Zora's Daughters Podcast

Stop trying to make Black happen! In this episode, Alyssa & Brendane return to the game Defund Reform Abolish to think discuss and clarify (no pun intended) light skin privilege, the one-drop rule, and white passing. Our What’s the (Unclear) Word segment covers the basics of Afropessimism, as well as the difference between economic Afro-pessimism…

It’s back to our regular programming with just Brendane and Alyssa getting deep into atmospheric anti-blackness, “natural” disasters, and the Texas Deep Freeze. Our What’s the Word? is anti-blackness where we explain why the term racism doesn’t fully capture the experiences of Black people in the diaspora and how Renaissance and Enlightenment philosophers finessed the…

In this episode, Alyssa and Brendane discuss our elders and ancestors of Black feminist anthropology with Associate Professor and President of the Association of Black Anthropologists, Dr. Riché J. Daniel Barnes! Dr. Barnes tells us about how she defines Black feminist anthropology, her journey to and through the discipline, who she thinks of as her…

It’s Black History 365 over here! We’re back for Part II of the first season of the podcast keeping it “spicy” talking about racialization, DaniLeigh’s problematic song “Yellow Bone,” and the intersection of Latinidad with anti-blackness. Alyssa and Brendane explain Louis Althusser and interpellation, Frantz Fanon’s “Lived Experience of the Black Man,” and discuss an…

We’re back!  Next week marks the start of ZD 102, the second “semester” of our first season of the podcast! From February to July, we’ll be dropping bi-weekly episodes that will continue to challenge and inform. It’ll be everything you loved about the first semester, but a little extra because Alyssa and Brendane are where…

It’s our last episode of the ZD Semester! In keeping with the season, Alyssa and Brendane discuss #BlackGirlMagic via the popular Netflix holiday movie Jingle Jangle (SPOILERS)! We discuss the origins of the phrase via CaShawn Thompson and her coinage of the hashtag Black Girls ARE Magic and how it is both celebration of Black…

In this episode, Brendane and Alyssa tackle a fraught subject in the Black community: colorism. We discuss the paper bag test, dating “loophole” women for ascendance vs. unambiguously Black women to legitimize one’s blackness. In our What We’re Reading segment, we bring things full circle with Alice Walker’s essay where she coins the term colorism,…

It seems we REALLY missed y’all because it’s a long episode! Today we talked neoliberalism and waiting for Biden to make it rain with stimmy checks, Black political strategies and women’s participation in political movements through the work of anthropologist Leith Mullings, Alyssa explains for 6 whole ass minutes why Canada the “cultural mosaic” isn’t…

It’s all about God’s greatest hits today! Alyssa and Brendane kick off the episode with ‘Defund Reform Abolish,’ before getting into the colonial and religious history and use of the word diaspora. They debate whether the Jamaican immigrant community is a diaspora and get into some African diaspora religions before moving on to the text…

In today’s episode, Alyssa and Brendane explain why we chose ‘Daughters’, play a new game called “Defund Reform Abolish,” and unpack Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics in conversation with Angela Davis’ brilliant essay “Racism, Birth Control and Reproductive Rights” who helps us contextualizes the history of birth control movements and eugenics. In our What in…