“Just One Thing Missing” from This American Life: Nice Work if You Can Get It
“American Skin (41 Shots)” by Bruce Spingsteen
Written in response to the shooting of Amadou Diallo.
“A Radical Experiment in Empathy” by Sam Richards
Kiki hunted in her purse for her wallet. Warren Crane stood beside her, with his hefty head, too large for that neatly muscular blue-collar New Jersey body, his beefy sailor arms crossed and a whimsical look on his face, like that of an audience member waiting for the comedian to get on stage. When you are no longer in the sexual universe — when you are supposedly too old, or too big, or simply no longer thought of in that way — apparently a whole new range of male reactions to you come into play. One of them is humor. But then, thought Kiki, they were brought up that way, these white American boys: I’m the Aunt Jemima on the cookie boxes of their childhoods, the pair of thick ankles Tom and Jerry played around. Of course they find me funny. And yet I could cross the river to Boston and barely be left alone for five minutes at a time. Only last week a young brother hall her age had trailed Kiki up and down Newbury for an hour and would not relent until she said he could take her out some time; she gave him a fake number.
‘You need a loan, Keeks?’ asked Warren. ‘Sister, I could spare you a dime.’
Kiki laughed. She found her wallet at last. Money dealt with, she said goodbye to the trader.
‘That’s pretty,’ said Warren, looking down her and then up her again. ‘As if you needed to get any prettier.’
And this is another thing they do. They flirt with you violently because there is no possibility of being taken seriously.
“A More Perfect Union” by Barack Obama
“Suggestion” from 13 Songs by Fugazi
It would seem to me … that the definition of people in terms of color is humanly impossible. ‘Humanly’ does not refer to the virtues but the possibilities, or limits, of the human being. People can be defined by their color only by their beholder, who, in order to arrive at this definition, must will himself/herself blind. And this is absolutely true: there is not a racist alive who is not a liar and a coward, the proof being that they imagine reality to be at the mercy of their will— or, rather, of their terror.
There are few facts in my humble history to which I look back with more satisfaction than to the fact, recorded in the history of the woman-suffrage movement, that I was sufficiently enlightened at that early day, and when only a few years from slavery, to support your resolution for woman suffrage. I have done very little in this world in which to glory except this one act—and I certainly glory in that. When I ran away from slavery, it was for myself; when I advocated emancipation, it was for my people; but when I stood up for the rights of woman, self was out of the question, and I found a little nobility in the act.
From a speech to the International Council of Women by Frederick Douglass.
The full speech and more information about Douglass’s role in the women’s suffrage movement can be found here.
A selection from Studs Terkel’s Hard Times radio series from This American Life: Who Do You Think You Are?
More Studs Terkel interviews are available here.
