Episode description

This is the last episode of Notes from America with Kai Wright.

If you’ve been with the show through its multi-year history and iterations as a NYC-based narrative podcast and local call-in show called The United States of Anxiety before becoming a nationally distributed program, then you may remember the conversation in this finale.

It’s with cultural historian, Columbia University professor and MacArthur fellow Saidiya Hartman, who introduces host Kai Wright to young women whose lives were obscured by respectability politics. Hartman is the author of "Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals," which offers an intimate look into some of the Black people that have been seemingly erased from the history books. 

Through a series of readings, they explore the complicated role of Black intellectuals like W.E.B DuBois, the Black family and how a damaging moralism continues to inform the policing of marginalized communities, public space and American cultural politics today.

This episode was originally published as “The ‘Beautiful Experiments’ Left Out of Black History” on February 8, 2021.

Find Notes From America’s archive of episodes here, including the following companion listening for this episode:

“Faith Ringgold Creates Space for Black Americans” (1/5/2023)

Faith Ringgold’s art is an intimate dialogue and debate between generations of Black women, stretching from the formerly enslaved to today.

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Notes from America airs live on Sundays at 6 p.m. ET. The podcast episodes are lightly edited from our live broadcasts.