They Organized, We Organized Too: Podcasts as an Organizing Homeplace for Racial Justice

• In Event: A Homeplace in Podcasting: Holding Space for Critical Conversations in Education

Abstract

Objective/Purpose:
Black podcasters continue the “legacy of Black entertainers creating for Black audiences outside of the white gaze” (Florini, 2015 p. 210). The rise of Black podcasting is comparable to the Black blogger movement, where “rather than attempting to promote the assimilation of African Americans into the mainstream, bloggers and their readers use the blogs to build centripetally and reaffirm the right of people of African descent to produce art that speaks to and for them” (Gipson, 2019, p. 8). Black led podcasts focused on Black culture provide a homespace for nuanced discussions of Blackness, but also as organizing spaces for liberation.
The [redacted] podcast, hosted by Author 1 and Author 2 features a new co-host/guest speaker each episode to engage in discourses of Black lived experiences in academia, education and ways to dismantle oppression. As a co-host for the episode, [redacted], I articulated the ways in which anti-CRT and anti-history legislation are rooted in white supremacy (Author 1 et. al, 2022) and the resistance efforts to mobilize against them. In this paper, I theorize how this podcast episode not only spoke on the issue but became an organizing homespace for racial justice.

Perspective/Theoretical Framework
Critical Race Media Literacy provides an avenue to grapple with systems of oppression and the multifaceted ways in which it functions in the media with a close attention to race and racism (Yosso, 2002). Critical Race Media Literacy (CRML) is often utilized to explore problematic and negative portrayals in the media. However, Yosso (2020) reminds us that as CRML helps us critique dominant racialized narratives in the media but it should also “recognize a shared legacy of resistance to oppression” (p. 9). It is in that vein, this paper unpacks this particular episode through a Critical Race Media Literacy lens to understand how it offers both a counter-narrative to traditional media portrayals and homespace for resistance.

Methods:
Conceptual paper

Scholarly Significance:
Vrikki and Malik (2019) state “podcasts do more than just open public windows of expression; and yet as easily accessible, renders them a potentially radical space for counter-hegemonic discourses of meanings of race” (p. 276). The [redacted] podcast episode as counter-narrative, provides both a historical and contemporary context of Black resistance. It equally affirms, raises consciousness, and prompts listeners to informed action. Utilizing the [redacted] podcast in education spaces can provide listeners with a radical space for truth telling but more importantly serve as a call to action.

Author

• Tiffany Mitchell Patterson, District of Columbia Public Schools
  Presenting Author