The Kicker

Gender and sexuality can feel natural and even immutable, but science and the lived experience of numerous humans tell us that these categories are far more variable than they may seem. At a time when dozens of states around the US have passed or are considering legislation to enforce rigid definitions of gender, queer theorist Jack Halberstam and journalist Zach Stafford discuss the fallaciousness of what scholars call the “gender binary.” Bringing an intersectional perspective, and looking at examples from women’s sports, they invite journalists to speak truth to the power that is exercised, often violently, through an insistence on “normative” ideas of gender and sexuality. Guests: Zach Stafford & Jack Halberstam

The American Dream is often portrayed as the hook that pulls people to the United States. What is usually left out of the story is the hell many flee, sometimes a hell fed by the very country in which they seek refuge. The story of U.S. involvement in Central America is a classic example of wars inflicted on people by U.S. financed repressive regimes and later by gangs grown in the U.S. and deported wholesale to vulnerable nations. In this episode, a scholar sheds light on the invention of the “illegal alien,” its use and manipulation for the past 140 years (and counting) to exclude and exploit people of color and more recent notions of who and who is not deserving of legal admission into the United States. Guest: Mae Ngai

Steel produced in Youngstown, Ohio, helped America win World War II, and it was used to build the bridges that we cross and the buildings in which we live. But in the 1970s, the mills began closing. Some 50,000 well-paid jobs were gone. There was a concurrent rise in anger as the workers and their children struggled to survive with minimum-wage jobs or in the gig economy. Youngstown represents the widening chasm of class division in the United States. Journalists need to understand how class informs politics and culture. In this episode we talk with a labor studies expert about how to cover the working class.Guest: Sherry Linkon

There is a long tradition of imperial denial in the United States. After all, Americans fought the British Empire and have always thought of themselves as different from European colonialists. They are Empire Slayers — why else would “Star Wars” and its fight against the Galactic Empire have such a hold on the popular imagination? In this episode, two scholars explain how, from the nation’s birth, imperial expansion — first westward into Indian Country and later, overseas —was a defining character of these United States. The echoes of empire can be heard in today’s news. It’s impossible to talk about immigration, drone strikes, the attacks on Asian Americans, the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, etc., without understanding the history and projection of American power. What would journalism informed by the history of empire look like? Guests: Daniel Immerwahr & Vernadette Vicuna Gonzalez

Whiteness in America isn’t just the neutral norm against which racial minorities, particularly Black people, are measured. Whiteness in America means having the privilege and power that go along with being part of that supposed norm. And becoming white – not in terms of pigment but of social status – is a choice that nearly every immigrant or refugee group in America has had to embrace or reject. We talk with two scholars in the field of Whiteness Studies about how understanding the construction of white identity in this polyglot country gives us keen insights into its troubled racial history.

The issue of police violence and racism is a familiar one. It’s been present in the United States since the Republic's beginnings. And the stories of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tamir Rice and others cannot be understood if we do not know and comprehend that history. In this episode, we discuss race, crime, criminal justice, violence and the kind of cyclical dynamic that we have seen repeatedly over the decades with Harvard historian Dr. Khalil Muhammad. The conversation gives greater context and an insight into the shattering events of today by illuminating the roots of injustice and violence against Black Americans by those in authority.

How We Got Here is a podcast for journalists about how history and identity shape narrative. As journalists, we like to say we’re writing the first draft of history. But if we don’t know our own history, we run the risk of misinterpreting what we see and what we hear. Of failing to connect the dots. George Floyd’s murder, the Black Lives Matter movement, the election, the attempted coup - they’ve all brought America to a reckoning with its national character. Six professors from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism take a step back to examine the historical context of today’s news. They look at how race, gender, class, immigration and American empire impact the stories we cover and how we tell them. How We Got Here is a production of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism in partnership with Columbia Journalism Review.

When Samuel Getachew was a sixth grader in the Oakland public school system, Akintunde Ahmad was a “hometown hero,” headed to Yale. On this week’s Kicker, Ahmad, now a CJR contributor and Ida B. Wells fellow, and Getachew, a rising first year at Yale, discuss the media’s misuse of successful Black students.

How do we report and contextualize the January 6 insurrection, or the largest efforts to suppress the vote since the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, or the way political power is wielded in the US without understanding the racial history of our country? On this week’s Kicker, Hannah-Jones, the new Knight chair in race and reporting at Howard University, and a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for the New York Times Magazine, joins Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, to talk about her decision to decline tenure at the University of North Carolina, and her plan to turn Howard’s journalism program into a “firewall for democracy.”

The pandemic’s limits on primary candidates and the journalists who cover them; a drastically shorter campaign season; and all but absent public polling thanks to the new ranked choice voting. This has been a New York City primary season like no other.On this week’s Kicker, Errol Louis, who is the anchor of NY1’s “Inside City Hall,” the host of the podcast “You Decide with Errol Louis,” and a professor of urban reporting at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, joins Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR. They discuss the ability of the city’s already fragile local news ecosystem to cover a high-stakes election season, and what Eric Adams’ treatment of the press so far means if he becomes the next mayor of New York City.