System Check with Melissa Harris-Perry and Dorian Warren

By: The Nation Magazine
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  • Summary

  • Diagnosing and repairing a malfunctioning democracy, with hosts Melissa Harris-Perry and Dorian Warren.
    The Nation
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Politics & Government Social Sciences
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Episodes
  • 10: Political Violence Is No Anomaly in American History

    10: Political Violence Is No Anomaly in American History
    Jan 8 2021
    Georgia made history this week: The state elected a Black Senator on Tuesday for the first time ever. Rev. Raphael Warnock, a Morehouse graduate who serves as senior pastor of the storied Ebenezer Baptist Church once pastored by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., will be representing Georgia in the Senate as soon as the results are certified. Along with the win of his fellow Georgian, Jon Ossoff, the Senate will effectively be in Democratic hands, as will the House and the Presidency. Sadly, a different kind of history was also made this week, when an angry, violent, mob of mostly white Trump supporters broke into the Capitol on Wednesday, smashing windows, destroying private offices and violating public spaces. With encouragement from the man occupying the highest office in the land, the mob forced our elected representatives to flee the House and Senate floors as they were undertaking the constitutionally mandated certification of the 2020 presidential election. The people who perpetrated this attack against our democracy were fueled by misinformation, much of it coming from the President himself: That dead people had voted, that voting machines had somehow switched votes, that the election was rigged and widespread fraud had handed Biden the presidency. But they were also acting on another kind of misinformation, another kind of lie—a lie that erases the genius and the contributions of Black people, a lie that ignores the fact that it was Black hands that made America what it is, that unpaid Black labor built the very buildings that serve as the seat of our democracy. They were fueled by the lie that is white supremacy. If we are to move beyond the gridlock that has been our political fate for years, we need to face up to this lie embedded deep within our entire public life. On this week’s show, your hosts Melissa Harris-Perry and Dorian Warren undertake a system check of the very foundation of our politics. Our guest and guide this week is Hasan Kwame Jeffries, associate professor of history at The Ohio State University where he teaches courses on the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. He reminds us that the violence we saw at the Capitol this week is not an anomaly—in fact, political violence is what birthed this nation. The American Revolution, the Civil War, the brutal suppression of Reconstruction and the stiff resistance to the Civil Rights Movement, political violence has long been used to perpetuate white supremacy in this country. And too often, Black agency and emancipation has been bartered away to avoid further political violence. But Prof. Jeffries points us toward a way to hold people—whether they’re the people who stormed the Capitol or the politicians who egged them on—accountable for their political violence, and a way to recognizing and honoring the full contributions that Black Americans have made to our republic. Our final word this week goes to Professor Blair Kelley, Associate Professor of History at North Carolina State University. System Check listeners will remember Prof. Kelley from episode 2, in which she gave us a deeply personal perspective on voter suppression—this week, she reminds us of all the working class Black folks who have asserted their right to participate in a political system that more often than not thwarted and devalued their input. It is our task to honor their legacy. System Checklist Transforming analysis into action, the System Check Team gives listeners three action items this week: Take Action: The politicians who aided and abetted this week’s assault on democracy must be held accountable. Prof. Hasan Kwame Jeffries’s brother, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, is one of a chorus of politicians who came out today demanding President Trump’s removal from office. Add your name as a co-signer of Rep. Cori Bush’s bill to investigate and expel members of congress who fomented the storming of the Capitol, and help shift the balance of power in the Senate, that most unequal of institutions, by telling your representatives to make Washington, DC the 51st state.Get Informed: How do we fight misinformation? By educating ourselves. This week’s political violence didn’t come out of nowhere, it’s a clear response to the progressive political gains made this year, facilitated by the work of Black women from Stacey Abrams all the way back to Fannie Lour Hamer. Check out Prof. Jeffries’s moving TedTalk, mentioned in today’s show. Listen to Rev. Raphael Warnock’s speech after his defeat of Sen. Kelly Loeffler to learn how the son of a woman who picked someone else’s cotton could become a US Senator.Watch: And while you’re at it, treat yourself to Elizabeth Alexander’s full reading of “Praise Song for the Day” at the 2009 inauguration of Barack Obama. As always, we welcome your additions to our Checklist! Use our Twitter and Facebook pages to add your comments, suggested actions, and organizations to support. And if you ...
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    35 mins
  • 9: The System Check Book Club

    9: The System Check Book Club
    Jan 1 2021
    This week on System Check we are saying farewell to 2020 and hello to 2021 with our first System Check Book Club. Your hosts Melissa and Dorian first aired this Book Club as a Live Event on YouTube and Facebook just in time for holiday reading. While the original show was over two hours long, for our podcast this week we decided to share with you some of the highlights from the live event. First up is Maria Hinojosa, journalist , storyteller and founder of Futuro Media Group. She is the host and executive producer of the brilliant and informative weekly NPR show Latino USA, and anchor of the Emmy Award-winning talk show Maria Hinojosa: One-on-One. Her latest book, Once I Was You: a Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn America was published by Atria Books and received well-earned, rave reviews this fall. We talk with her about the system of immigration, particularly the cruel and harmful practices of family separation of young immigrant children from their parents, the role of state agents who insist they are simply “doing their job” as well as those brave enough to resist, and the personal origins of her book title. Next we speak with Rumaan Alam, author of the gripping, searing and suspenseful novel Leave The World Behind. With bylines in many places including The Nation, Alam’s fictional characters in his third novel feel as though they are grappling with the dystopia of their new domestic lives, revealing deep-seated racism, and coping with the death-dealing consequences of environmental and political disaster. Sound familiar? Leave the World Behind was a finalist for this year’s National Book Award and has already been optioned by Netflix. Although written in 2018 and 2019, it seems like the year 2020 released the lived experience version of this novel. Up next is a powerful, brutal, and insightful new book by New York Times best-selling author Scott Farris. Freedom on Trial: The First Post Civil-War Battle Over Civil Rights and Voter Suppression tells the story of the federal government prosecution of the South Carolina Ku Klux Klan in the early 1870s. Farris talks with us about the system of citizenship—and the contested meanings of the 14th and 15th Amendments during the Reconstruction period, the role of radical Republicans in the fight for racial justice, and the specific role of Farris’s own great grandfather in this overlooked historical saga of the KKK. Our colleague John Nichols, National Affairs Correspondent for The Nation, joins us next to discuss his latest book, The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party: The Enduring Legacy of Henry Wallace’s Anti-Fascist, Anti-Racist Politics. In the book, John reveals the legacy of former Vice President Henry Wallace, who warned of the persisting “Danger of American Fascism” and urged the Democratic Party to reject imperialism in favor of a genuinely progressive future. It is a message, Nichols says, the Democratic party needs to heed now. Nichols brings the often forgotten visionary, politician, activist and philanthropist Wallace to the fore of mid-century American politics, charting the untraveled paths he envisioned for the Democratic Party, including a post-war peace that was rooted in human dignity and justice abroad and domestically. And John answers the question: does the Democratic Party today have a soul to fight for? Our final selection for this week’s episode offers a very different way of thinking about systems. Although this book is about one man—athlete, artist, philosopher, and activist, Paul Robeson—it isn’t so much a biography as an exploration of Robeson as a system, a technology, an element and vibration. Intrigued? Tune in to hear Shana Redmond, Professor of Musicology and African American Studies at UCLA, and author of Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson, as she talks with our hosts about this extraordinary book, including how Robeson was to Henry Wallace in 1948 as Killa Mike was to Bernie Sanders in 2020. A very special thanks to all of our authors that joined us for first System Check Book Club, as well as all of our partners for the live event including: The Anna Julia Cooper Center, Community Change Action, The New York Public Library, Tattered Cover Bookstore, and of course the home of System Check The Nation. Like System Check? Follow us on Twitter and Facebook, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes every Friday. System Check is a project of The Nation magazine, hosted by Melissa Harris-Perry and Dorian Warren and produced by Sophia Steinert-Evoy. Support for System Check comes from Omidyar Network, a social change venture that is reimagining how capitalism should work. Learn more about their efforts to recenter our economy around individuals, community, and societal well-being at Omidyar.com. Our executive producer is Frank Reynolds. Our theme music is by Brooklyn-based artist and producer Jachary. ...
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    1 hr and 9 mins
  • 8: Could This Pandemic End Up Making Our Healthcare System Stronger?

    8: Could This Pandemic End Up Making Our Healthcare System Stronger?
    Dec 18 2020
    President-elect Joe Biden has made history: This week, he announced that Rep. Deb Haaland would be his pick for head of the Interior Department, the first Native American person ever to a Cabinet-level position, making Biden’s Cabinet the most diverse in history. This kind of representation is important, but it’s not enough, because far from Washington, Native Americans are dying at disproportionate rates from the Coronavirus pandemic. In October, the death rate from Covid-19 on the Navajo Nation was higher than in any state. In South Dakota, the Cheyenne River Lakota reservation is fighting to keep roadblocks up to prevent the spread of the virus, despite the order from the state’s governor to take them down. And Neshoba County, Mississippi, home of the Mississippi Band of the Choctaw, had the highest rate of death per capita in the entire of Mississippi due to coronavirus, devastating the tribe. Neshoba: If that rings a bell, it’s probably because it was at the Neshoba County Fair in 1980 that then-candidate Ronald Reagan launched his campaign for the Presidency on the platform of “state’s rights,” ushering in four decades of neoliberal policies that have devalued and gutted many of the core functions of government meant to protect us from...deadly epidemics. On this week’s System Check, Melissa and Dorian follow up on last week’s episode to explore the system of finding a cure for the coronavirus epidemic that has killed more than 300,000 Americans so far. Finding a vaccine, for sure a scientific feat of epic proportions, is hopeful news. And while necessary, it is not sufficient to understand and transform the systems that have resulted in mind-numbing mass death. We have to push ourselves to also ask the questions: what are the systems that created and sustained the crisis? And how can we bring about a dramatic change not just of the system of science or the system of public health, but rather of the whole ecosystem that made this pandemic possible? We offer a few plausible answers found at the intersection of science, social science and activism. For insight into these intersecting systems, Melissa and Dorian talk to Gregg Gonsalves, Assistant Professor of Epidemiology and Associate Professor of Law at Yale University, to help us think about the Covid-19 pandemic beyond a clinical perspective. And he offers ideas about how to build our social immunity to defeat the virus, and the vast inequalities that make it deadlier for far too many. We then check-in with Alondra Nelson, president of the Social Science Research Council and the Harold F. Linder Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey. She tells us about the creation of the Coronavirus Syllabus, and the necessary efforts to mobilize science and social science for the public good. And she reminds us that the solutions to this pandemic are not only biological and clinical, but also require communities of social and human sciences working collaboratively to tackle exclusion, exploitation, and inequality. The missing piece, and one too often left out of public health conversations, is grassroots organizing. That’s why our final word this week comes from Lenice Emmanuel, Executive Director of the Alabama Institute for Social Justice. She reminds us that activism is what system change looks like on the ground, and that what Black people in the South and everyone vulnerable and marginalized across our country need are systems that allow them to thrive. And yes, childcare and coinage. System Checklist Transforming analysis into action, the System Check Team gives listeners three action items this week: Mask Up: We said it last week and we’ll say it again: With vaccines rolling out, there is light at the end of this tunnel. But we’re far from the end of the pandemic, and your actions now could save the lives of people in your community, maybe even people in your own home.Educate yourself: The Coronavirus Syllabus that Alondra Nelson highlights in this week’s episode is a cross-disciplinary treasure trove of research about the virus, a humane list of music and literature about past pandemics, and helpful syllabi and teaching resources for educating young people about this difficult time in our history. Dig in!RSVP: Lastly, you’re invited to the first ever System Check Book Club. This Saturday, December 19, at 5pm Eastern, join Melissa and Dorian for a live video event—they’ll be talking the authors of some of their favorite books from this year, and looking ahead to titles to watch out for in 2021. Register here for this free event. As always, we welcome your additions to our Checklist! Use our Twitter and Facebook pages to add your comments, suggested actions, and organizations to support. And if you like the show, subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes every Friday. System Check is a project ...
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    43 mins

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