Nigerian writer Dipo Faloyin has grown up seeing the Western coverage of Africa from a “bird’s-eye perspective,” as many diverse communities were stereotyped and the huge continent oversimplified as a monolith. “They treat Africans and African countries as if they are sort of these strange species, unnoble people, unnoble communities that exist in a way that is so different and so far away from, you know … the rest of the world. And that obviously isn’t true.” Faloyin joined Riada Asimovic Akyol on the Wider Angle podcast to talk about his work and recently published book “Africa Is Not a Country: Notes on a Bright Continent.” He explains that the coverage depicting communities so simplistically and incorrectly “has been done deliberately, to subjugate people, to eradicate people and to ensure that their humanity is stripped away. And that makes it easier to exploit them often.” But Faloyin doesn’t shy away from acknowledging the challenges that many countries on the continent face, pointing to Western governments’ interventions and the violence, corruption and tyranny that have marked many countries’ histories. He emphasizes both the current facts, such as that “less than 10% of the continent is under authoritarian rule” as well as the context of modern Africa’s formation, including the history of European powers’ colonialism and the fabricated myths of Africans as uncivilized savages who “needed colonial powers to save them from themselves.”  The continent is today made up of 54 countries, with a significant number of national  borders as straight lines. Faloyin argues in the podcast that “they are all largely manmade nations that make very little sense in reality. They were designed by colonialists who were very little interested in the realities of people on the ground.” Among major consequences of such artificial borders, Faloyin speaks of “chaos, violence and fundamental, foundational instability.” Yet, despite colossal efforts to build or rebuild nations, he describes how little acknowledgement has been given for the work that these countries put in after gaining independence in the 20th century. For the lack of mutual understanding between Africa and many Black diaspora communities “who are looking to rebuild or even build connections with the continent and their lost heritages,” Faloyin points to the absence of “realistic portraits of the region” in the mainstream. Listen to the conversation to hear the wider angle of harmful projections, lazy thinking and incuriosity about Africa. Faloyin welcomes new engagement with the continent, one that focuses on multilayered stories and realistic portrayals of characters beyond typical representations. This conversation is also available on New Lines' YouTube channel.

The Proud Boys call themselves a patriotic drinking club of Western chauvinists. But Andy Campbell, the guest in this episode of the Wider Angle podcast, argues that we need to look at the facts and data instead, and points to the acts of frightful political violence behind this anti-immigrant, ultranationalist, anti-LGBTQ, misogynistic extremist group. Campbell is a senior editor and reporter at HuffPost and the author of “We Are Proud Boys: How a Right-Wing Street Gang Ushered in a New Era of American Extremism.”  Campbell shares his observations about the group, founded by Gavin McInnes in 2016,  the year Campbell visited and reported from several political rallies in support of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump. He witnessed many examples of what at the time seemed “off” and “bewildering” behavior by the Proud Boys. While most of the other groups preferred anonymity, from the start the Proud Boys “were concerning because they wanted to talk to the press, they had nicknames for each other lionizing their violence, they wanted to be celebrated as the guys fighting in the street for Trump.” They would emerge not only as the leaders of the street gangs but would also reach the mainstream audiences acting as “patriotic freedom fighters.” On the way, they gained esteem among the GOP political circles and were endorsed by some politicians. Campbell argues that what sets the Proud Boys apart as an explicit threat is that “ability to [form a] coalition” — with the media, law enforcement and various GOP members — as well as their knack for fast mobilization of “extremists from all factions under their banner.”  Because of “the crisis now of normalized political violence as some justified option in politics,” Campbell warns that it is dangerous to think of groups like the Proud Boys as “an outlier” or a fleeting moment in modern U.S. history. In fact, he points out, they are mobilizing faster than ever in acting upon right-wing grievances and believes that “the spirit of the Proud Boys won’t go away even if they happen to change their name or dissolve tomorrow.” In this framework, Campbell doesn’t shy away from calling out the right-wing pundits or conservative media for downplaying or misrepresenting the threat. But he also points to the responsibility of the broader press “reporting on modern extremism” in general. When downplaying the available data, Campbell says, either out of “ignorance or negligence,” such coverage of right-wing extremism can become a means of their propaganda instead.  Five members of the Proud Boys, including ex-leader Enrique Tarrio, are on trial for their role in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Still, Campbell worries that “January 6 has not so far had a chilling effect on that violence.” Campbell praises the importance of local community resistance, antifascist resistance and citizen efforts like those in Portland, Oregon, which has been the site of massive clashes. Listen to the conversation to hear the wider angle about the urgency of recognizing the damage that has already been done by far-right groups like the Proud Boys in normalizing violence in American politics. Campbell emphasizes their ongoing danger and “the extremist playbook” they created for the digital age. The video of this conversation is available on New Lines' YouTube channel. “Wider Angle” is produced and hosted by Riada Asimovic Akyol.

How do phenotypic factors like hair texture and skin tone affect the candidacies and experience of Black women politicians in the U.S.? How do voters opine on those differences, considering the dominant Eurocentric standards of beauty? What is the importance of official action like the proposed federal CROWN Act (“Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair”) as well as similar legislation at the state level?  Scholar Nadia E. Brown studies the politics of Black women’s appearance, and she joined Riada Asimovic Akyol as the guest in Episode 10 of the Wider Angle podcast to discuss her fascinating research on the subject. In this conversation, she sheds light on different associations attached to Black hair as well as historical legacies that have shaped the contemporary scrutiny that Black women face in the U.S. When in public life, Black women’s bodies are viewed through the prism of colorism and hair texture preferences stemming from the history of anti-Blackness in the U.S. “To deny the racist, sexist and patriarchal underpinnings that have created a culture in which Black women are both demeaned and fetishized on the basis of their physical appearances would be shortsighted,” Brown writes in her book “Sister Style: The Politics of Appearance for Black Women Political Elites,” co-authored with Danielle Casarez Lemi. Using various examples including Kamala Harris, Michelle Obama, Stacey Abrams, Ayanna Pressley and Lauren Underwood, Brown argues why it is wrong to assume that Black women political elites have the same options or experiences. She also points to intra-group nuances and different factors like skin tone and hair texture or style that greatly affect how voters evaluate them. But for Black women in American politics, race and gender do not mean automatic “double disadvantage,” Brown clarifies. She explains how Black women make sense of the framework in which they operate and how they “are making [their agency] work to their advantage.” There have been vast generational differences that Brown noted between “millennial and boomer/silent generation Black women political elites” in terms of acceptable or desired ways of self-presentation or styling Afro-textured hair. Nevertheless, a “hair paradox” remains for Black women, and Brown describes research showing that even when they appreciate natural hair, “they have implicit bias against textured hair.” Listen to the conversation to hear the wider angle of differences among Black women politicians in navigating their choices. Learn how they consider biological, historical or societal constraints and use their agency for strategic appearances in public life. “Wider Angle” is produced and hosted by Riada Asimovic Akyol.

Cathy O'Neil, the guest on episode 9 of the “Wider Angle” podcast, is an American data scientist and mathematician, the author of the bestselling book “Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy” and “The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation.”  In this conversation about shame, O’Neil recognizes that many others before her have written about the psychology behind it. She clarifies that in her book, she focuses on how shame is manufactured and analyzes it as “an immense structural problem in our society.” Shame, which O’Neil notes as an “important evolutionary tool,” is organized in huge parts of the economy with a function “to make us feel horrible.” She explains the ensuing exploitation, using candid personal examples of bullying and fat shaming as well as others’ circumstances. From addiction to the beauty industry to wellness to poverty, O’Neil asserts, “The nature of choice, the nature of how we project choice onto other people, allows us to get that kind-of-like blaming, shaming distance from people, so we can say that things that are happening to you are not my problem, not my responsibility to help you solve; they are the product of your poor choices. And that is inherently dismissive and shaming.”  O’Neil argues that shame can be harnessed for good and talks about the “healthy opportunities.” But she also elaborates the role of social media platforms in the digital age, in terms of so-called “networked shame,” and the repercussions of our interactions after they are stored in the data economy.    Proposing a nuance between what she calls “punching up” and “punching down” shame, O’Neil in the podcast mentions as an example Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. She praises his ability in leading a great punching-up shame campaign in his pleas for help from other liberal democracies against the common enemy.   The discussion included ideas about shame across cultures and the rise of “cancel culture” in the past few years. One reason O’Neil cites for writing this book is urging the readers “to recognize when shame is taking the place of persuasive argument.” She adds in the podcast, “A large part of my efforts here are just to get people to be self-aware, not just what’s happening around them and also what they are doing to other people as well.” “Wider Angle” is produced and hosted by Riada Asimovic Akyol.

The guest in this episode of the “Wider Angle” podcast was Edward E. Curtis IV, a scholar of Muslim-American, African-American and Arab-American history, and the author of 13 books. This conversation was based on his book “Muslims of the Heartland: How Syrian Immigrants Made a Home in the American Midwest.” Both sides of Curtis’ mother’s family migrated to the U.S., just some of the 100,000 people who came to the country among the half million who left Ottoman Syria. He explains how from the late 1800s to 1920, they left the region, which at the time included Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan. Curtis grew up knowing about “a Syrian Midwest” as a community and continued studying it in depth as a scholar. Digging into archives, he found a rich trove of information about the different aspects of Syrians’ settlement in the U.S. Midwest. As the business thrived in the Great Lakes region, tens of thousands migrated there because of railroad and waterway development. They did their best to organize public life as Muslims and built ties among themselves as well as  with non-Muslims. Asserting that he is “correcting the stereotypes” and “false narratives” about the Midwest as an all-white Christian land, Curtis says in the podcast, “I am adding a narrative to try to fuel a different kind of imagination that takes away the past from this kind of idealized white past from white supremacists, and gives it back to its rightful owners — which is all of us — who have made this place what it is today.” Listen to the conversation to hear the wider angle of one immigrant community’s story and its effect on the Midwest, as a message of a long-standing diversity and plurality in that region.  “Wider Angle” is produced and hosted by Riada Asimovic Akyol.

In Episode 7 of New Lines' "Wider Angle” podcast, the guest was Danielle J. Lindemann, sociologist and author of the book “True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us.” In 2017, among the top 400 shows to air on U.S. television, 188 were reality TV. Lindemann explains in the podcast how this genre emerged as well as different historical factors that made it take off and become widely popular.  “From the cost-benefit analysis, it really benefits the networks,” says Lindemann, because these shows are not expensive and don’t take much time to make. But despite its popularity, there is still a “hierarchy of acceptance” within reality TV, and this form of entertainment is still “often ridiculed.” Lindemann says she wrote this book not as a critique of reality TV but as “a love letter to sociology.” She asserts that we need to take reality TV seriously as a cultural object, because of what it can tell us about our families, friend groups, or how we think of subjects as different as fashion and sports and immigration. “Nearly every aspect of life is touched on in reality TV in this kind of magnified form,” says Lindemann. So, it can be a compelling means of teaching us about different inequalities that exist in our culture  or social norms about gender, race, class and sexuality.  Lindemann also elaborates on why watching reality TV is not a passive experience, because in some ways it makes the viewers interlocked and committed to this kind of program through a multi-platform engagement.  In the podcast, Lindemann underlines, “Reality TV still trafficks in these archetypes and by seeing these archetypes thrown together, we can really start to understand in a really magnified way the kind of pull of our personal socialization in shaping who we become as individuals.” Listen or watch the conversation to learn why regardless of what we may think of reality shows, they are a powerful force in contemporary culture, including politics.

Jonathan Freedland, the guest in Episode 6 of New Lines magazine’s “Wider Angle” podcast, is a Guardian columnist, podcast broadcaster and presenter at BBC Radio 4. He is a past winner of an Orwell Prize for journalism and the author of 12 books. The latest one, “The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World,” was the basis of the conversation with Riada Asimovic Akyol. Rudolf Vrba, the main character in Freedland’s book, along with companion Fred Wetzler, were the first Jewish prisoners who successfully escaped Auschwitz. Through descriptions of the childhood and family life of Walter Rosenberg, Vrba’s name before he changed it later in life, Freedland also depicts the expanding antisemitism in Europe in the late 1930s. As anti-Jewish propaganda grew more prevalent in Rosenberg’s homeland of Slovakia and elsewhere, grisly policies followed.  Rosenberg was transported to Auschwitz in June 1942, where he soon learned that “death was all around.” Out of every five Jewish arrivals, at least four were selected for immediate death, Freedland notes. And while Rosenberg never stopped thinking about escaping, it was while working at the railway platform, the so-called ramp, where he could see myriad trainloads of arriving Jews, that he realized that they were completely unaware about what was about to happen to them. Keeping this mass-scale murder in secret, while lying to their victims’ face until the end, was the Nazis’ purposeful and “absolutely essential” strategy. Freedland explains Rosenberg’s realization “that the one element that the Nazi killing machine relies on, more than any other, is deception, that it’s the fact that they deceived their victims that enables the Nazis to proceed in an orderly fashion with this mass slaughter.”  Freedland adds how a 17-year-old Rosenberg then became even more determined to get out of Auschwitz — to tell the world and at the time “currently ignorant” Jews of Europe the truth, to warn them about it. But after Rosenberg’s brilliant, meticulously planned and incredibly difficult escape from Auschwitz on April 10, 1944, with his companion Wetzler, he soon became greatly disappointed.  It was only later that he learned that “the rest of the world was not nearly as ignorant” as he and Fred had thought — like the leading politicians in London or Washington, for example. Yet, for their own different war-related reasons, they did not act to save the Jews. Yet still, Freedland asserts that the fact that the report ended up preventing the deportation of close to 200,000 of Hungary’s Jews to Auschwitz makes Vrba and Wetzler “towering figures of the Shoah period.” He adds in the podcast that “the story of Rudolf Vrba deserves to rank alongside Anne Frank, Oskar Schindler, Primo Levi, as the epic stories that define our understanding of the Holocaust.”  “Wider Angle” is produced and hosted by Riada Asimovic Akyol.

In Episode 5 of New Lines’ “Wider Angle” podcast, the guest is Batja Mesquita. One of the world’s top social psychologists joined Riada Asimovic Akyol for a conversation about different ways that people from different cultures express their emotions. Mesquita explains how throughout 30 years of her career as an emotion researcher, she has come to realize the importance of social context for emotions and that “emotions may live ‘between’ people rather than ‘within.’” To better steer such variations in emotions across cultures, ethnic and racial groups, genders, socioeconomic groups or even family members with different experiences, Mesquita suggests a perspective of emotions that emphasizes the roles of social conditions and contexts, relationships and norms in acting between people. Batja Mesquita speaks with scholarly authority about different aspects of this subject. She clarifies that learning new ways “to do emotion” in different cultures is possible but that it takes time and participation in social life. The research from Belgium and the United States on the phenomenon of “emotional acculturation,” which compared the emotions of bicultural individuals or immigrant groups with those of the majority respondents in various situations, showed that it takes on average three generations for minority groups to adjust their emotional patterns to that of the majority, “if that is a goal.” In those cases, Mesquita thinks that those individuals can still have “two emotional cultures.” The research on this subject of cultural “code switching” and emotions is ongoing. Mesquita argues that saying that emotions are not universal is not tantamount to denying that people have feelings. In the podcast, she elaborates, “To the contrary, I would say, all people have feelings about the things that are important to them, in a way that is respected and that gains them position in their cultures and that they’ve learned in their cultures.” Listen to or watch the conversation to understand the wider angle of how emotions depend on social context and why grappling with differences in emotions allows people to forge better connections in multicultural environments.  Batja Mesquita is the author of “Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions.” “Wider Angle” is produced and hosted by Riada Asimovic Akyol.

Erich Schwartzel, the guest in Episode 4 of New Lines’ Wider Angle podcast, is a journalist and author of “Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy.” In this episode, he joins Riada Asimovic Akyol for a discussion about movies as powerful tools of influence used by world powers in competition for cultural dominance. The implications reach far beyond the entertainment industry. Schwartzel powerfully explains the history of China’s interest in American films, which grew together with its political influence on the global stage. With smart investments like technology transfer and other long-term strategy advances, Chinese entrepreneurs and officials succeeded in making Hollywood officials, just like many U.S. companies, allow the Chinese regime’s political preferences to guide their business decisions. Listeners of this episode can also learn about the different aspects of a complicated race for cultural influence between the U.S. and China in other countries around the world and how successful China has been in exporting movies and shows overseas. At the same time, other political and economic initiatives that China has been undertaking, like the Belt and Road initiative, contribute to its assertiveness in altering various countries’ geopolitical positioning.  Listen to the conversation to hear a wider angle of China’s blend of authoritarianism and capitalism as a challenge to Western liberal democracy through the ongoing battle for cultural preeminence and China’s dissemination of its movies.

The guest in this episode of New Lines’ Wider Angle podcast is Shrayana Bhattacharya, an economist at the World Bank’s social protection and labor unit for South Asia and the author of “Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh: India's Lonely Young Women and the Search for Intimacy and Independence.” She joins Riada Asimovic Akyol for a discussion of her award-winning bestseller, which deals with the common grievances and aspirations of a diverse group of women in post-liberalization India as told through a series of profiles of different rural and urban working women. They are divided by caste and class, but Bhattacharya has described their different personal paths and yearnings through the perspective of common fandom for the Bollywood actor and global cinema icon Shah Rukh Khan. Within such a framework, where the women don’t search for just entertainment and fun but seek new ways of wellbeing, the author underlines that Shah Rukh Khan is “a female — not a feminist — icon.”  “While misogyny is certainly not a monopoly of the elite, and I think I describe this, this complete paranoia, particularly around female joy and pleasure, and a deep disgust towards it, to be perfectly honest, which I think holds across classes, I do think women’s willingness to resist seems to be much stronger in sort of our economic precariat than elsewhere,” Bhattacharya said in the podcast. At the same time, new generations of young, educated women continue to challenge the surveillance from “the Indian state, our markets and families,” while myriad ordinary women practice “private rebellions” daily. Listen to the conversation to hear the wider angle of the dynamics of gender relations in today’s India. You can watch the conversation on New Lines magazine’s YouTube channel. “Wider Angle” is produced and hosted by Riada Asimovic Akyol. Special thanks for this episode to Surbhi Gupta.