Podcasts of the Week Ending October 17

Throughline :: The Electoral College

The history of why the United States has a backwards system of electing Presidents and how it has been used to promote slaveholding and racism throughout history.

Planet Money :: Caste Comes to Silicon Valley

The constitution of India officially outlawed the ancient caste system in 1947, but discrimination against people based on caste persists in India and has followed Indian immigrants to the US.

Code Switch :: Let’s Talk About Kamala Harris

Evaluating Kamala Harris’ record on criminal justice as a prosecutor and California attorney general.

The War on Cars :: America’s Love Affair With Cars

Efforts to fight the deleterious effects of the automobile are often countered with the statement that Americans have a love affair with their cars. This podcast traces the origin of this term in an industry promotional program starring Groucho Marx and questions the validity of the “love affair.”

RUNNING TALLY OF PODCAST OF THE WEEK APPEARANCES

• AirSpace – 1
• Afropop Worldwide – 3
• All Songs Considered – 3
• And Nothing Less – Entire series
• The Anthropocene Reviewed – 1
• BackStory – 4
• Brattle Film Podcast – 2
• Best of the Left – 2
• Coronavirus Daily/Consider This – 5
• Code Switch – 4
• Decoder Ring – 5
• Fresh Air – 9
• Futility Closet – 3
• Have You Heard – 3
• Here & Now – 1
• Hidden Brain – 3
• Hit Parade – 3
• Hub History – 1
• The Last Archive – 4
• LeVar Burton Reads – 1
• Memory Palace – 4
• More Than Enough – 4
• Mortified – 1
• The Moth – 1
• Nice White Parents – entire series
• 99% Invisible – 10
• 60-Second Science – 4
• Planet Money – 6
• The Politics of Everything – 2
• Radio Boston – 3
• Radiolab – 8
• Retro Disney World – 1
• Risk! – 1
• Science Talk – 2
• Smithsonian Sidedoor – 4
• Snap Judgment – 1
• Sound Opinions – 1
• The Thirty20Eight – 1
• This American Life – 2
• This Day in Esoteric Public History – 1
• Throughline – 12
• The Tomorrow Society – 1
• The Truth – 1
• Twenty Thousand Hertz – 7
• The War on Cars – 1
• Wedway Radio – 1
• What Next – 11

Book Review: Caste by Isabel Wilkerson

Author: Isabel Wilkerson
Title: Caste : The Origins of our Discontents
Narrator: Robin Wiles
Publication Info: Random House (Audio), 2020
Summary/Review:

The author of the remarkable work on the history of the Great Migration, The Warmth of Other Suns, returns with a book about systems of caste.  Wilkerson focuses on three of the most deeply entrenched caste systems in world history: India’s millennia-old system, the subjugation of Jews in Nazi Germany, and the continued inequality of Blacks in the United States that persists even after dismantling slavery and Jim Crow segregation.

Through the lens of caste, which Wilkerson says trumps both class and race, we can understand how inequality persists and what can be done to dismantle it. Wilkerson works through eight pillars of caste and richly illustrates it with examples from history and current events.  Wilkerson also frequently draws upon examples from her own experience as a professional Black woman being treated as an inferior.  The book is eye-opening and sobering, and it is one that I believe should be on everyone’s must-read list.

Recommended books:

• The whites of their eyes : the Tea Party’s revolution and the battle over American history by Jill Lepore
• The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein
• A Colony in a Nation by Chris Hayes
• Nobody: Casualties of America’s War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond by Marc Lamont Hill
• The new Jim Crow : mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

Rating: ****1/2