This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, late doctoral students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.

Today’s conversation is with writer and critic Michael Harriot. Along with numerous journalistic pieces in venues such as The Root, Yes! Magazine, TheGrio.com, he is author of the award-winning book Black AF History: The UnWhitewashed Story of America, published by Dey Street Books in 2023. In this conversation, we discuss the importance of study in journalistic and popular writing, the varied and deep roots of Black study, and the cultural and political responsibilities that come with writing about Black life in the twenty-first century.