Disrupted

This hour, we are returning to conversations about the stories we see represented on the small screen. Elizabeth Ito is the creator of City of Ghosts and also worked on Adventure Time. She'll discuss using people's real voices in her work and covering topics like gentrification on a series that children watch. Bethonie Butler, author of Black TV: Five Decades of Groundbreaking Television from Soul Train to...

Legendary trumpeter Terence Blanchard is the first Black composer to have had an opera performed at the Metropolitan Opera. But, as he says, he isn't the first Black composer qualified to do so. This hour, we talk to musicians who are changing the face of opera by bringing new stories to the fore.

GUESTS:

• Terence Blanchard: Executive Artistic Director at SF Jazz and Multiple Grammy Award-winning trum...

In March of 1924, more than 100 Black and white attendees were at a dinner party in downtown Manhattan. The party was organized by prominent thinkers Charles S. Johnson and Alain Locke and included people like W.E.B. DuBois. Their goal was to bring together Harlem’s young Black writers with white publishers to help the writers’ work find a national audience. The party was a success. So much so ...

Historian Martha S. Jones was looking through a book one day when she found a section mentioning her grandfather. It referred to her grandfather as white. But in reality, her grandfather’s father was a free man of color, and his mother was born enslaved. This wasn’t the first time her family’s racial identity was questioned, so she started writing down her version of her family’s hi...

Five years ago, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. Since that time, the world has changed dramatically, from the way we think about public health to the way we socialize to the way we watch movies. But those changes haven't had the same impact on everyone.

This hour, we’re talking about COVID-19’s impact on existing inequities. We talk about the diverse experienc...

This hour on Disrupted, we're challenging long-held assumptions about parents and caregivers. First, Angela Garbes, author of Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change, explains how care workers are undervalued. She touches on the way the early days of the pandemic spotlighted issues in caregiving and why the legacy of American colonialism in the Philippines influenced both her family history and the dis...

Bernadette Atuahene initially moved to Detroit, Michigan to study squatters rights. But she discovered a more urgent issue once there— that many Black residents were losing their homes.

The reason was property tax foreclosure, and it came as a result of property taxes that were illegally inflated. It’s one of several racist housing policies that shapes who does or doesn’t have generationa...

Every February, the United States celebrates Black History Month. But this year, the celebration might feel a bit different.

On January 31st, the Department of Defense announced it would no longer use official resources to celebrate cultural awareness months, including Black History Month, which began the following day. That announcement came after the Trump administration's rollb...

Poet Reginald Dwayne Betts was part of a carjacking in a Virginia mall parking lot when he was 16 years old. He was charged as an adult and sentenced to 9 years in prison.

Dwayne was released in 2005. Today, he’s a lawyer and award-winning poet. He’s also the founder and CEO of a nonprofit organization called Freedom Reads. It provides handcrafted bookcases full of brand new books to prisons.

F...

When you think about love, what comes to mind?

Maybe a movie like Love Actually or Love & Basketball. Maybe Dolly Parton or Whitney Houston singing "I Will Always Love You." Love shows up a lot in our pop culture— but what about in our politics?

The relationships we build…the people we love…the way we treat each other…all of that can be political.

This hour, we hear about the...

Brandon J. Dirden is an actor and director who has appeared in TV shows like The Americans and plays like the Tony Award-winning All The Way (he played Martin Luther King Jr. alongside Bryan Cranston as Lyndon B. Johnson).

He's also a director — most recently of Yale Repertory Theatre’s production of Eden. The play takes place in 1920s Manhattan. It focuses on two families living in the same ap...

James Baldwin and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were two of the most influential thinkers of the Civil Rights Movement. This hour, we reflect on their legacies as we think about our present political moment.

Kyle Bass wrote the play Citizen James, or the Young Man Without a Country, which will be performed in Hartford in February. It portrays a young James Baldwin at an inflection point in his li...

This hour, we listen back to our episode about some of the ways that millennial and gen z politicians are making their mark on the U.S.

Up first, Brandon Scott is the youngest mayor of Baltimore in more than 100 years. A new documentary film called The Body Politic, follows Mayor Scott during his first term in office, focusing on his campaign to reduce gun violence. We are joined by that film's director an...

Martin Luther King Jr. Day is designated as a National Day of Service to encourage people to volunteer and improve their communities. But those communities' needs don’t end when the day of service ends. Here in Connecticut, people like Erik Clemons work year round to improve the communities they care about.

Erik is the CEO of New Haven-based nonprofit Connecticut Center for Arts and Technology (ConnC...

In recent years, politicians across the U.S. have been debating what history should be taught in the classroom. Connecticut is no exception to these debates— a 2022 press conference announcing a planned Native Studies curriculum in Connecticut's public schools turned tense when questions around the specifics of the program came up.

This hour, we’re talking to historians and educators to learn w...

The Disrupted team is welcoming the new year by choosing a couple of the episodes we loved from 2024. We have so many favorites that we couldn't reair all of them, but these are some of the ones that we wanted to listen back to. This week, host Khalilah-Brown Dean chose our interview with author Amy Tan.

Amy is best known for popular novels like The Joy Luck Club and its 1993 film adaptation. The book...

The Disrupted team is welcoming the new year by choosing a couple of the episodes we loved from 2024. We have so many favorites that we couldn't reair all of them, but these are some of the ones that we wanted to listen back to. This week, producer Kevin Chang Barnum chose our interview with James Forman Jr.

The United States imprisons more people than any other country in the world.

And Black people bear ...

In March of 1924, more than 100 Black and white attendees were at a dinner party in downtown Manhattan. The party was organized by prominent thinkers Charles S. Johnson and Alain Locke and included people like W.E.B. DuBois. Their goal was to bring together Harlem’s young Black writers with white publishers to help the writers’ work find a national audience. The party was a success. So much so ...

We hear a lot of of debate around sex and sexuality from our political leaders these days. Proposed legislation in areas like reproductive rights and education are constantly in the news. And while that debate may seem intense today, it isn’t new. Americans have long argued over which kinds of sex are, and aren’t “acceptable.”

You need to understand the past to understand the presen...