How to make learning Black History feel "delicious"
And why our feelings about history matter.
Hello Proxy People!
Just two more months until Proxy officially launches. We’re so close. Thank you for your patience.
Instead of yammering again about how hard the Proxy team is working, I asked one of our editors, Tim Howard, to testify on the show this week. (Because I needed a witness.) And I quote: “Um I mean, I can verify you are working extremely hard.”
Tim has worked at Reply All and Radiolab, and he’s someone who wouldn’t say such things if he didn’t mean them, even when prompted. He lives in Berlin, so we meet at 8am our time to catch him during his afternoon, for our couple hours of editing a week. Let’s just say he’s used to me looking disheveled. I’m proud to say I’ve only slept in and missed our call once.
I trust Tim’s edits on everything. Like this very smart note he said to add in big red text to the Proxy website so that we aren’t giving the wrong impression about our level of resources.
FRESH DROP
All this is a long preamble for why we’re excited to share a story from another show we like.
Nichole Hill is the host and creator of Our Ancestors Were Messy, a new podcast exploring Black history through the lens of gossip and drama. In 2020, Nichole discovered a digital archive of pre-Civil Rights era Black newspapers from across the country and she immediately got obsessed. She couldn’t stop reading, giggling, and gasping at these papers and everything they chronicled: Affairs. Fights. Shade.
She says it felt like scrolling on an Instagram feed. It was THAT entertaining. That’s the feeling she wanted to give listeners with her new podcast.
On the main feed, you’ll hear Nichole regaling Vox’s Jonquilyn Hill with a Victorian era love triangle that rocked the elites of DC.
And in this month’s exclusive bonus Patreon episode, I talked to Nichole about why she wanted to make learning Black history feel “delicious” and why our feelings about history matter. You can listen to that bonus here.
Here are some highlights from our conversation.
On the inspiration for Our Ancestors Were Messy
“I grew up watching all these old films and sometimes I'd be watching one of these movies and I would see a Black person and I would wonder what their life is like. I'm sure it's awful. And I would feel very conflicted because … I want to see a movie about them, but I know that the movie is going to be so miserable and make me feel so bad that I kind of don't. And I always had this curiosity … I wonder what Black people were doing in the thirties besides suffering.”
On the first pieces of juicy gossip she found in these newspapers
“In the Washington Afro American, which was this very prolific paper ... They have an advice column, and it's called the Court of Afro Relations, where people write in with their problems and then this judge character gives them advice … One was a sister who was writing in because her sister was in love with a married man at their church and had been confronted by the wife who attacked her with an umbrella. And the sister wanted to know, should I put my sister who was in love with this married man and causing all this drama, should I put her out? But she's my sister, like, what do I do? My husband's getting mad. What's your advice?”
On her process for finding stories for Our Ancestors Were Messy
“I get a little taste of something in the newspapers. I kind of follow the thread, I go off and I do additional research. You read this one headline and you're like, huh? And then I go to another state [newspaper] and I read the same story, but it's a totally different headline … And then as I'm reading throughout the month, this story is unfolding, and it's unfolding in different ways in the white papers than the Black papers, and in different states it sounds like this, and in another state it sounds like that. So I would go through it like that for a while, and then I would finally go look up the story and find out what actually happened. And a lot of those stories became episodes of Our Ancestors Were Messy. But that's sort of how I taught myself history… just applying my Instagram sleuthing model to the newspapers and it was very enjoyable.”
On the feelings that have come up when learning this history
“I think the hardest feeling for me and what I've wrestled with the most is this idea of absolutism and this idea that a lot of the quotes that we use today, ‘If you disagree on my humanity, then we can't talk. Then we have nothing to discuss,’ this idea of not compromising and just standing firm in what you believe, I feel 100%. I felt that since the 2016 election … Then I read these papers and I read about the past and I read these op-eds where people are debating not just the most righteous path forward, the most effective path forward, and the path that will lead to the end of a culture that is violent and oppressive and dangerous for Black people, for Black women. They're at the beginning stages of sort of joining forces with other communities and recognizing the struggles that others are enduring. And they're getting really strategic about the compromises that they're willing to make and the compromises that they're not willing to make. And they were successful. To change culture is a really powerful thing. And they didn't do it by just saying, ‘What I'm saying is righteous, just listen.’ They did it by being really, really, really clever.”
You can listen to the full conversation here.
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Your emotional investigative journalist,
Yowei