30 Days of ‘Left of Black’: Farai Chideya and Professor Cathy Cohen

30 Days of ‘Left of Black’: Farai Chideya and Professor Cathy Cohen
If I had role models for how I wanted to function as the host of Left of Black, veteran journalist Farai Chideya would be on that list—a list that would also include the late Gil Noble, Charlie Rose, the late Frankie Crocker, Bev Smith (from her days in the late 1980s on BET), and…Don Imus. I was happy and excited to have Farai  on this Left of Black  episode from November of 2010. When I was transitioning into the world of public writing more than a decade ago, and contributing to Farai’s Pop & Politics site, it was Farai who instructed me on how to write a snappy, punchy lede.

University of Chicago Political Scientist Cathy Cohen is part of my Chicago intellectual family (like my late friend and colleague Richard Iton), and her work, like The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDs and the Breakdown of Black Politics , has been influential on me in terms of thinking about politics—in both formal and informal aspects—around the study of popular culture.  At its core, I’ve envisioned Left of Blackas a vehicle for scholars to discuss their latest book-length publications—I don’t think there was one book that I was more excited to talk about during our first season than Cohen’s Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics .