“My Brother’s A Basehead” is a true story. Posdnous from De La Soul had an older brother who had a crack addiction and it was very damaging for the whole family. For Pos and his parents, crack was literally in the house just as it was in many houses and many families during the crack era. Crack decimated many families and De La Soul made one of the most powerful songs about all that. In this episode we talk about how crack destroyed families and what went into the making of “My Brother’s A Basehead.” We talk to Prince Paul, De La Soul’s producer who’s sometimes called the 4th member of the group. We also talk about a very different song about crack users, Public Enemy’s Night of the Living Baseheads, which looked down on people who used crack while one of the members of PE was a crack addict. PE’s producer Hank Shocklee joins us for that.
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Toure: [00:00:00] The crack epidemic ran from the mid-eighties until the early nineties, and it’s hard to overestimate how hard crack hit black America. The devil couldn’t have come up with a more insidious drug. A crack user told the news reporter what it felt like using crack.
News Clip: Crack User [00:00:16] It’s unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in my life. It’s really there’s not even any words for it to describe it. It’s a feeling so intense and so pleasurable. That I’ve seen it cause people to spend their last penny.
Toure [00:00:31] In the eighties, there was an army of crackheads scrounging for every dollar they could possibly get. Which is why, as criminologist David Kennedy once said, crack blew through America’s poor Black neighborhoods. Like the four horsemen of the Apocalypse had traded their steeds for supercharged bulldozers. Crack led to the homicide rate for young Black men skyrocketing. The fetal death rate rose. The number of break-ins and robberies rose. Cars were routinely attacked for their radios. And the more brazen addicts ran into homes and stole TVs and VCRs and anything that could be sold for a quick buck. In the big cities it felt like there was an all out assault of drugs and bullets and theft and crack zombies. KRS One told me, quote, “Crack came like a monsoon.” Everyone in the ghetto got drenched. Business was good, so the competition was murder. The gun epidemic screeched in. Territory wars went nuclear. The innocent got killed with regularity. Basketball courts became war zones. Nas once told me crack sucked the life out of people. They’d lose not just their weight, but their minds. It destroyed people. When you became a crackhead. You lost your soul. And I started to feel like New York had a sort of gloom about it. Jay-Z saw it this way.
Jay-Z [00:02:02] Drug dealers were monsters. The sole reason neighborhoods in major cities were failing. No one wanted to talk about Reaganomics and the ending of social safety nets, the defunding of schools, and the loss of jobs in cities across America. Young men like me who hustle became the sole villain and drug addicts lacked the moral fortitude.
Toure [00:02:20] The crack era, felt like an apocalypse. And it had a massive impact on Black America. The drugs ruined lives, and the country’s response to it led to an explosion in the number of Black people who were incarcerated, which ruined more lives and families and an entire generation. Crack was as serious as a heart attack, but one of the greatest songs ever made about the crack epidemic has a light and playful feel.
Music: My Brother’s a Basehead by De La Soul [00:02:51] Make the Bass come out so clear. Make the bass come out so clear. This song does not contain explicit lyrics, but what it does contain is an undesired element. This element is known at the basehead. The lowest, the lowest of all elements that exist. And the sad thing is this particular element…IS MI BRUDDA.
Toure [00:03:14] “My Brother’s a Basehead” tells the true and tragic story of how the brother of one of the guys in De La Soul became a crack addict.
Prince Paul [00:03:24] Don’t smoke crack. Don’t do it. Or you get a record made about you.
Toure [00:03:28] That’s Prince Paul, who produced the record. Of course, De La wasn’t the only rap group that had a crack addict in the house. Public Enemy was the most political, most moralistic, most revolutionary rap group of them all. But even they had a member with a drug problem and they couldn’t just fire him.
Hank Shocklee [00:03:47] It’s like, you know what you gotta do? You’re going to throw them out. You’re gonna throw them out in the street. No.
Toure [00:03:51] That’s Hank Shocklee, Public Enemy’s producer.
Hank Shocklee [00:03:55] That’s what we were confronted with. It’s like, no, we got to show love and respect because that’s the only thing that’s going to help them.
Toure [00:04:03] This is Being Black: The Eighties, I’m Toure, and this is a look at an epic decade through the lens of some of the great songs of the era, not necessarily the best songs, but the songs that speak best to the issues that shaped the Eighties. The War on Drugs or women’s empowerment or the anti-apartheid movement. This episode dives deep into “My Brother’s a Basehead” by De La Soul and the impact of crack addiction. In the 1980s, most big emcees came from the boroughs of New York City or the streets of L.A. Hip hop was all about what was going on in urban America. The trials and tribulations of living in the hood.
Music: The Message by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five [00:04:49] Broken glass everywhere, people pissing on the stage, you know, they just don’t care.
Toure [00:04:52] But in 1989, De La Soul changed things.
Music: Me, Myself and I by De La Soul [00:04:57] It’s just me, myself and I. It’s just me, myself and I. It’s just me, myself and I.
Toure [00:05:08] They were different, where everyone else was trying to be hard. Their first album, Three Feet High and Rising, cast them as hippies. Where everyone else was from the hood, they were from the suburbs. Long Island, New York, where lots of white, middle class people had moved decades earlier to escape the city. But even though they were in the burbs, they still had to deal with the crack epidemic. And they made the best song ever about the frustration and the pain of dealing with a crack addict. My brother’s a bass head. See, De La was part of a Black middle class that was growing rapidly in the eighties. Yes, the number of Black people in the working class swelled in the eighties, but at the same time, lots of Black Americans moved into the upper middle class. Their ranks doubled in the eighties. This is the yin and yang of being Black in the eighties. A study at the end of the decade found, quote, Evidence points to two African-American communities one of middle class and affluent blacks who took advantage of the increased opportunities provided by the civil rights movement and poor largely urban blacks who remained socially and economically isolated from the American mainstream, where the majority of hip hop culture flowed out of poor urban communities. De La was among the first to represent hip hop culture as seen by people from a middle class environment. I mean, their second single was Potholes in My Lawn.
Music: Potholes in My Lawn by De La Soul [00:06:40] Potholes in my lawn. I found that it’s not wise…
Toure [00:06:44] Which is interesting, given the history of lawns, i.e. grass that was not for farming and making money with, but was purely esthetic. Only the wealthy had grass or land that they could afford to do nothing with. One of my favorite podcasts of all time, 99% Invisible did a whole episode on this.
99% Invisible: Roman Mars [00:07:03] A lawn was about power.
99% Invisible: Sam Greenspan [00:07:06]A lawn was a way for these English elites to show off they were so wealthy that they didn’t need this land to grow food. They could afford to let their fields go fallow.
99% Invisible: Paul Robbins [00:07:16] And could afford to keep grazing animals and scythe-wielding peasants to keep it short.
99% Invisible: Sam Greenspan [00:07:22] When European colonists set sail for the new world, they took grasses with them. But lawns were still mostly for rich people and eventually public parks.
99% Invisible: Roman Mars [00:07:30] It wasn’t until the turn of the 20th century, with the first suburbs, that lawns started appearing around the homes of the middle class.
Toure [00:07:36] I could listen to Roman Mars talk all day, but anyway, as the ranks of the Black middle class grew, so did the sense that Black middle class folks had to prove that they, too, were still Black.
Toure [00:07:49] In a hip-hop sense for De La, this meant they had to prove that they too, were hard. This may somehow relate to why they were beating people up on tour.
Prince Paul [00:08:00] Then they would go on tour and I would get reports back. Is Yo Yo De La just beat up these guys in Arkansas! De LaJust beat up these guys.
Toure [00:08:09] *Laughter*
Prince Paul [00:08:11] And I would get just random, like, reports of who they beat up. It wasn’t like they were just going around randomly beating up people.
Toure [00:08:16] People thought they were soft because of their hippie image and because of the idea that Black middle-class folks weren’t really Black. The guys in De La weren’t soft. They were physically large. And they may have found it offensive that people wanted to test them as if that was symbolic of them having to prove their blackness. The whole idea of having to fight and having to prove that you’re tough and having to prove that they’re not hippies and that they’re really Black. All of that became the undergirding notion of De La’s sophomore album De La Soul is Dead. It was a brilliant album. It’s my favorite of theirs, and it was based around talking about themselves and repositioning themselves as more street savvy than their hippie image had suggested. But a lot of us from the middle class felt pressure to prove that we weren’t soft, and more than that, to prove we were just as black as Black folks from the dood. De La’s album De La Soul is Dead took on that struggle in an artistic way. They wanted to destroy the image of their first album, but they weren’t street and they were creative as hell, so they approached all of this in their own way. One of the songs that shows this dichotomy is My Brother’s Basehead. It revealed that De La wasn’t living in some suburban oasis. They, too, were grappling with the crack epidemic, just like emcees from the city, but where emcees from the city talked about dealing it or seeing people deal it. For De La, crack was a family problem. Rapper Posdnuos had a brother who was a crack addict. True story. And of course it was bothering the hell out of him.
Prince Paul [00:09:57] I knew it was heavy on his brain.
Speaker 1 [00:09:59] Prince Paul was the producer of De La Soul is Dead, and sometimes they called him the fourth member of the group.
Prince Paul [00:10:05] I remember him just really being bothered. And this was I mean, and and recording the record and really expressing a lot of emotion. Like this wasn’t just, you know, the song sounds kind of light hearted and it might poke a little fun here and there as it sounds, but it was something that bothered him and it came across in that in that studio session.
Toure [00:10:29] Posdnuos once told a journalist, and I quote, “When my brother was basin’, I had strong feelings about it. Some people might have thought it was too personal for them to write about, but I really didn’t care. It helped get it off my chest. Plus, I thought a lot of people could identify with it and it could help people.” Word by word. It’s not following what actually happened, but it’s close. The song came together quickly.
Prince Paul [00:10:55] I remember having the beat going and recording it and just it just felt heavy. And I was like, Is this really happening? You know, I think I might have asked him and he kind of, you know, Yeah. And I just sat back and listened. It was a very quick song to record because he knew what he wanted. My thing for then was just performance, you know what I’m saying? As a producer, it’s like, I want people to feel how I know you’re feeling right now, you know? And it was frustrating. And I want them to feel the frustration and I wanted to make sure that was in his vocal tone, his performance.
Music: My Brother’s a Basehead by De La Soul [00:11:32] Brother, brother, stupid love of mine started getting high at the age of nine. Now at 21 you’re lower than low. Nowhere to turn nowhere to go.
Toure [00:11:40] This song came out in 1991. But it speaks to an issue that dominated the eighties, and it’s better than any song from the Eighties at telling the pain of dealing with crack addiction. It’s rapper Posdnuos, telling the true story of his older brother becoming a crack addict and how his experience hurt him and his whole family. In this song, crack was literally in the house the same way it had invaded black America and put its dirty feet up on the couch and vomited on the floor and then set the place on fire. The song has a fun vibe, but there’s a lot of anger in it.
Music: My Brother’s a Basehead by De La Soul [00:12:18] Bullshit didn’t believe a lick.
Toure [00:12:21] It’s as if Posdnuos is playing off how difficult all this is for him. Like someone who tells you “yeah, things are really bad,” but then they smile like it’s all good. But we can hear his anger, his frustration. We know he’s in pain. His brother’s going through it, getting beaten up by dealers when he can’t pay.
Music: My Brother’s a Basehead by De La Soul [00:12:40] Don’t have a dime? It’s payback time, payback time “Don’t cry the blues cause I got bad news” “Should I stab ya? Should I bite ya? Should I use my tools? No, I got another way to earn my defeat, ah! (Slam the child on the hard concrete)
Toure [00:12:53] We see Pos’s parents struggling to deal with his brother’s addiction.
Music: My Brother’s a Basehead by De La Soul [00:12:57] Now Pop grew tired of being a mouse. Finally told you to get the hell outta the house. From there a mother figure came into play. Claimed for you she saw a better day
Prince Paul [00:13:06] People just didn’t talk to their kids, you know, saying sometimes as simple as that.
Toure [00:13:12] They turn to the church, which leads to a hilarious mid-song breakdown where there’s this ridiculous sermon done by De La Soul’s Trugoy.
Music: My Brother’s a Basehead by De La Soul [00:13:22] Hit me! Forgive us. Said it’s taking over. Taking over the world. All It’s doing is taking over. Where them crackers at? Them crackers that they serve, where they at?
Prince Paul [00:13:35] It was his idea to put the church thing in the middle. It’s basically like Pos really just took over. You took the reins. He’s like, I’m taking this beat and I’m going to steer it in the direction I want to steer it.
Toure [00:13:46] I feel like this church interlude where the preacher has nothing valuable to say while Pos’s, brother and family go through a real spiritual crisis. This points to the cluelessness of traditional institutions at combating the crack epidemic. We treated it like a spiritual crisis and a legal crisis, and we arrested users or shamed them or rejected them, which did nothing to help them. It was a medical crisis. It was a mental health crisis. And Pos references this by referring to the voice that addicts hear.
Music: My Brother’s a Basehead by De La Soul [00:14:19] Said there was a voice inside you that talked That said you shouldn’t stop but continue to walk
Toure [00:14:23] The notion of an addict having a voice in their mind is so real. The addiction becomes like a person inside of you that you have to negotiate with and fight with. I talked about this in a YouTube essay I did a few years ago about my own struggle to quit using drugs.
Youtube Essay: Toure [00:14:42]The voice lives inside you and fights to keep itself alive. It’s insidious. It’s smart, it’s persistent. It’s a chameleon. Everything becomes a reason to smoke. If I was happy, let’s smoke to get happier. If I was upset, let’s smoke to lift the mood. If it was rainy. If it was sunny. Time to smoke. If it was Sunday. If it was Monday. Time to smoke. If I needed to write something. Let’s smoke to be more creative. If I had to do the dishes. Let’s smoke so we won’t be bored. Any plan I made, he’d be right there to say, “Hey, let’s smoke first.” And if I said no, he’d say, “Okay, okay, I get it. Cool, cool.” And he back off, and then a minute later, he’d be back at it. “How about now? How about now?”
Toure [00:15:29] Once the voice sets up shop inside your mind. And the addiction is constantly arguing for its survival. You’re in trouble. It’s hard to break free from there. Prince Paul says Posdnous made this song to help himself and his family.
Prince Paul [00:15:44] Now, I’m almost thinking that has put it out there to almost waking up his brother. You know, I’m saying to like he’ll listen to this and maybe I can’t tell him the words face to face how I feel, you know, But maybe he won’t even listen. But he can’t. He could cut off the record for sure. But this is something that might grab his attention, that I love him, that this is bothering our family. This is bothering me. You know, we’re disappointed in you. You know, you can get better. I think it’s something that he just had to to say. And and hopefully, I think it cleared up a lot of problems in his family.
Toure [00:16:25] Plus, the news told the journalist he wasn’t then speaking to his brother. He said, quote, Even though he’s trying to do better now, he’s fucked up so much in life that I really can’t deal with him. He knows I’ve written the song, but obviously he can’t do shit about it. At the end of My Brother’s a Basehead said was his brother does not win. He does not quit the drug. He moves to New York City, where presumably he can just indulge his addiction as he wants.
Music: My Brother’s a Basehead by De La Soul [00:16:53] And when my friends see me come in and ask, Yo where’s your brother? I’ll be the first to splash, Yo he’s a basehead.
Toure [00:17:00] In reality, his brother went to rehab and got clean.
Prince Paul [00:17:04] What I have saw, you know, I’ve seen, I should say. Yeah. Like all all ended well
Toure [00:17:12]He’s healthy now.
Prince Paul [00:17:15]Yeah. And who’s to say, you know, maybe that record was that thing.
Toure [00:17:16] But in the song, the character continues to struggle even after the story ends. Because all of this is symbolic of what Black America was going through in the eighties, where the crack problem rolled on and on for years. Criminologists say the reason why the crack epidemic ended wasn’t because of more police officers on the streets or tougher sentences being handed out. But because a younger generation saw the impact that crack was having on people and said they wanted no part of that. Being a crack addict made you look insane. It ruined lives, and the sense that people were ruining their lives made people feel like it was okay to laugh at crack addicts and like it was okay to say any derogatory thing at all that you could imagine because crackheads were the lowest of the low.
Prince Paul[00:18:07] If anybody’s learned anything from a conversation is don’t smoke crack, don’t do it. Oh, you can get a record made about you. *laughter*
Toure [00:18:17] Now, a word from our sponsors.
Toure [00:18:24] Long Island was also home to Public Enemy who dove into the crack issue in an entirely different way than De la. PE did not use music to work out their identity issues. They came into music a little older than most emcees, where De La was in their late teens when their first album dropped. Chuck D was in his late twenties when P.E.’s first album came out.
Chuck D [00:18:45] and being that my first records, I’m 26, 27 years old. I’m not going to try to sound like a 13 year old kid, and I’m not going to try to appeal to them either, because to me, rap was a grown person’s sport.
Toure [00:18:57] He wasn’t sensitive about being suburban and he was a graduate of Adelphi University, so he was more educated than a lot of emcees, and he approached music like he was a political activist here to teach and to lead. He made the vocal booth seem like a pulpit. He was like the second coming of Malcolm X.
Malcolm X [00:19:18] Who taught you to hate the texture of your hair? Who taught you to hate the color of your skin to such an extent that you bleach to get like the white man who taught you to hate the shape of your nose,
Music: Night of the Living Baseheads [00:19:35]Here it is, bam
And you say, “G**damn, this is the dope jam”
Hank Shocklee [00:19:35] PE was designed to do one thing to excite the new generation, to be to go beyond their boundaries, to go beyond their limits, to do whatever.
Toure[00:19:51] That’s Hank Shocklee, Public Enemy’s lead producer.
Hank Shocklee [00:19:55] So we couldn’t have anything that was too organized because that represents, once again, conformity and complacency. So so by having the chaos in the records and and it only worked because of Chuck’s voice, his voice can cut through all that.
Toure [00:20:16] Public Enemy’s 1988 song about crack use Night of the Living Base Heads. Comes from a political perspective. It’s more like an activist speech decrying the scourge that’s destroying the community. Shocklee said the initial inspiration for the song sprang from a childhood memory of watching Night of the Living Dead, the legendary 1968 horror film.
Hank Shocklee [00:20:39] I’m a big, crazy sci fi horror movie buff. And so the concept came from Night of the Living Dead, which kind of like was was a first movie that me and my brother saw when we were about six and nine years old. We wasn’t supposed to see that movie. That won’t be scare the shit out of what with something you know impacts your mind at such an early age like that. It stays with you for the rest of your life. So you remember how that felt. Now let’s move this to the eighties, when we had the crack epidemic that was destroying households, destroying families, dividing them left and right. Because not only did it, then it hurt the person that was there. It also hurt the people that was around them by either stealing from them. Right? They’re lying to them. They’re being deceptive. But at the same time, they were a menace to their to themselves and to everyone else around. And so we we hung out late at night. The studio was we’re in the studio 24 hours a day. But our, most of our activity happens from 12 to about five in the morning. And so as we go out and get something to eat at that moment, there’s only a few places that are open. And those few places that are open are the ones that got the the steel, the steel guard gate down with the little window, with the bulletproof glass and and all you can get is a – and slide the money in a in a little in a little, little tiny door and you get a little product to buy that, right? Well, you know, at that time, the only people that are out are basically the crackheads or hustlers that’s on the street. And that scenario gave us the idea of putting together, okay, drug addiction. Night of the Living Dead was zombie zombie apocalypse. All those things were all going through our minds at that time. So why not create a song that was just about – What have what the effect of crack was on the on the Black community.
Toure [00:22:53] The song has a siren wailing in the beat.
Music: Night of the Living Baseheads [00:22:56] I’m talkin’ bout base!
Toure [00:23:04] Is it a red alert warning us about the danger of crack use? Is it a car alarm going off because a crackhead tried to break into a car? Public Enemy loved dissonance. They loved using sound in a way that jarred the ear. That’s so hip-hop to use sound in an abrasive but rhythmic way. But for Shockley, the dissonance in this record in others was also inspired by jazz.
Hank Shocklee [00:23:30] Thelonious Monk did this thing where a lot of his records, you know, you would hear these little off notes and you sitting there going like “Yo, What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” And I thought that I think its the off-ness to me that makes things interesting. And the idea of that week that we put together was to try to have a situation where we can create off and on. We want stuff to be on and off at the same time. We wanted some flammng going on it because we want to show that this is the band that’s playing in a sh*t storm. As opposed to this is a band playing at a nice mild concert, so to speak.
Toure [00:24:18] And the song is loaded with samples and sounds. There’s like no empty space giving us the frenetic, crowded, chaotic, crazy feeling of the crack era. Chuck breaks down what’s happening on the street.
Music: Night of the Living Baseheads [00:24:31] Sell their own, rob a home, While some shrivel to bone, Like comatose walking around
Toure [00:24:36] And keeps shame on both users and sellers.
Speaker 4 [00:24:40] Shame on a brother when he dealin’, The same block where my 98 be wheelin’, And everybody know, another kilo, From a corner from a brother keep another below, Stop illin’ and killing, stop grillin’, Yo, Black, yo
Toure [00:24:49] Meanwhile, he seems like a preacher decrying the loss of our souls and an activist pleading us to reach our higher nature.
Malcolm [00:24:57] Have you forgotten that? When we were brought here, we were robbed of our name, robbed of our language? We lost our religion.
Toure [00:25:05] But where Chuck D is preaching to the entire community to do better. As opposed to Posdnous testifying about his brother’s fall. Chuck is eliding the fact that while he’s making this song, his brother from another mother, Flavor Flav, was at that very moment a crack addict.
DJ Vlad [00:25:28] Was it a little strange doing an anti crack song like Night of the Living Baseheads and actually. Behind closed doors, you were actually on drugs herself?
Flavor Flav [00:25:36] Honestly, to tell you the truth, I didn’t have no guilty feeling about it because I ain’t gonna lie around that time. Yeah, man, I was going, like, 180 miles an hour, man, with that drug shit with that coke and crack shit. You know what I’m saying? That was one of the worstest [sic] mistakes that I could have really ever made with them with my life. You know what I’m saying? Experimenting with drugs and shit. Let me tell you something, man. Drugs, dumb shit is real easy to get on. And they are hard as hell to get off.
Toure [00:26:08] The group knew he had a problem.
Toure [00:26:11] Did you know that Flavor had a drug problem at the time when you were making a record decrying the crack problem in the community?
Hank Shocklee [00:26:20] Oh, yes and no. *laughter* Yes. When? When we needed something to be done, it was critical and we couldn’t find him. And no that we didn’t want to really allow that to occur, to hold him back or hold us back.
Toure [00:26:41] You knew, but you didn’t really want to know.
Hank Shocklee [00:26:43] Well, let me let me push that to another level is that we can’t we knew what we did not want that for him, for that to be his. The stigma for him. Think about it as unconditional love. It’s like you got it. It’s like you have to sometimes you have to embrace the chaos. You got to embrace the noise. You have to embrace the things that you are uncomfortable with. Yeah, we was uncomfortable with that, but we could not allow that to become a situation that holds him back or us back. So so it’s kind of like us pulling our younger brother up, so to speak.
Toure [00:22:24]Okay.
Hank Shocklee [00:22:25] And that’s that, to me is an area that I think that we need more of. It’s like, okay, we know what the fuck you going through? We know what you’ve been through. I understand that we have a different philosophy and a different understanding of things, but we have a mission. And. And our mission is for us to be together. And the idea of Flavor – Flavor is probably the most important character in the group.
Toure [00:27:48] Well, Chuck’s the most important.
Hank Shocklee[00:27:51] No, Flavor is. And why? Because. Because Flavor gives illumination to Chuck. Without Flavor, Chuck is too much the same thing. It’s like, okay, we heard that before. Flavor gives it animation. It’s the thing where the supporting character makes the starring character. And without those – so they both become characters. That’s why both Chuck and Flav, if you put them both together, they create a chord. Flavor, represent the street life. Chuck represented the more educated life and bringing the two together creates a chord of unity. And this is what makes…made PE powerful.
Toure [00:28:31] For all the influence that crack users had on Black America, for all the pain and devastation their addiction spread around the community, there was an even greater influence from the drug sellers. The most famous of them were the kings of the style pyramid. They were the ones the rappers and the athletes wanted to be like and so much more. We’ll look at the influence of drug dealers and NWA’s incredible song Dope Man and the Ten Crack Commandments by Biggie Smalls, next time. I’m Toure and this was Being Black: The Eighties. The next episode of this show is already available and soon we’ll be back with Being Black:The Seventies. This podcast was produced by me, Toure, and Jesse Cannon and scored by Will Brooks with additional production by Brian DiMeglio and executive production from Regina Griffin. Thank you for listening to this podcast from TheGrio Black Podcast Network. Please tell a friend and check out the other shows on TheGrio Black Podcast Network including Blackest Questions with Chrissy Greer, Dear Culture with Panama Jackson, TheGrio Daily with Michael Harriot, and Writing Black with Maiysha Kai.
