“We are here, and the same rights accrue to us.” Derica Shields, a writer and researcher, advocates for listening to Black peoples’ accounts and analyses of their own lives. She speaks with the hosts, Nikita Gale and Alexander Provan, about her oral history of Black experiences of the welfare state, “A Heavy Nonpresence." Her work shows how, in Britain, liberal nostalgia for the so-called care of the state is premised on not listening to those who receive benefits—and how politicians and journalists enable Black people to be shamed for doing so by upholding the age-old distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor.