Reckoning and Repair: The Urgent Conversation About Race in the Black Christian Podcast Circuit

Abstract

This paper focuses on the Black Christian response to the 2020 uprisings against police brutality in the United States. Through a critical discourse analysis of three podcasts and interviews with podcasters, this paper argues that the Black, Christian podcast circuit is a counterpublic (Squires, 2002) that seeks to change Christian culture in America. I argue that it is the affordances of the medium of podcasting that make this counterpublic possible and that make it a potent force for changing the Christian conversation about race. These podcasters offer a portrait of a divided Christian church in need of repair and they make the case that repair is only possible through decolonizing the Christian faith, repenting and offering reparations for the racial trauma caused by white Christians, sparking Christians’ activist inclinations in favor of racial justice causes, and interrogating and correcting sexism within both the Black church and white evangelical culture.

The Millennial Medium: The Interpretive Community of Early Podcast Professionals

“…Still, podcasting has provided new distribution streams for voices who have been underrepresented in mainstream broadcasting and as such the medium can have political, activist potential. For example, in the case of those "feminist killjoys" (Tiffe and Hoffmann 2017) and Black voices (Laughlin 2021;Florini 2015) who speak to their own communities and unite counterpublics based on shared identities. Florini (2019) identifies podcasters as central to the networks of Black activist media makers who have fueled the #BlackLivesMatter movement.…”