn’t have questioned the effectiveness of neoliberalism; for example they examined decisions made by Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, that expressed the preference for states to file for bankruptcy rather than receive federal government funding during the COVID-19 economic crisis.³⁵ Similarly, Pitchfork Economics has hosted economists such as Stephanie Kelton and Joseph Stiglitz in order to interrogate the basic assumptions that undergird neoliberals’ approaches to the economy. These approaches, they contend, range from inaccurate to baseless.

Significantly, the focus on neoliberalism and on wealth inequality carries an indirect criticism of both political parties in the United States. This attitude emanates from public frustration over commonalities between Democrats and Republicans in domestic economic policy. Thus many podcasters, in spite of their socioeconomic status, educational training, and institutional affiliations, articulate largely working-class and middle-class views. In fact The Working People describes itself on Twitter as “a podcast by, for, and about the working class today.”³⁶ Additionally, the choice to focus on the critique of neoliberalism as a common ground between the two parties and as the source of practices they share appears to mark the articulation of a non-partisan, citizen-centered approach; and this kind of approach presents itself as more credible, reliable, and truthful than that of partisan media. To some degree it implicitly critiques the Democratic–Republican divide as a false ideology, and has the potential to draw listeners into a broader, non-partisan community, organized around their class interests rather than around the false interests of political camps.

The decolonial podcasts view all the legacy media, en block, as a megaphone for the colonial mentalities that justify elite consensus. In their estimation, the messaging of elite media seeks to exacerbate racial, gendered, and cultural divisions among the working classes. Thus the populist left believes that legacy corporate media fulfill a communicative function for the two major political parties, which – on this view – stoke division as a means of distracting voters from unifying attempts. Possibly more than anyone else in the podcasting space, Matt Taibbi of Useful Idiots has sought to explain why legacy media seek to divide rather than to inform the citizenry. Taibbi contends that the communism versus capitalism lens, which legacy news media relied upon since their inception, was replaced by a Democrats versus Republicans lens after the conclusion of the Cold War.³⁷ As the advent of cable and of the Internet fragmented audiences by the 1990s, the long-standing strategy of legacy media to maximize their audience was no longer viable. In response, each media outlet sought to attract a loyal demographic through praise for its political party of choice and antipathy for the opposition party. Taibbi notes that this was not a sinister plot by the elites of legacy media; rather it was a strategy designed to maximize revenue.³⁸

Left-wing populist podcasters interpreted the corporate news media coverage of Trump’s presidency as epitomizing the narrow lens of legacy media. Many of those involved in left-wing populist media – and especially the historian and writer Thomas Frank, who frequently appears as an expert commentator in the podcasting space – argued that Trump’s populist rhetoric proved successful because the Democratic National Committee (DNC) defended the status quo at a time when people were disenchanted.³⁹ Although Trump’s rhetoric was empty, it revealed voters’ desire for a more aggressive federal government, which should serve their needs. Decolonial podcasters contend that the voters’ rejection of the elite status quo in 2016 did not elicit self-reflection, let alone a change in policy, from the elites; elites remained obstinate and fabricated instead the nation of Russia – not voter apathy for the Democratic Party – as a boogeyman to blame for their failure and for Trump’s electoral victory. Decolonial podcasters claim that the strategy of the DNC after 2016, far from being one of adopting policies that could attract Trump voters, exaggerated the behaviors and attitudes of Trump, in order to scare voters away from supporting him.⁴⁰ In practice, some decolonial podcasters accuse the legacy media with DNC leanings – for example the CNN, the MSNBC, and the New York Times – of cynically portraying President Trump as an authoritarian rather than as a buffoon, in order to garner ratings and political capital for the DNC. Sam Moyn echoed this sentiment in a January 2021 episode of the Katie Halper Show:

We can’t just read half the news in our analysis of the Trump administration. Some of us have been arguing throughout that the amazing thing was in a sense how weak he turned out to be. That’s not fascism. At least of any kind that we’ve seen in the past and even January 6, which Jason and others are taking to be the great confirmation event, I think more vividly illustrates how weak a man he is. So, even before the riot broke out he’d lost his alliance with Mitch Mcconnell and Mike Pence, who had resolved to end his you know imaginative or symbolic insurrection before the real one took place.⁴¹

The accusation at the heart of these decolonial podcasts is that Trump was a symptom of the failures of neoliberal elites. They accuse the DNC of fixating on Trump so as to avoid the pressures (such as from decolonial podcasters themselves) to deconstruct neoliberalism.

Rather than align with the DNC, which is portrayed by the corporate press as the liberal party of inclusivity, decolonial podcasters eviscerate it for being corrupt and feckless. It is almost a foregone conclusion in these spaces that the Republican Party is a xenophobic and white supremacist party of patriarchs and plutocrats. Rather than continuously reminding their liberal audience of this perspective, decolonial podcasters try to raise awareness about the colonial mentalities ensconced in the DNC. They characterize it as a party whose sole purpose is to serve its wealthy donors by blockading progressive left-wing policies. Their probing reveals that the DNC is an organization that seeks to engender voter support by appealing to progressives and liberals through vapid rhetoric that leads to no actual policy. This was the consensus that Briahna Joy Gray and Virgil Texas discussed in early 2021, in an episode of the podcast Bad Faith:

BRIAHNA JOY GRAY there are folks that are people that get really, really mad, if you suggest that people in that MAGA [Make America Great Again] crowd can be flipped. That people in that MAGA crowd could be appealed to with those kinds of material arguments. It’s not that oh the person is poor, and Democrats help poor people, and therefore if I prove to you that the person in the crowd wasn’t poor, then there’s no convincing that person in the crowd. Like that’s so stupid, right? The argument is that there are people in that crowd that are concerned about things that the Democratic party should stand for; the democratic party should be able to make a pitch if it were willing to do so. That piece of the conversation is just so absurdly stigmatizing for some reason.

VIRGIL TEXAS I mean that’s really it, people should be suspicious of economic and political elites, people should be hostile and insulted. Hostile to and insulted by this technocratic talking down to condescension that you know we’re just you know we’re going beyond politics we’re just going to put the experts in charge, we’re going to bring science back, and that’s going to make everything better. People know that to be false and you don’t have to be a Q-maniac [Q-anon conspiracy believer] to, you know, believe that. The Democratic Party as an institution is simply not going to be able to tap into that resentment that hostility that [the] majority of people intuitively have irrespective of what website they’re on irrespective of what videos they’re watching. Simply because of what that institution of the party is. And if there isn’t anything that’s really going to tap into that, then of course, people are going to gravitate and be hooked by the algorithm to the most lurid and paranoid manifestations of that.⁴²

Such dialogue is anathema to corporate press discourses, which employ a binary lens of Democrats and Republicans to examine any policy. Furthermore, Gray is an African American woman challenging the class politics of the DNC. This, too, is in stark contrast to the corporate news media, which often treat Black voters as a monolith narrowly obsessed with representation rather than with material conditions or policy. However, Gray stands in direct opposition to that racist news media frame. In the process, the hosts reveal that the DNC – the liberal party in the United States – is a vehicle for achieving progressive policy but a hindrance to its own policy goals.

Bad Faith is hardly the only podcast to counter the corporate news media’s depiction of the DNC as a liberal party. For example, Krystal Kyle & Friends characterize politicians as people who see their job as serving elite donors by maintaining class inequities rather than public service. This was a central point in the opening dialogue of their January 2021 broadcast:

KYLE [Joe] Biden was campaigning in Georgia, this was after they already got the $600 through, and he was saying we are going to do $2,000 checks. That would be a total of $2,600. But now they have backed off that because they are Democrats…

KRYSTAL It’s such a perfect owned goal. It is so simple. You actually stumbled into what was a powerful political message, that actually was good for you politically, it was something that was super popular, it is something that would actually have tremendous benefit to people, you gotta suddenly negotiate with yourself and muddle the message, and make it this super like. It’s just a perfectly, democratically, technocratically message.⁴³

Often in this space decolonial podcasters assert that, instead of actually fighting for substantive policy to achieve the material well-being of voters through structural transformation, the DNC engages in “genuflecting” and “virtue signaling.” These are essentially empty acts of symbolism that appeal to voters’ emotions rather than challenging the power structures that engender inequities. For example, the Useful Idiots’ hosts Matt Taibbi and Katie Halper eschew Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi for ripping up a copy of then President Trump’s State of the Union speech in 2020. The gesture was meant to show the DNC’s disdain for Trump’s erratic and dangerous behavior and rhetoric. However, Taibbi and Halper find this opposition to be hollow, considering that the DNC voted to authorize Trump’s military authority. The hosts contend that the authorization stands in stark contrast to the DNC’s stated fears about Trump. Taibbi and Halper also took the DNC to task for kneeling while wearing African Kente cloths in 2020, to show their opposition to racism – that is, for kneeling rather than passing legislation directly targeted at the material conditions brought about by structural racism.⁴⁴

The podcasters interrogate the corporate media’s divisive and polarized news, and they do so through a decolonial frame that critiques the consensus of the elite political parties. They see polarized reporting as a process akin to colonial brainwashing, because it motivates voters to choose one section of the elites to align with and defend. Many people in the decolonial space – for example Krystal Ball herself, or guests such as Glenn Greenwald – explained that, when they were DNC voters, they believed that the party wanted to pass progressive legislation but failed to do so because of the obstructionist tactics of conservatives in Washington, DC.⁴⁵ However, after years of working in journalism and politics, Ball and Greenwald came to believe that the members of the DNC were essentially bribed with campaign donations and tried to gain positions in the DNC so as to act as feckless politicians who hinder rather than enable progressive policies. Some, such as Ball, go even further and argue that the DNC actually prefers the Grand Old Party (GOP) – the Republican Party – to be the majority power in Washington, because that would increase campaign donations to the DNC when its members can blame the GOP for the abeyance of discussion about progressive policy in Congress.⁴⁶

Decolonial podcasters’ critiques helped develop a vast and popular bi-racial media ecosystem that has already shown some success in decolonizing anti-working-class discourses in national politics. Many of the individuals involved in the decolonial media space participated in the 2016 and 2020 Sanders’ campaign – for instance Nina Turner, Briahna Joy Gray, David Sirota, and Faiz Shakir. In late 2020, decolonial media’s interrogation of elite consensus proved fruitful, as its call to US citizens for a second round of stimulus checks during the COVID-19 pandemic came to fruition thanks to populist politicians who were sympathetic to the populist media ecosystem. In the same vein, although decolonial media’s proposal to halt the nomination of Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House in exchange for a vote on Medicare for All was unsuccessful, by eliciting responses from members of the corporate media and of the US House of Representatives it demonstrated the podcasters’ ability to shape mainstream discourses.⁴⁷ There are also politicians who appear in these podcasts – such as US Senator Bernie Sanders, House of Representatives member Ro Khanna, and State Senator and US Congressional district candidate in Ohio’s 11th District Nina Turner.⁴⁸

White Supremacy

The interrogation and critique of white supremacist ideology and violence has been of particular interest in the Trump era. However, rather than taking a merely partisan turn at Trump’s open support for such organizations as the Proud Boys, Boogaloo Boys, QAnon conspiracy theorists, and their enablers in the Republican Party and its extensive media echo chamber, the decolonial podcasting space offers broad and multifaceted critiques of whiteness at large. White supremacy is defined as a “historically based, institutionally perpetuated system of exploitation and oppression of continents, nations, and peoples of color by white peoples and nations of the European continent, for the purpose of maintaining and defending a system of wealth, power, and privilege.”⁴⁹ Scholars contend that white supremacy is designed to produce unequal racial outcomes without conscious knowledge, because a waning consciousness about race prevents the redress of those marginalized and ostracized by these structures.⁵⁰

Decolonial podcasters have interrogated and critiqued the dominance of white supremacy in US society. In their efforts they helped contextualize contemporaneous events in real time, in order to illuminate white supremacist ideology. For example, Latinos Who Lunch offers a critique of Confederate monuments, proclaiming: “All white supremacists’ monuments must fall!!!” The critique revealed that claims about such monuments “just being statues” were ill informed and concealed the white supremacist power structures behind their construction. In the same spirit, Eat the Rich explored “Joe Biden’s unique brand of old school casual racism.”⁵¹ This, too, revealed that rhetoric, even that which derives from white people who position themselves as the ideological opposite of a racist president (Donald Trump), can still hold and perpetuate white supremacist ideas and behavior.

Despite the ever present critique of experts and elite society, decolonial podcasters still appeal to members of the intelligentsia to contextualize white supremacy in the United States. Cape Up hosted Carol Anderson, the author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, to document the development and perpetuation of white supremacy in US history.⁵² In another episode it hosted Jonathan Metzl, the author of Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland, to discuss how some whites are literally dying to maintain white supremacy.⁵³

The project of interrogating and critiquing white supremacy while living within a white supremacist social, political, and cultural order remains an uphill battle; to be investigated properly, the long-standing and taken-for-granted assumptions of American white supremacy require both familiarity with the methods of historical analysis and the willingness to broach unsettling and uncomfortable topics. The fourth season of Slow Burn, Slate magazine’s podcast, was dedicated to the rise of David Duke, the Ku Klux Klan leader turned politician.⁵⁴

The series doesn’t shy away from Duke’s unapologetic racism or anti-Semitism. Even so, it’s hard to ignore the sense of foreboding eeriness that comes as the episode progresses, when you start to realize – through clever scripting and use of archive – that the story of a white man getting to power by making himself ‘a cause’ for the disenfranchised isn’t a historical outlook. Present-day America shows us that Duke wasn’t an anomaly, but the beginning of a long-standing trend.⁵⁵

John Biewen of the Seeing White program for the podcast Scene on Radio offers a 14-part primer on the historical underpinnings of white supremacy. NPR’s White Lies offers a series that investigates the 1965 murder of Rev. James Reeb in Selma, Alabama, by speaking to Reeb’s descendants and to the descendants of his attackers. Maureen Benson, Diedra Barber, and Aaron Rand Freeman’s Eyes on Whiteness describes itself as a podcast that “illuminates the insidious and ignorant ways of whiteness, regardless of intent. Our guests are invited to talk about the ways white supremacy and patriarchy are pervasive and ever-present”⁵⁶

When it comes to racial discourses, podcasters asked how the identity of a group is defined and what is the members’ actual real-world experience. For example, the Chicken & Jollof Rice Show emphasizes that it is “a podcast featuring first-gen African–Americans’ perspectives on current events & pop culture.”⁵⁷ As the hosts of Code Switch note, discussions about race and racism can be “challenging conversations” because the colonizer can change and alter the identity of the colonized. Indeed, this was the focal point of a May 1, 2020 episode titled “Reparations and the Elusive Definition of Black Identity.” The show began with the hosts of Code Switch, Gene Demby and Shereen Marisol Meraji, interviewing individuals about their struggle with choosing a racial identity. It then turned to a history lesson about the US census designed to illustrate how white supremacy acted as a colonizing force that redefined the identity of the colonized:

GENE: DEMBY Black folks obviously describe themselves in a bunch of different ways, but throughout the course of American history, Black folks have been referred to in a bunch of different ways, depending on the political moment.

SHEREEN: MARISOL MERAJI That is right, during the first US census back in 1790, they were referred to as slaves.

GENE: DEMBY In 1840, free colored males and females, and slaves

SHEREEN: MARISOL MERAJI In 1890, Black, mulatto, quadroon, octoroon.

GENE: DEMBY 1950 negro.

SHEREEN: MARISOL MERAJI In 2020 is Black or African American with the option to write in the country of origin…. What it means to be Black and who counts as Black in the US has always been in flux.

GENE: DEMBY And being on one side of blackness or the other, wherever it landed at a political moment has always been enormously consequential.⁵⁸

This was hardly the only podcast to tackle the issue. Meraji and Demby described how “many Puerto Ricans grow up being taught that they’re a mixture of three races: Black, white and indigenous. But on the US census, a majority of Puerto Ricans choose ‘white’ as their only race.” Their discourse illuminated the processes by which colonial mentalities regarding race are perpetuated when white supremacist power structures shape and define the boundaries of identity for the colonized.⁵⁹

Just as the class-focused decolonial podcasts were able to challenge powerful figures in the federal government with their message, so too was this decolonizing race podcasts. For example, the presidential candidate Joe Biden appeared on a May 2020 episode of The Breakfast Club with host Charlamagne Tha God. For nearly fifteen minutes, Charlamagne raised a series of questions that asked Biden to defend his proposals for Black communities, his tepid initiative to dismantle the drug war, and his support for the 1994 Crime Bill. After this, Biden said he had another appointment and needed to leave.⁶⁰ Charlemagne responded:

CHARLAMAGNE Listen, you gotta come see us when you come to New York VP Biden. It’s a long way until November, we have more questions.

BIDEN You got more questions, but I tell it if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t Black.

CHARLAMAGNE It doesn’t have nothing to do with Trump. It has to do with the fact, I want something for my community, I would love to see you

BIDEN [interrupting] Take a look at my record man I extended the voting racks 25 years I have a record that is second to none the NAACP has endorsed me every time I’ve run the world, I mean come on, take a look at the record.⁶¹

Their dialogue revealed that white supremacist mentalities narrowly define Black voters as being concerned with a politician who shares their identity. This representation reeks of a white savior model of racial politics that seeks to define Black voters’ needs narrowly and scolds them for contradicting the white liberal ethos. This was clear in the mixed reaction of frustration and confusion from Biden after he heard Charlamagne’s sophisticated policy demands. That confusion illuminated the gap between the ideological interpretation and the reality of people of color. The hosts noted this same trend in the commentary of artist Ice Cube, who announced in late 2020 that he was willing to work with Trump or anyone who had a policy agenda for Black America. The interrogation of Ice Cube made clear that the hosts wanted audiences to recognize that Black Americans’ policy desires go deeper than those of people of color in positions of power.⁶² Their commentary illustrated the ways in which colonial mentalities – even among those who claim to be an ally of racial minorities – homogenize and pasteurize select identity groups, turning them into monoliths whose preferences and priorities – to see more people of color in power rather than a change in material conditions – are defined by those who derive power and privilege from the legacy of colonial practices.

Decolonial podcasters accuse white supremacist ideologues of co-opting the rhetoric of racial justice to serve elite interests. In fact Katie Halper and Briahna Joy Gray use the term “woke washing” to describe a process by which political candidates’ anti-progressive views and policies are ignored in favor of their marginalized identity.⁶³ According to populist leftist media makers, this is a powerful tool, because criticism of these individuals’ policy positions is conflated with racism and sexism, and this allows the policies to persist with little resistance from progressives, who fear such labels. Halper mocks this phenomenon with a “woke button” that she presses on Useful Idiots – which results in a segment of the Wham song “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” to play – for a perceived violation of this narrow definition of wokeness.⁶⁴ It has found sympathetic personalities among academics and journalists in the decolonial podcast space – people such as Mark Crispin Miller, Adolph Reed, and Zhaid Jailalni.⁶⁵

In the decolonial podcasting space, Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility is often interrogated and critiqued for what podcasters view as an attitude of serving the interests of corporate elite under the auspices of furthering racial justice. The lucrative contracts her anti-racist trainings generated after the murder of George Floyd saw many decolonial podcasters decry that DiAngelo was a grifter. For example, in a June 2020 episode of Chapo Trap House, the hosts – Will Menaker, Matt Christman, Felix Biederman, Amber A’Lee Frost, and Virgil Texas – asked their guests, New Republic’s Jen Pan and Bad Faith’s Virgil Texas, what they thought about the concepts in Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility and how it was being applied after the murder of George Floyd.

JEN PAN The context in which I encountered White Fragility is a few months ago. I was assigned to review it for the New Republic in sort of the broader context of the diversity industry. Which you guys are probably aware is this like massive bloated $8 billion industry, which sort of encompasses like anti-racist training sensitivity workshops, cultural competency implicit bias training, and that is incidentally the industry in which this author of White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo, works. I think that you know a kind of interesting component to the conversation is the fact that there’s kind of been this you know emerging body of literature that talks about how these diversity trainings don’t work, they don’t reduce people’s biases, they don’t really make workplaces more diverse, and in some weird cases they even like make people’s biases stronger. So I think that’s kind of important to keep in mind, when you are thinking about Robin DiAngelo and White Fragility, and how her book is basically a documentation of how these trainings don’t work.

HOSTS (laughter)

PAN She is a diversity trainer, in her case studies in this book, she goes around to people’s workplaces and to their schools and talks to them about racism, and her whole thesis is that white people in the room become extremely uncomfortable, they don’t like what they’re hearing, and they don’t react well to her.

AMBER A’LEE FROST I think that one of the things that kept jumping out at me when I was reading this is that she kept saying like I cannot correct or deprogram my unconscious bias, and feelings of racial superiority. I will always be like this. I will always, you know, walk around with, you know, late in white supremacy, and I’m like then why am I listening to you? Like why are you that the anti-racist trainer? Because she’s like every other paragraph, she’s like look I know about racism, take it from me, a racist.

HOSTS (laughter)

FROST She doesn’t do a very good job at justifying her anti-racist credentials, except that she can charge people $10 thousand a session, a speaking session, for two hours, it’s better than podcast money, it’s amazing.

PAN Yeah and if you’re never done being racist, then all you can do to work on yourself is you know kind of participate in these steps of self-improvement, which of course include buying her book and attending her seminars

FROST there’s no cure, there’s a treatment you have to take all the time always and keep paying her.

WILL MENAKER I mean I guess what was like sort of sort of weird to me … if we’re in a moment where white people are just, you know, once again perpetually being like “damn there’s a lot of racism in this country that’s fucked up, like you know what could I do?” It would seem to me, if you were if you like if you wanted to educate yourself … read any history of the United States. Like or any Black author who’s written about this, but like this is a white woman. The whole thrust of it is through this kind of corporate HR [human rights] model…

PAN Another place in the book she says something like “I just can’t understand why these white people would react like this upon getting an opportunity to learn about their racism?” That opportunity, of course as you pointed out Will, is in the workplace. Which of course, is something that she never bothers to not only just interrogate, but doesn’t even acknowledge, that you know, the context in which these trainings are unfolding is quite often in her case in the workplace; whereas we all know there are many different power dynamics already at work. The main one of course being between the bosses who organize such workshops and then everyone else

WILL [interrupting] yeah, its mandatory, the idea why are you being open to me the person that your fucking asshole boss paid to yell at you for an hour

VIRGIL Is she right? Does she actually never address that?

FROST Never, not once. She never mentioned that like this is a mandatory school assembly, where your employer is now being invited to like interrogate the most intimate parts of your psyche and brain and experience,

PAN About a very politically charged topic. Like who the fuck wants their boss talking to them about racism?

HOST the information certainly will not be put in your file for later use [laughter from the panel]⁶⁶

These sentiments were echoed by Matt Taibbi of Useful Idiots, who compared DiAngelo’s assessment of racial categories as monoliths to Nazi philosophies on race. He accused DiAngelo of stripping famous Black Americans such as Jackie Robinson of their talent and agency by narrowly attributing their success to the will of white men. Finally, Taibbi accused DiAngelo of legitimizing negative Black stereotypes – such as that Black people are incapable of arriving at a location on time – by classifying them as cultural aspects whites needed to accept.⁶⁷ Where Taibbi critiqued the evidence behind DiAngelo’s claims, Krystal Ball sought to assert the class motives behind DiAngelo’s analysis. Ball chided DiAngelo for accepting lucrative corporate contracts to lecture the working class on its behavior and attitudes toward race. To Ball, DiAngelo’s trainings enabled corporate capitalism – which Ball views as a fundamental contributing factor to the persistence of racism in US society – to shed its culpability and to place the blame for racism on squarely on the backs of the some of the least powerful actors in US society: the working class.

Perhaps the most chilling podcast in this space is the true crime podcast Unfinished: Deep South, hosted by journalists Taylor Hom and Neil Shea. Hom and Shea investigate specific cases of racial violence and murder in the deep South during the civil rights era. In the first iteration of this podcast, they investigate the lynching of “a wealthy African American farmer and veteran named Isadore Banks” who was “lynched on the Arkansas Delta.” Hom and Shea join members of the Banks family on a quest to find out who killed Isadore and to restore his legacy. What they find will shake a small southern town from its silence, explore the story of African American prosperity on the Delta, and trace the roots of racial terror “from Isadore’s day up through our own.

SHEA Let’s rewind 70 years to the 1950s, back before the space age, before the internet, before Twitter.

HOM In 1954, in a tiny Arkansas town, on the Mississippi River. The hero for many was a man named Isadore Banks. He was well over six feet tall, weighed nearly 300 pounds. He was strong, quick, and handsome. Isadore had served in World War I. He owned hundreds of acres of farmland and he’d become really, really rich.

INTERVIEW SUBJECT 1 He had seven different plantations, owned his own trucking business, he had a tavern and he had a restaurant.

INTERVIEW SUBJECT 2 Isadore Banks may have been the wealthiest person in Britain county. I understand that he owned thousands acres of land. He had owned cotton gins. He had trucks. He had a café, grocery store. You know, he was a corporate giant in this area.

INTERVIEW SUBJECT 3 Mr. Banks, okay. He had a big farm up around Marion. Good man. Big tall man. Strong man, and he was a very kind man. He was a hard-working man.

INTERVIEW SUBJECT 4 He wasn’t afraid. You know, you didn’t back him down. You know all the stuff, because he just believed in what he believed in and did what he did.

SHEA People listened to Isadore Banks. Looked up to him. His success made him a kind of senior statesman in his community.

INTERVIEW SUBJECT 4 He would help businesses. He would help put your kid through school. He even helped save farms. If you couldn’t get it, you’ll say you’re going to the bank that was going to help Isadore Banks.

INTERVIEW SUBJECT 5 He didn’t mind helping nobody, that’s one of the things I remember and he didn’t care whether you were a man or a woman.

INTERVIEW SUBJECT 6 He could have been quiet but his works were very loud they were loud and they were long-lasting he’s a paradigm he’s a model of freedom

HOM Isadore banks was also African American and in 1954 he was lynched. Everything he had, his wealth, land, businesses… it was all stolen. His family was torn apart.⁶⁸

Phone Conversation between Hom, Shea and Interview Subject 7:

HOM He was murdered. The name is Isadore Banks.

INTERVIEW SUBJECT 7 Oh boy, oh boy! That was a really controversial murder.

SHEA There was a murder in 1954 of a man named Isadore Banks. And it’s remained… yeah, you know about it?

INTERVIEW SUBJECT 7 We know it happened, but I think it needs to be resting. I’m really not going to be able to help you, so I’m going to hang up and let you follow your next lead.

HOM This is the story of Isadore. It’s a story about land, love, and a very old kind of hatred. And it’s about how one African American man’s legacy vanished when he was killed in a most American way.⁶⁹

Through the lens of the true crime genre and aided by the documentary filmmaking skills of Taylor Hom, Unfinished: Deep South offers an investigative account of lynching, effectively linking the racial murders of Black people with white resentment. hom and Shea successfully interrogate the myth of the Black rapist, the alleged rationale for lynching, and provide evidence through specific case studies that lynchings were political instruments of terror, motivated by a desire to limit Black economic and political progress.

Neocolonialism

There are few podcasts recorded in America by immigrants from countries that experience neocolonial expansion. Our survey suggests that voices of immigrants and former patriots from countries that face the fascist rule of dictators propped up by neocolonialism are rare in America and tend to predominate in Europe, with a particular concentration in England and France. A notable exception is Abbas Hamad’s podcast The Messenger. Unlike the Chicken & Jollof Rice Show, a comedic podcast hosted by four first-generation African Americans, this podcast creates a space where podcasters interrogate neocolonialism, fascism, inequality, and civil strife in their native countries.

The Messenger is a podcast hosted by the French American hip-hop artist Abbas Hamad, aka Bas. Broadcasting from New York City, Bas has devoted his podcast to following “Afropop superstar Bobi Wine’s transformation into a global icon spearheading a political uprising in his home country of Uganda. It explores the decades of injustices Ugandans have faced through the telling of Bobi Wine’s story and the role musicians are playing in the fight for social change across Africa.”⁷⁰ Working from the perspective of critique and interrogation, Bas offers an “investigative documentary” podcast that is produced by Spotify Studios. He notes:

In 1994, Gil Scott-Heron’s spoken word track “A Message to the Messengers” implored artists to use their influence to improve and advocate for their communities. Now, building on Scott-Heron’s concept, comes The Messenger, a new investigative documentary podcast that introduces audiences to places, genres, and questions of deep cultural and political importance that have rarely been explored in audio.⁷¹

Bas says further: “I try to speak on stories that are relevant to myself and my peers. I try to tell their stories, their struggles. My stories, my struggles. I try and give perspective.”⁷²

ABBAS Dear people around the globe, I’m addressing you as a Ugandan in the urge of telling the world a story. The story is about Robert Kyagulany also known as Bobi Wine. Known for his music but leading what they call the struggle for freedom. For the ones who don’t know anything about Uganda. We are the youngest population in the whole world. With over 80% of Ugandans below the age of 35. That’s approximately the number of years our current president is in power. But that’s also Bobi Wine’s age. We Ugandans all know because of his music. The music that he started producing in the late 90s from a small town center in the suburbs of Kampala – Kamwokya. Bobi Wine is a ghetto kid. He represents ghetto. He is part of the ghetto, ghetto is in his blood. That’s why he is loved in our county. He challenged everyone, but you know what? You can come from the ghetto and be somebody because I’m also from the ghetto. I think this is a fundamental change in the politics of our country. This is president Yoweri Museveni in 1986. Ugandans were happy that the war against the regime of former president Obote was over and that Museveni brought stability and economic growth. Not 5, not 10, but 30 years later, he won his sixth term. Now when we go back to the ghetto it might look peaceful to you. Kids playing around, happy faces, but the facts around Ugandan ghettos are worrying. People are really poor and they feel completely abandoned by Museveni’s government. These people have been claiming they have brought peace; people are sleeping well, but we can’t sleep when we are starving. This is the part of Uganda where the war was. It had everything, people were good farmers, we had coffee factories, we had cotton factories, we had big gardens. They are nowhere to be seen. We had very strong cooperative societies. Nowhere to be seen. Ugandans are slaves in their country now.⁷³

The use of music allows for a rich interrogation and critique of dominant discourses on the lived experience of ethnic minorities. In the process, decolonial podcasters are able to extrapolate crucial similarities and key differences among identity groups – on the program and in their audience. In addition to racial and ethnic identities, decolonial podcasters interrogate and critique gender.

Patriarchy

Decolonial podcasters interrogate and critique male patriarchy, its relationship to the violence and oppression of women, and its intersectionality with other forms of oppression. This is a space that is overwhelmingly populated by the voices of women and fulfills a profound need, denied to women in corporate media. It is also, significantly, largely characterized by insightful intersectional analyses. Patriarchy refers to “a set of social institutions that deny women the opportunity to be self-supporting, thereby making them dependent on male relatives for survival, and that otherwise favor men in the intrafamilial allocation of resources and power.”⁷⁴ Patriarchy consists of largely uneven gendered practices that target girls and women for actual, perceived, or representative challenges to or violations of applicable patriarchal norms and expectations.⁷⁵ Gender refers to “the array of socially constructed roles and relationships, personality traits, attitudes, behaviors, values, relative power and influence that society ascribes to the two sexes on a differential basis.”⁷⁶ Misogyny upholds patriarchy by enforcing gender conformity on both men and women.⁷⁷ Misogyny is different from sexism, which feminists argue is “the justificatory branch of a patriarchal order, which consists of an ideology that has the overall function of rationalizing and justifying patriarchal social relations.”⁷⁸ Sexism naturalizes our belief in sex differences as a way of justifying patriarchal social arrangements by making it seem that they are inevitable and that resistance is futile.⁷⁹

The decolonial podcasters position themselves as an alternative to the “woke washed” patriarchy of the legacy media. For example, in late 2020, Ball agreed that it was sexist for conservatives to mock Dr. Jill Biden’s use of the doctor title, but noted that elite liberals feigned to care only because they could relate to the frustration that a title they may feel entitled is being disrespected. According to Ball, the story revealed the ways in which elite culture co-opts feminist language in order to perpetuate power inequities.⁸⁰ Similarly, in late 2019 Jimmy Dore mocked the ways in which discourses about women shattering the glass ceiling distracted from female politicians who maintained the status quo. Dore lampooned the legacy media for framing the appointment of Gina Haspel as a story of gender equity when she was a critical part of the effort to cover up CIA’s participation in torture. Dore exclaimed that “torturer Gina Haspel broke through the glass ceiling to become the director of the CIA and picked up one of the glass shards and started torturing people.”⁸¹

Podcasters who critique and question the discursive concepts around gender seek to give audiences a more comprehensive definition of misunderstood and misrepresented terms. For example, The Stakes hosted an episode dedicated to getting deep into the definition and history of “sexual harassment.”⁸² Similarly, The Gender Rebels’ programming seeks to move the audiences’ understanding of gender beyond the language of binaries and dichotomies with the help of “a weekly question-and-answer podcast that explores life outside the binary; cross-dressing, transgender topics, queer life and anything else that helps break down the gender binary.”⁸³ Beyond language, these podcasters interrogate and critique socially constructed conceptions of identity. For example, 2 Dope Queens interviewed the former First Lady Michelle Obama about her struggle with the label “angry Black female.”⁸⁴

Other podcasters have investigated patriarchy as an element of systemic oppression and have explored sexism in specific settings, public and professional. Deborah Frances-White, host of The Guilty Feminist, has asked how patriarchy is expressed in the gender inequities that persist in the workplace and in the judicial system.⁸⁵ The Guilty Feminist also explored how male privilege allows men to admit in public to crimes without fear of retribution, and the hosts claimed that “there is one man, however, who has a history of bragging about sexual assault, who has been accused of sexual misconduct by nineteen women, and who regularly demeans women in his workplace, but has been curiously silent: President Donald Trump.” Cristen Conger and Caroline Ervin, co-hosts of Unladylike, have presented a history of how patriarchy prevented women from enjoying outdoor activity without threats of violence.⁸⁶ Liz Plank and Hitha Herzog of Divided States of Women have investigated how the majority of women in prison were incarcerated for crimes they committed in self-defense.⁸⁷ Both Guys We F****d (hosted by Corinne Fisher and Krystyna Hutchinson) and Divided States of Women have explored how patriarchy silences women, especially in the media.⁸⁸ Jennifer Shafiro and Lisa Lynn’s Dear Patriarchy is devoted to a critique of male patriarchy in the corporate world and is broadly inclusive of homophobia and transphobia.⁸⁹ Bridget Todd’s podcast Stuff Mom Never Told You offers substantive critiques of patriarchy in the podcasting space.⁹⁰ Writing for Forbes magazine, Carrie Kerpen sums up Todd’s podcasting career thus:

“There are so many women and gender non-conforming folks who are creating amazing podcasts, so I want to be clear: we’re out there and we’re creating good content,” says Bridget Todd, host of the podcast Stuff Mom Never Told You.⁹¹ “Unfortunately, the same issues that plague the film, television, and literary industries are also unfolding in the podcast industry. Women and gender non-conforming folks are telling our stories, but all too often those stories go without a platform.” On SMNTY, Todd and her guests discuss the challenges women face, along with strategic solutions to further women’s lives, careers, and activism.⁹²

Deconstruction is central to the project of interrogation and critique in this space. Of notable interest is Amy McPhie Allebest’s podcast Breaking Down Patriarchy. Amy describes her podcast thus:

On this podcast when we say “Breaking Down Patriarchy,” we mean it in both senses of the word. We mean we want to “break it down” as in understand it. We want to study Patriarchy as deeply and thoroughly as we can so that we can see the roots of this system, and understand how things have come to be the way they are today. And we’re not gonna lie, we also mean we want to “break down Patriarchy” in terms of dismantling it. But we have a specific vision of how we want to accomplish this deconstruction. Returning to Gerda Lerner’s analogy where men and women are participating in a play together, in close proximity to each other and interconnected with each other, if someone starts swinging around a sledgehammer, trying to bring the set down, two things are likely to happen: one, the hammer will probably hit people in the face – maybe other women, or maybe men, who didn’t build the set or write the script either and are just doing their best trying to play the roles they were taught. Some of my very favorite people in the world are men – my dad, my brother, my brothers-in-law, my father-in-law, my sweet nephews, my male friends, my husband, who is my best friend and my son, who along with my daughters is the absolute joy of my life. I would not want anyone hitting these boys and men in the face with a hammer. So, this podcast is not about women breaking down men. This is about women and men learning together and working together to create a system that is more just and happy for everyone.⁹³

There is deep innovation in this space, including through the integration of comedy and performance art. Consider Janet Hyde, host of the comedic podcast Dude Talks to a Lady, where she explores male patriarchy in the space of comedy.⁹⁴ Kerpen writes:

Comedian Janet Hyde is known among her colleagues as being an outspoken feminist. “I’m always ready to heckle or call a guy out if I think a joke crosses a line,” she says, “but I’m really more interested in exploring that with guys, and helping them understand how it feels to be the only woman in a dark basement when a man tells a rape joke while making direct eye contact with you.” To create a space for this exploration, Hyde launched the podcast Dude Talks to a Lady, interviewing male comics about their jokes about women, while also opening up conversations about topics including sex, dating, and feminism. Says Hyde: “With this podcast, I’m less interested in calling out sexism and more concerned with digging into how internalized misogyny influences our senses of humor and worldview, and how we can start to unpack all that.”⁹⁵

Scarlet, Roxy, and Margery of The Red Resistance: A Handmaid’s Tale Podcast use an analysis of the Hulu television series in order to provide “a field guide for the patriarchal oligarchy.”⁹⁶

Although this space is largely dominated by women, a notable exception is Jeremy Herte’s Let’s Talk Bruh, a podcast that critiques Black masculinity.⁹⁷ Herte writes:

We have conversations on mental health/therapy, Black male privilege, vulnerability, patriarchy’s impact on Black women, friendship, sex and much more with a type of vulnerability rarely heard in the podcast space. Our conversations are designed to create a space where Black Men can have deeper conversations, vent, laugh, cry, celebrate each other AND call each other for problematic behavior. With each episode we try to do our part in considering and suggesting new visions of Black masculinity.

Roosh Valizadeh of Kingmaker has examined the role of patriarchy in everything, from porn to the politics of Donald Trump.⁹⁸ Filmmaker Ian MacKenzie’s The Mythic Masculine takes a deeper historical dive into the mythological roots of masculine archetypes.⁹⁹ John Biewen and Celeste Headlee of Scene on Radio have devoted an entire series of podcasts to the exploration of male patriarchy and its origins in American social history.¹⁰⁰

Heteronormativity

Podcasters have also investigated heteronormativity and its intersection with patriarchy. Heteronormativity “refers to norms related to gender and sexuality that seek to reinforce existing power structures and ideologies such as patriarchy and compulsory heterosexuality.”¹⁰¹ The privileges afforded to heterosexuals are evident in laws such as the Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as taking place between a man and woman, and the tax code, which until fairly recently only offered economic benefits to married heterosexual couples.¹⁰²

Queery is interested in how heteronormativity results in waning civil rights for non-heterosexuals.¹⁰³ Savage LoveCast analyzes heteronormativity with the help of concepts like monogamy, religiosity, and politics.¹⁰⁴ In its turn, Identity Politics has investigated the narrow ways in which masculinity is defined in heteronormative spaces.¹⁰⁵ Divided States of Women has looked at the ways in which heteronormative supremacy is challenged by a certain amount of normalization of the LGBTQ community, but “trans people are still discriminated against everywhere.”¹⁰⁶

Other podcasts interrogate and critique competing language and concepts in the sphere of sex and sexuality. These programs seek to expand audiences’ understanding of sex and sexuality. For example, Turn Me On uses conversations to define “what it is to be a sexual being in the world.”¹⁰⁷ F***s Given seeks to expand audiences’ conception of sex and sexuality by including “all genders, sexualities and experiences” in the conversation.¹⁰⁸ Similarly, Guys We F****d seeks to promote a “healthier outlook on sex” by hosting “discussions on the most taboo kinks, interviews with revolutionaries in sexual health, cultural icons, and, occasionally, guys they’ve fucked.”¹⁰⁹ Their “anti-slut shaming” programming seeks to decolonize sexual practices and expectations. This was clear in a December 2018 episode where the hosts of Guys We F****d, Krystyna Hutchinson and Corinne Fishe, interviewed comedian Liza Treyger:

LIZA TREYGER Like every dude’s goals should be making the girl cum before you even get your dick involved.

KRYSTYNA HUTCHINSON Yeah.

CORINNE FISHER I agree, absolutely, but there’s a lot a lack of interest and I think that’s why there’s a lack of skill because if you’re not interested in…

KRYSTYNA HUTCHINSON I’ve been guilty of this, especially lately, is advocating for yourself, be like no let’s not we’re not done yet like fucking eat or finger me, or something.

LIZA TREYGER Yeah, it starts from so young that feeling you deserve it. Because after Khaled, DJ Khaled said he didn’t go down on his wife, right, yeah, I read some article in like a New York Magazine type publication where they talked to a bunch of sex therapists, and they said the majority of couples that they see are actually women that don’t let their partners go down on them.

KRYSTYNA HUTCHINSON I’ve heard that a lot too yeah and why do you think that is?

LIZA TREYGER Because you know because women don’t like their bodies or it’s this thing of the interest of like a guy is down there and it’s like it seems like a chore I think our natural energy is to be like okay it’s fine like you’re done.¹¹⁰

Hutchinson and Treyger interrogated and critiqued the ways in which patriarchy has defined and limited sexual practices. Again, corporate media do not allow for this degree of openness about sexual practices, or about the colonial mentalities associated with sex; they prefer rather narrow discourses that conflate equity with representation. This is another illustration of how the podcasting space stimulates deeper probings of power structures. Decolonial podcasters’ analysis is not only deep but complex. Our survey revealed that their programs not only critique and interrogate the power dynamics of these identities, but analyze the ways in which the identities themselves intersect.

Intersectionality

The term “intersectionality” was coined in 1989 by the Black feminist scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw.¹¹¹ It began as an exploration of the intersection of race and gender. For example, the author, professor, feminist, and social activist bell hooks employed a racialized lens for examining feminist studies, because it “challenged the notion that ‘gender’ was the primary factor determining a woman’s fate.”¹¹² hooks explained that the racial component in women’s identity can create a different experience from that of other racial identities women hold. Intersectional theorists note that individuals have multiple identities.¹¹³ Building upon the work of Crenshaw and other intersectional scholars, Patricia Hill Collins identifies and analyzes matrices of domination.¹¹⁴ Collins explains that “the term matrix of domination describes this overall social organization within which intersecting oppressions originate, develop, and are contained.”¹¹⁵ While intersectional analysis examines the ways in which the power dynamics in identity works at the individual or at the local level, the matrix of power focuses on the power relations invested in society’s social structures.

Intersectional scholarship has had an impact on the podcasting space. In fact the podcast Intersectionality Matters! African American Policy Forum is hosted by Crenshaw.¹¹⁶ Of interest here is the thorough integration of her Black feminist paradigm of intersectionality. Her podcast explores the role of patriarchy in the Black male support for Donald Trump, the element of “misogynoir” in the Black male critique of Vice President Kamala Harris, and the confluence of COVID and “disaster white supremacy” and offers and intersectional look at the 1619 Project. In episode 25, titled “From the Base to the Face of the Party: Kamala Harris, Black Women, and Misgynoir in the Election,” Crenshaw asks: “Black women have been the wheels of the Democratic Party bus, but will we ever get to sit in the driver’s seat?” She offers a historical perspective of the Democratic Party’s most reliable voting block; together with Donna Brazile (Democratic Party strategist), Barbaraa Arnwine (president and founder of the Transformative Justice Coalition), Kim Foxx (state attorney for Cook County, Illinois); Republican Maxine Waters (California’s 43rd congressional district), and Kirsten West Savali (executive producer of Essence magazine), she explores the historical importance of Kamala Harris’ political ascendance; and she analyzes Harris’ own historical self-understanding, as reflected in her acceptance speech for the Democratic vice presidential nomination. They speak to the level of misogyny directed at Harris by political foes and media voices, the intentional obfuscation of the historical moment, and Black male patriarchal criticism of Harris’s Jamaican heritage and intercultural marriage.

Crenshaw’s intersectional lens has profoundly influenced a host of other podcasters in this space who express an understanding of the broader social, political, and cultural impacts of patriarchy and link it with race, class, gender, and disability. Bridget Todd, host of the Stuff Mom Never Told You, claims: “The show we create tries to explore issues from an explicitly intersectional feminist lens because we don’t really have an option of doing anything else.”¹¹⁷ “We also try to keep in mind that not all women share our own particular life stories, backgrounds, or experiences. I want to build a community where all women – Black women, trans women, disabled women, undocumented women, poor women, rural women – all feel heard, seen, and affirmed.”¹¹⁸ The hosts of Vegan Warrior Princesses Attack describe themselves as hosts who “‘attack’ a wide range of topics from an anti-capitalist, feminist, anarchist, vegan perspective.”¹¹⁹ The hosts of Show Race hold regular discussions on “identity, politics, power, and privilege in our pre-post-yet-still-very-racial America.”¹²⁰

Podcasters in this space often interrogate and critique colonialism through an examination of the lived experience of an intersection of identities. For example, Identity Politics hosted the “Toronto-based #Blackistani couple Henna Khawja and Ryan Hilliard about race, family, and what it takes to bring together two cultures in one household.”¹²¹ Similarly, See Something, Say Something interviewed the sex educator and writer Wazina Zondon “about navigating queerness, sex, and Islam.”¹²² Self-Evident: Asian American Stories, “a member of New York’s Bangladeshi Feminist Collective, helps us take a hard look at the roles of class, colorism, and cultural education within the broader conversation about Asian representation in America.”¹²³ The hosts of Gender Blender describe their program as “exploring gender with everyday people – what shapes it, how we define it, and the strange and sometimes silly ways it shows up in our lives.”¹²⁴ Latinos Who Lunch focuses on the intersection of “everything from pop culture and art to issues of race, gender, and class in Latinx communities.”¹²⁵ On a weekly basis, Code Switch “explores how race intersects with every aspect of our lives.”¹²⁶

Conclusion

Interestingly, when it came to racial and ethnic minorities, women, LGBTQIA, and religious minorities, personal stories were told by actual members of each identity group. However, the same opportunity was not afforded to the working class. We could not find much evidence that working-class guests frequent any podcast in order to discuss class issues. Generally, those stories tend to be told by experts such as economists and sociologists. There were few podcasts critiquing dominant ideologies of ableism and indigeneity. This is surprising, especially about the latter, given the connection between indigeneity and colonialism. All Things Equal was one of the few podcasts that consistently critiqued and interrogated these ideologies.¹²⁷

Our podcasters also critique the overlooked dominant ideology of ableism. Ableist ideology continuously attempts to shape societal structures in a manner that privileges the abled.¹²⁸ The podcasts uncover how dominant discourses ignore the lived experience of the differently abled. For example, All Things Equal did cover the ways in which technological innovation has offered “incredible, life changing opportunities to people with disabilities … but only if they can use them. Otherwise, the discrimination they already face could only get worse.”¹²⁹ Similarly, Off-Kilter with Rebecca Vallas discussed how ableist discrimination during COVID-19 has resulted in a “poverty trap” for those challenged in terms of ability.¹³⁰ In another episode, Vallas discussed structural ableism in relation to the fact that the American electoral system imposes barriers on voting for people with disabilities. The podcasters’ critique of dominant ideologies placed an emphasis on identity.

We were surprised to discover the dearth of decolonial podcasts querying the perpetuation of colonization on indigenous peoples. When it comes to the interrogation of discursive concepts of indigeneity, Nick Estes’ Red Nation is a clear leader in the field.¹³¹ Estes’ program centers on the colonial legacy of indigeneity in contemporary events. Estes interviews activists, for instance members of the Indigenous Environmental Network, about their resistance to the Keystone XL pipeline. He contextualizes their stories in the long history of indigenous people, who saw settlers colonize their land and remove them, in pursuit of profit. Other podcasters explore the way in which colonial practices against indigenous people persist globally. For example, Thunder Bay investigates the murder of indigenous people as a perpetuation of Canada’s colonial legacy.¹³² In our search, these were the podcasts that consistently addressed the theme of a colonial legacy for indigenous populations. Others, such as All Things Equal in an episode from June 2019, interrogated the history of indigenous primary schools before it moved on to these institutions’ modern attempts to take “a holistic, community driven approach to learning.”¹³³ However, the program investigates a litany of dominant ideologies, and only two episodes are dedicated to indigeneity.

We expected to see podcasters challenging dominant ideologies; what we did not expect was to find such a limited analysis of ethnocentric ideologies. Indeed, although some of the podcasts queried indigeneity and Muslim culture insofar as they relate to identity, these features where less submitted to scrutiny than others. Furthermore, discourses about imperialism, which is a defining feature of colonization, were limited as well. Indigeneity, from which much decolonial work emerged, is extremely underrepresented in the podcasting space by comparison to other identities. This may speak to some of the limitations of podcasting as a site for discourses about decolonization.