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The Current Transcript for May 8, 2018

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

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VOICE: Well we're spending a lot of money, the problem is that we haven't done it very wisely. We've wasted a lot of money in Afghanistan.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: That's the voice of the man tasked with auditing the billions of dollars of U.S. tax money spent on reconstruction and stabilization in Afghanistan over more than a decade. He said that last year and today John Sopko will update Congress. His office releases reports on the good and the bad that they find, all of which is in stark contrast to Canada. Our contribution is smaller, but still in the billions. But we have no parallel agency auditing Canadian contributions and programs. In a moment we're asking about the successes and the stumbles of the goals on the long list of Afghan reconstruction. Also today, "This is America."

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Sample of "This is America" by Childish Gambino.

AMT: Rapper Childish Gambino released his new music video this weekend while the real Donald Glover hosted and performed on Saturday Night Live. Tens of millions have already viewed it and the attention underlines just how much African-American popular music and its creators are driving the political and cultural conversation today. We've got that discussion in half an hour. And then it wasn't that long ago that milk was the topic of cheesy commercials.

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Milk commercial.

AMT: In reality, milk has been the topic of all sorts of expectations and political reactions over the centuries. In an hour, I'll look at our most primal nutrient and the food fights that it's caused. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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Does Canada need U.S.-style oversight of money spent rebuilding Afghanistan?

Guests: May Jeong, James Dobbins, Murray Brewster

AMT: Well headlines out of Afghanistan in the past days and weeks suggest things in that country are going from bad to worse. There have been a string of deadly attacks by the Taliban and ISIS, including yet another bombing targeting a voter registration centre Sunday and the violence is overshadowing hopes for a free election in the country this fall. It wasn't supposed to be this way. Yesterday I spoke with retired major-general David Fraser who commanded NATO troops as they faced off against the Taliban in 2006. He has just released his own chronicle of Operation Medusa, the battle that was considered crucial in the goal of routing the Taliban and bringing change to Afghanistan.

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VOICE: And what we tried to do when we were in Afghanistan was bring them moral authority with the resources, bring them together so that they could actually have a conversation and create a society that's sustainable and peaceful.

AMT: It is clear however that the fight for peace in Afghanistan is not over. According to a new report, the country is floundering by most other measures as well. Rising poverty, a stalled economy, widespread corruption and a spike in opium production. This despite billions of dollars from international donors earmarked for reconstruction and development in the 15 years since a U.S.-led military campaign to overthrow the Taliban in 2001 began. Those are just some of the findings of the U.S. Office of SIGAR. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, which is an independent auditor created by Congress. John Sopko has been raising his concerns for some time. Here he is speaking with C-SPAN a year ago.

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My job is to oversee the 117 billion dollars that's been spent there as an Inspector General. We've wasted a lot of money in Afghanistan. We have problems of intense corruption. We've documented cases where corrupt officials have stolen the fuel, sold it to the Taliban, stolen weapons we provided, sold it to the bad guys. That's the big issue we're facing is the corruption.

AMT: My next guest has lived and worked in Afghanistan tracking such issues for the last four years. May Jeong is an investigative journalist and visiting scholar at New York University and we've reached her in New York City. Hello May.

MAY JEONG: Thank you for having me, Anna Maria.

AMT: How successful have American efforts been in reconstructing and redeveloping Afghanistan?

MJ: Not very, I mean by all measures, as you mentioned, over 100 billion dollars that's been spent in Afghanistan, there's really nothing to account for that. You quoted major Davis Fraser earlier. I visited the places where Operation Medusa took place and if you talk to the villagers there, they'll tell you that lives are much better now, that the area is no longer contested between insurgents and largely Canadian troops, but that now it's firmly in the hands of the Taliban. I mean the the big picture of you know who gains which ground is really a question for the military and politicians for the people actually living in those areas. The day-to-day lives for them is arguably for some it's better now that there isn't ongoing combat. He also mentioned moral authority for these people. You know, Canadian troops, Americans, the Dutch they were seen as invaders in many ways and so I don't know if moral authority is the word that they themselves would use to describe their own lived experience. You mentioned SIGAR, the auditing arm of the Afghan mission, the current report that's come out for this quarter is, you know, so similar to all the other reports that's come out. The financial audit reveals everything we know to be true. Corruption graphs, you know deficiencies, every report that comes out is a tragicomic read if not for the many failings that it describes. In the past it's talked about, you know, hospitals that's been built in the middle of a lake and you know dams that don't exist and things like that.

AMT: So when the office of SIGAR says that the money is not being used to actually do what it's supposed to do, where is it going?

MJ: To real estate abroad in Dubai and to purchasing homes elsewhere and many of it does not leave America. It goes off, you know, into being paid for salaries or bribes and oftentimes, which is just impossible to track, but is the thing that the locals often talk about, it oftentimes goes back to the invisible economy of either, you know, insurgents or the Mafia or various warlords. I mean effective in the past ten years or 15 years or what have you, we have benefited, the war has benefited, approximately, I mean a few hundred families in the country. I mean trickle down effect is not really a thing anywhere, but it really has not affected the lives of the majority of people who that live in that country.

AMT: And yet May, there are organizations who say they've changed things for girls going to school, that things are better for women now in Afghanistan.

MJ: The first female pilots of the Afghan air force just saw asylum in America. I did an investigation into the superlative women, as I was calling them in Afghanistan, the first female police officers, first female judges and I did this investigation in Kandahar where of course, Canada has a long history. Dozens of them have been murdered in the successive years. You know we fed up them, we propped them up made, we made them into public celebrities and then we abandoned them. And then there was no, I mean if you Google their names, there's all these glowing profiles of their accomplishments and then there are no follow-ups to what happened to them after we left. Many of them are dead.

AMT: And what about the economy?

MJ: I mean the story of Afghanistan is the riddle of how could we have spent so much money and how could so many lives have been lost and how can there be such little to show for it. A lot of it has gone into graft, but there is also racist rhetoric in the way we talk about corruption, who gets to be corrupt and who is not corrupt? You know in America there's things like earmarking or gerrymandering and you know it's almost like certain aspects of how politics in economy runs has been normalized, but what's happening in Afghanistan, we call them venal Afghan politicians. They're just responding to incentive structures.

AMT: OK May, we have to leave it there. Thank you for your time.

MJ: Thank you for having me.

AMT: That is May Jeong, investigative journalist and visiting scholar at New York University. She's in New York City. Well not everyone shares that view of efforts in Afghanistan. Ambassador James Dobbins is a senior fellow and Distinguished Chair in Diplomacy and Security at the RAND Corporation, a non-partisan think-tank. He served in the administrations of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. He was a special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan during the Obama administration. James Dobbins is in Washington D.C., hello.

JAMES DOBBINS: Hello.

AMT: How do you respond to the criticism you just heard?

JD: Well I think it's overstated. I think that John Sopko's criticism of individual projects is undoubtedly well-founded in a society at Afghanistan's level of development, the degree of corruption is distracting and a real obstacle. But the idea that nothing has changed is simply not true. If you look at Afghanistan today as opposed to 2001, what you see are pretty stark changes in things like longevity, literacy, infant mortality, maternal mortality per-capita GDP. You know there's sort of three ways of measuring reconstruction if you will. You know, one is input, how much money did you spend for instance on schools, the second is output, how many schools did you build and the third is outcome, which is what happened to literacy rates. Now literacy rates between 2002 and 2012 doubled, twice as many people could read and write in Afghanistan in 2012, as in 2002. Longevity rates went up by at least six years. Afghans were living six years longer. GDP, the per-capita GDP, the individual income went up by 300 percent. Afghanistan's economy grew at a rate comparable to China, between 2002 and 2012.

AMT: It stopped doing that though.

JD: Well of course it stopped doing that. You had 140,000 American and NATO troops there you had huge spending on infrastructure to support those troops. They've almost all gone now. Assistance rates have dropped, but the Afghan economy has continued to grow, but it's grown much more slowly, it's grown at a rate comparable to Canada or the United States now, not a rate comparable to China.

AMT: OK so you're making the point that you see improvement, but of the hundreds of billions of dollars that the United States has spent, Mr. Sopko has pointed out that a lot of it has been, it could have been better spent. So you say those outcomes are good, but are they are they good enough for the money that the U.S. has spent?

JD: The answer, of course, is no. I mean the answer is you could have done better. But, you know, given the conditions in the country given the level of development, given the security situation, some drainage of the sort that Sopko tries to counter, is inevitable and it happens in every country at Afghanistan's level of development. It's just that we've spent more money in Afghanistan because of our commitment there.

AMT: I'm looking at a figure that says 8.78 billion dollars since 2002 to reduce narcotics production, but opium growth has steadily increased, a 63 per cent jump in 2017. That would have been one of the US priorities.

JD: Absolutely. Well, reducing opium production was never one of the highest priorities, but it was a priority and we have spent money on it. But with the reduction in American and NATO forces, the territory that was under Taliban control and therefore had uncontrolled opium growth increased. And we had 140,000 troops there five years ago, today we have 14,000. So we've reduced our force there by 90 percent. It's not surprising that we've lost some ground.

AMT: No, and of course you reduced your force, as did all the other countries, because you were hoping to hand it over to Afghan security and that the country would be further along on its own by now, is that not correct?

JD: We have handed it over to Afghan security. The Afghans are taking 99 per cent of the casualties, they're doing 99 per cent of the fighting.

AMT: And they only control 65 per cent of the country.

JD: And they controlled, and when we were there with 140,000 troops, we controlled maybe 70 per cent. So yes, there has been some ground lost, but given that we've pulled out a huge number of troops, the amount of ground loss was no more than expected.

AMT: So what does the American public need to take from the reports of the auditors and what do American legislators need to take from it? Where do you think it needs to go?

JD: Well, I mean I think that the reports of the auditors are nothing new. I think one thing to take up it is that we do have a system of accountability, that there is an effort to oversee and control expenditures and that we are making every effort to determine how we can do better. I think, I'm not sure that there's much that you can you can go beyond that. The question is whether or not we want to sustain a position in Afghanistan, which allows that country to continue to not host large numbers of terrorists from plotting attacks on the United States and elsewhere in the western world. So far we've achieved that. We've achieved it at a considerable cost. The cost is going down, but it's still considerable and it'll probably be considerable for some distance into the future.

AMT: OK Ambassador Dobbins, thank you for your time today.

JD: My pleasure.

AMT: Ambassador James Dobbins, senior fellow and Distinguished Chair in Diplomacy and Security at the RAND Corporation. He was the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan during the Obama administration. He's in Washington D.C. While Canada has invested heavily in Afghanistan over the past 15 plus years, according to the federal government, Ottawa spent 2.8 billion dollars on what it calls reconstruction and stabilization efforts between 2001 and 2016. Most of it going to development assistance, Canada is also one of the largest providers of humanitarian aid to Afghanistan., ninth among single country donors. Tracking exactly where those funds have gone and how effective they've been, has not always been clear cut. Murray Brewster is the CBC's parliamentary defense and foreign policy reporter. He's covered the Canadian military and foreign policy for over a decade. Prior to joining the CBC, he spent a total of 15 months on the ground, covering the Afghan war for the Canadian Press. Murray Brewster joins us from Ottawa. Hi Murray.

Murray Brewster: Hello Anna Maria.

AMT: A couple of questions for you. First of all, we did ask global affairs to comment on where the Canadians, what's going on with Canada. They sent us some information that's on their website and then they sent us some figures that quoted the World Bank statistics, not unlike what Mr. Dobbins was talking about, under five mortality has decreased, life expectancy increased, school enrollment increased, what do you make of that?

MB: Well the evaluation that they're talking about there is funds that were committed in July of 2016. We're looking at about 465 million dollars. A good chunk of that is being spent maintaining both the Afghan army and the Afghan police, paying their salaries and equipment. So these are funds that we would have to be spending. Approximately 270 million of that 465 is going into development assistance. But a lot of that is wrapped around in the global government's agenda for women and girls and education. But it's money that is being spent that we don't know exactly if it is giving the kind of effects that we want. And I mean, the government does quote World Bank statistics, that's good, but for education as an example, I mean there was a huge scandal a few years ago that the Afghans were cooking the books in terms of the number of children in school, the number of teachers that had been trained. So it all points to the need to have some kind of value for money audit, the way that they do in the United States.

AMT: We don't have an Office of Special Inspector General for Afghan reconstruction.

MB: No, no, we don't. I mean SIGAR is a very specific auditing agency. The auditor general of Canada potentially could do that kind of review, but I don't think Michael Ferguson has done or is planning to do any kind of review on Afghan development.

AMT: Now you have tried to gain more information on specifics over the years.

MB: Yes, yes I have. Prior to my first deployment in 2006 to Afghanistan I asked for CETA's reviews of the development programs that they had between 2012, or excuse me, 2002 and 2005. I actually received those reviews two days before I went to my second to last deployment in 2011. I was asking for them under access to information, it took five years.

AMT: Wow. And did you learn anything from those, when they finally handed them over?

MB: Not really. Not really. I mean they're not the kind of hard-nosed, what did we learn from this kind of report. And it is not a value for money audit, it is an evaluation. Now, I mean the Canadian government did conduct a very comprehensive evaluation of the development programs it spent in Afghanistan in 2015. I mean you mentioned the figure of like 2.8 billion, they had a look at the 310 initiatives that had been funded. Now they also, in this evaluation, broke it down into three phases, which is prior to 2008, essentially Canada funded nation building and institutional building programs with donor partners, but from 2008 until 2011 they funded specific projects in Kandahar, which was very controversial. Very controversial in the development community and then after 2011, it went back to nation building and institution building funding.

AMT: Well you've actually looked at a couple of signature projects where, don't have a lot of time here, but tell us about the Dahla Dam.

MB: Well I mean essentially, we had three signature projects in Kandahar and this review that I'm referencing here went back and looked at the Dahla Dam, which we spent 50 million dollars improving irrigation and improving the infrastructure for agriculture in the area. And I mean essentially the Dahla Dam, it was non-functioning before the Canadians got their hands on it and it is partially functioning now.

AMT: It's full of silt.

MB: It's full of silt, 40 per cent of it is full of silt. And the thing is, the evaluation noted and other media reports have noted that the government knew this and the Afghans were actually telling the Canadian government, you should build a new dam.

AMT: Murray we have to leave it there, that's just one example, but thank you for your time.

MB: You're welcome.

AMT: Murray Brewster, CBC's parliamentary defence and foreign policy reporter, he joined us from Ottawa. Stay with us, the news is next. And then if you haven't seen the music video for Childish Gambino's "This is America," we're talking about it. We're asking why the most vital conversations about American society are coming from the country's black musical artists, it's exploring that issue when we return after the news. This is The Current.

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Does Childish Gambino's This is America risk traumatizing victims of gun violence?

Guests: Bedour Alagraa, Jordan Sowunmi, Ricky Jones

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

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AMT: Still to come, what could be simpler or more complicated than a tall glass of milk. Milk and all things dairy, have been staples on tables around the world for centuries. But it's also left some of us sour on everything from its ethics to nutrition. Author Mark Kurlansky takes on milk in half an hour. But first, 'This is America.'

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Sample of "This is America" by Childish Gambino.

AMT: Well, with more than 33 million YouTube views since its release this past weekend, it's safe to say that this is America by rapper Childish Gambino is the latest music video to break the Internet. The video is demanding attention because it is provocative, politically charged and like all great art, it requires viewers to do some thinking for themselves. You heard the music in that passage move from light to dark. The video works that juxtaposition again and again. Gambino, whose real name is Donald Glover, is seen smiling and dancing and then that levity is undercut by escalating gun violence and chaos, including the gunning down of a black gospel choir reminiscent of the 2015 South Carolina church massacre. 'This is America' is a powerful commentary on what it means to be black and a black entertainer in America today. As such, it's the latest contribution to an ongoing conversation from rapper Kendrick Lamar's surprise win of a Pulitzer Prize for music to Beyonce's latest work and sensational performance at the Coachella Music Festival last month to Kanye West's controversial tweets on slavery. African-American musicians are driving the conversation about race, politics and culture in the U.S. today. We brought together a panel guest to pick up on this conversation. Ricky Jones is a Professor and Chair of Pan-African Studies Department at the University of Louisville. He is in Louisville, Kentucky. Bedour Alagraa is a PhD candidate in American Studies at Brown University. She's with me in our Toronto studio as is Jordan Sowunmi. He is a writer, social content strategist and rap DJ. Hi everyone. Welcome. Jordan I'm going to start with you, what do you think of 'This is America'?

JORDAN SOWUNMI: Well I think, when I first watched it, I was I think like a lot of people just kind of captivated by just the visuals and the video and kind of the understanding that this is a thing that you're going to have to watch on more than one occasion. There's a lot going on in it. Yeah, I really was among the people that were kind of blown away by it.

AMT: And Bedour, what do you think, are you a fan of this new song?.

BEDOUR ALAGRAA: I'm not. I was deeply troubled by the video when I first watched it. I think they're, I think it's always important to contextualize whatever cultural cues are embedded in a piece of art. The 2015 Charleston massacre is still pretty fresh and the first thing that came to my mind was what if it had been me or my own mother or someone I knew that had survived this massacre and what must it feel like for Donald Glover to take it upon himself, to use it as an artistic cue, without any consideration for the fact that he's probably going to be re-traumatizing a lot of people who have survived this. And I'm someone who always wants to make sure that whatever artistic productions or especially black expressive cultural productions, remain deeply ethical at their core and I think this was very much, not that.

AMT: Ricky Jones what do you think of it?

RICKY JONES: You know I was blown away by it, in a positive way and I'm very sensitive to what sister Bedour is saying about the individual trauma and the collective trauma that black people, certainly in America, and all over the world experience with the onslaught of white violence that we're seeing daily, monthly, yearly. You know, throughout the decades. But at the same time, I don't think that this piece was constructed to disrespect anybody who had undergone that type of violence. It was more of a collective artistic expression to shine a spotlight on it once again. And some would say, well, a spotlight doesn't need to be shined on it and I would retort that we have in effect normalized black death in America and people have become anesthetized to it. And understanding that there's always been a special place as Harold Cruse said in '67, carved out for the black intellectual, the black artists and I would add the black athlete, I think in these artistic spaces it's very important that we have this type of production that is you know, once again forcing us to deal with it no matter how painful it may be. So I'm very sensitive to what sister is saying, but that would be the other side of it for me.

AMT: So in other words, the the violence and the sort of, I think everybody would have like a strong reaction to it, but that's the point. That was part of the point.

RJ: Well actually, I think you're right, some people will have a strong reaction to it and other people would not. You have some people who may have a strong reaction to this video, but they don't have a strong reaction to a 12-year-old child being killed by police in a Cleveland park. You know, so those are the things we're wrestling with.

AMT: My guests are nodding their heads in the studio, what do you want to say to that Bedour?

BA: Well first I'd like to say that if it's the case that this is supposed to spark a conversation or shock some into action or not shock others into action, so I actually agree that it's actually deeply ordinary to see the kind of routinized killing of black people. You can see that with the kind of virality of police killings and the videos and the footage of that. So if it's not meant to shock us into something, if it's actually deeply ordinary then what exactly is it doing? Whose appetite is actually being met by this, if it's already deeply ordinary? And if it's the case, right, that it's a commentary on the way we normalize violence and I don't know what's meant by 'we' because me as a black person, it's not actually my responsibility that violence has been normalized. This is a problem embedded in white supremacy. And so if it's the case, right, that this type of violence has been normalized, what is actually is gained from removing the white supremacist, terrorist from the act of terror and replacing himself as the person who's committing it. And I think that raises a whole host of other questions. And professor also brought up Harold Cruse's work and I'm also someone who remains deeply committed to a kind of black radical, intellectual history and one thing I always remember is Ida B. Wells' work on lynching. And Ida B. Wells' work on lynching reminds us that lynchings were always already meant to be displays, right. They were never meant to be done in private or hidden. They were always meant to be displays. And what she tells us is that these displays of extraordinary violence, on the one hand, helped to "keep black people in their place," but what they did fundamentally, they were rituals that helped the white community enact itself and congeal itself. Right. So we already know by studying the works of our forebearers right, that these kinds of extraordinary violent acts do more to help enact and performably enact, white community than they do anything else. And so I wonder what does it mean for Donald Glover, right, to place himself as the holder of this gun in the place of Dylan Roof, while knowing that white community itself at times of crisis especially, rely on the routinized killing of black people. I just think that the lack of contextualization in that sense is what gives me a lot of difficulty.

AMT: OK Jordan, what do you say to that? How do you interpret what you saw and how do you respond to that?

JS: I think that Bedoura is on the money with a lot of this stuff. Like for me, like I was saying my initial reaction was, I was like I really enjoyed the video, I really thought that it raises interesting questions. I still think that it has the potential to do that, but I do think that this line of criticism is completely on the money and I think that there's also people talking about why you know that it was representing of this Charleston killing and why it wasn't like Sandy Hook or something else that just did not just exclusively include, if it was like you know starting conversation about gun violence and gun control in America, why is it like just limited to the black community and I think it's a valid critique of the video.

AMT: Ricky, what is the message of this video in your mind?

RJ: Yeah and this runs back to sister's point, which I think is well thought out, but I certainly would make the argument in defense of Donald Glover in absentia and Childish Gambino, his alter-ego, we talk about communities and we talk about we, we're talking about various communities in this, so while there are a number of people that will read Cruse, that will read Wells, they will study lynching. You know they will handle these things in a very different scholarly way that other communities that do not handle things with that level of engagement. They simply do not have the time because everyday people are suffering too much. You know, that's one. Two when we talk about how these things are encountered by white communities and white communities are not monolithic either, we certainly have white allies, we always have and then there are some people who are terribly desensitized to it. We have black communities who handle these situations in different ways. So when we talk about how people are encountering this, I don't think the video is seen as something that is disrespect or should be seen as something that is disrespectful. Neither do I think it's something that is going to shock everyone, but it will shock some and it will remind others and it will reaffirm yet others still. So I think it's nuanced, I think it is important to contextualize it I think that's why we're having this conversation and many of the conversations need to be had. But I don't think that, I did not receive it in a negative traumatic way.

AMT: Ricky Jones, Donald Glover is not the only black artist making headlines, the rapper Kanye West, a supporter of Donald Trump, has been in the news talking about slavery being a choice. What do you make of the tension that he's been getting?

RJ: Well I mean this goes back to my original point. I think we're in a dangerous place when we talk about how America handles black people. Like you know we talked about brother Jordan who's doing magnificent things with music in a different space, we talk about sister Bedour, who's getting a PhD, in handling these things even when she disagrees with them in such a thoughtful manner, but that's not the way that most people of colour in this country are encountered. We're basically seen as people who are only good for entertainment. You know the dribble a little ball, dancer jig and sing a little sing. So when black intellectuals are encountered it's seen as weird right, but there's all this space carved out for these entertainers and many of them are not worthy of it. Now many of us who attempt to grant brother Kanye some space, understand that he's dealing with some psychological things and has been for some time, but you know this is just another example where too much attention sometimes is paid entertainers, even if their ideas are dangerous or very misguided. And I think that's what we're seeing with Kanye.

AMT: Jordan, people also are all over social media calling Kanye West and Donald Glover geniuses. Should they get more leeway to express themselves because they're geniuses and are they geniuses?

JS: I'm going to say no. No more leeway than any other person who may say ridiculous things.

RJ: I thought you said they weren't geniuses.

JS: No. I mean, I think sometimes especially in the entertainment world, like I was having this conversation with somebody the other day, that it's like really dangerous when you start calling an artist themselves as a genius and not like a particular piece of work. Because when you like, when you call someone a genius, you kind of paint them into a box. And I think it can sometimes hamper growth and I think sometimes it can allow them to not think as deeply as I feel like we're seeing with Kanye West about the impact of what they're saying or even doing the research to know what they're talking about, you know. And I think that, so yeah, I'm always kind of wary of calling you know, entertainers, geniuses.

AMT: Bedour what do you think?

BA: I'm also pretty wary of calling anybody genius. The reason that I'm wary is because the second that you call something genius, I think you attach a kind of novelty to it. And the second that something becomes signified as novel or new, you take them out of a very long tradition of expressive culture, especially black expressive culture. And so when you single out people like Kanye West or Donald Glover as genius, you say that they are kind of markedly different from a kind of long duree tradition of black expressive culture, when they're not, there actually are a great deal of continuities. And so I'm much more interested in parsing out those connections, rather than creating another category for people like Donald Glover or Kanye West and I also think there's a problem with calling someone as deeply anti-intellectual as Kanye West, a genius. I think there are just some like categorically, linguistically, like there are some problems there. So.

AMT: OK. I want to move on to Kendrick Lamar, of course winning a Pulitzer for music. Let's hear a bit of his song, "DNA.".

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Sample of 'DNA' by Kendrick Lamar.

AMT: OK, Ricky Jones let's start with you, how significant is that Pulitzer Prize in music?

RJ: I don't know, I was shocked by it at first. First of all, let me say that's a magnificent song and the video with Don Cheadle, who seems to be everywhere, all the time, for many, many years is magnificent I think people should go back and check out that 'DNA' video. I'm happy for brother Kendrick. You know, I'm very happy for him. I have consistently been troubled though over the years and I'm a child of the '80s, you know, growing up on Public Enemy and Poor Righteous Teachers and folk like that. I've been troubled by the direction of hip-hop music by some genres of hip-hop music and how it has been corporatized and certain music has been put, has been really, really pushed into the public's sphere, while others have been crushed. So what Kendrick Lamar represents, sometimes, not in all of his music, but certainly a lot of his music, is this message music that we've been talking about running from Gil Scott-Heron and all the others. And so that says something very positive in the midst of the storm of us being inundated with music that doesn't really carry any of these positive messages that are reflective at all, which sister Bedour I think was talking about when she was speaking about you know, Kanye West being anti-intellectual and some other people being that away. And Kendrick Lamar does not seem to be that, but I would caution people to understand that this is not the best that black culture has to offer, not the best that black intellect has to offer, but it is a positive offering.

AMT: How come then we are not talking about the best that black culture has to offer?

RJ: I think, I don't think this country wants to. I think that black people have been painted into a particular corner, we've consistently been struggling to get out of that corner. And so while some of us, who dig down into it, you know as people who are interested in black political thought, people who are interested in political philosophy, people who really are interested in history and people who are interested in the experience of black people outside of 1619, like we were dropped on the world stage here in America, as slaves, and there's nothing else, while we understand that it is a constant struggle. And I'm sure my dear brother and sister will say it's a struggle for us to continue to try to put that information into, not just black people, but people who walk across lines of race, class, religious orientation, you know, what may have you. What it can understand that we have so much more to offer and have offered so much more and will offer so much more as we move forward.

AMT: So am I understanding correctly, because we are still dealing with a predominantly white society that wants to see black culture as music and athletics and that's it, that's all.

RJ: Yes.

AMT: Bedour?

BA: Well my thoughts on Kendrick's Pulitzer win are a little bit different, I have more of a kind of institutional critique because I think that when someone like Kendrick Lamar wins a Pulitzer, I'm first of all, I'm very wary of exceptional black firsts, in general. Because I think that the second that you begin to kind of do this like arithmetic of black firsts, second, thirds, that also gets us into this trap of kind of liquidating along duree history of things that have happened to get us to this point. And the other thing that troubles me is that by, on the one hand celebrating this Pulitzer win, which you know Kendrick Lamar is a fantastic artist, by celebrating this win I think we let these institutions off the hook in a way because we tell them, you're now celebrating black art, you're OK. When the truth is that they're not OK, the truth is that now is the time, more than ever, to abolish these institutions. So you know, I think that's the kind of difficulty that we run into with these kinds of wins.

AMT: Jordan.

JS: I think, I don't know if this is answering the question, but I think what's interesting about Kendrick Lamar in general, is kind of going into what Bedour was saying about, just the lineage of black art and I think that one of the things that Kendrick does really well is always reaching back and like clearly showing his influences, whether it's like the jazz influence or you know, having Kid Capri on the record. It's just like, he is somebody who is in the mainstream at the forefront and is doing a great job of kind of showing you the tradition and the variety of black art over the last 60, 70, 80 years, you know.

AMT: Let's move on to Beyonce. This is, "Freedom."

SOUNDCLIP

Clip from Beyonce's performance at Coachella.

AMT: OK. Well, critics and fans went wild for Beyonce's performance at Coachella. She has also faced criticism for using political messages. Bedour Alagraa, in your view, how does she do that differently from Donald Glover?

BA: So first I think it's important to understand Beyonce's career trajectory. So I'm someone who's been able to witness her entire career, start to finish. And she's a very different artist now from who she was, when she first started, but there still remains some deep continuities at the same time. And I think what she managed with her Coachella performance was to kind of, so she's the first black woman to headline Coachella, and so she took that moment of like being an exceptional black person first and she turned it on its head because she performed a set that was deeply alienating to the mostly white audience that was there at Coachella. So there were all kinds of like linguistic and musical cues and encryptions that only people who are deeply familiar with these like long traditions of black Southern expression culture would understand. And you could tell that most of the audience weren't getting these cues, but you could see that she was taking that moment of like being an exceptional black first and really turning it on its head. So she had, on the one hand, and that's interesting as well because to encrypt all these things that are deeply unfamiliar to white audiences, while also being the kind of highest articulation of what's popular in music at the same time, like who is more popular than Beyonce, I think that her kind of walking the line, between or like embedding herself in that contradiction was really interesting. So, but then also there's the need to rethink what institutions like Coachella do to black popular performances and an expressive culture. So you know Beyonce is not off the hook at the same time, right, but I think what's different is that what she did was deeply thoughtful and deeply contextual. And I think the lack of contextualisation in Donald Glover's approach is what troubled me the most. So.

AMT: Who wants to respond?

RJ: I will. I find that interesting. I find it interesting that one could simultaneously embrace Beyonce, while levying such rank criticism on Donald Glover, when I think Beyonce, Donald Glover, Kendrick Lamar and others are really running back to this tradition of Richie Havens and Gil Scott-Heron and Nina Simone and so many others. And I'll say this, as we begin to run out of time, none of this stuff is perfect. There are contradictions in all of it, the contradictions with all the institutions, but when you talk about everyday black life and you talk about the representations of blackness through intellectual engagement, as well as the art, one we try to figure out how we can deeply engage the political onslaughts that we're seeing, but at the same time, stop normal and experience some level of black joy, so we don't go insane. So that we can celebrate these people, celebrate the good things that they do, challenge the bad things they do, as well as try to construct a better day. So you know, I think that all of them bring some positives and all of them bring some things that we need to debate.

AMT: Jordan, how do you see these artists changing the conversation?

JS: I mean I think that just like Bedour was saying, a lot of artists have been doing this throughout history. I think that we're just in a different media landscape now with the way that information travels so quickly and even like this Donald Glover video came out on Saturday and it has 33 million views like that kind of thing is and the way that it's consumed is completely different. People are seeing it on their phones and all these different contexts, so I think the conversation is different.

AMT: Conversation is happening, which is really important too.

JS: I think it's essential. And I mean just to double back to the Beyonce thing, I think what was interesting, kind of like what Bedour was saying about her performance at Coachella was that, how whereas the Donald Glover video maybe seems like freighted with the white gaze, Beyonce kind of rejected that and was like even though I'm in the most prime time position that you could possibly be in for this moment, I'm going to do something that calls on certain traditions that may not appeal to everyone because that's what's important to me and I feel like that's a really powerful statement and use of a platform.

RJ: And Donald Glover, remember that's Lando Calrissian, so he's handling things in different spaces as well.

JS: I'm not trying to denigrate Donald, I'm a Donald fan, but I'm just talking about the differences between their approaches.

AMT: OK and of course, they don't have to have the same approach. That's the whole point. They can have her own voice. We have to leave it there. Thank you, all of you, for being part of this conversation.

BA: Thank you.

JS: Thank you.

RJ: Thank you Anna Maria.

JS: Nice to talk to you Ricky.

RJ: Alright, alright. Have a good day.

BA: Good to talk to you, professor.

AMT: That's Ricky.

RJ: Alright. Love to you all.

AMT: Ricky Jones, Professor and Chair of the Pan-African Studies Department at the University of Louisville in Kentucky. Here with me in Toronto is Bedour Alagraa, PhD candidate in African studies at Brown University. Jordan Sowunmi, rap DJ with a monthly party called Boosie Fade and writer and social content strategist. Stay with us. We're talking about milk next, but we are going to go out with a little bit of Beyonce's Lemon from Lemonade. This is "Formation."

[Song: Formation by Beyonce]

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Milk might be history's most controversial food, says author

Guest: Mark Kurlansky

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current. When you think of cultures that love to eat milky dairy foods some European cuisines might be the first to come to mind. There are the great French cream sauces, the delicious Dutch Goudas, British Cheddar, Italian Parmesan cheeses, but the cuisine that actually makes the most of dairy comes from a continent away, Indian cuisine.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: So that's the yogurt, we've already heated up the milk and we're just waiting for it to cool down before we add the yogurt from yesterday. As a starter for each batch and then right here is the Ghee, the clarified butter. And we make both things just about every single day here. I would say we use at Rangoli about 15 gallons of milk a day. When I'm doing my food costing, people are thinking, oh the lamb, oh the chicken, oh the vegetables, but milk and butter is a big part of my food costs. Milk is a big deal here.

AMT: That's Meeru Dhalwala, she's an author and chef and the co-owner of two Indian restaurants in Vancouver, Vij's and Rangoli, where there is plenty of dairy on the menu, from Paneer, to yogurt sauce to Kulfi and beyond.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: These are the two big things that we do here yogurt for Raita and then Ghee for flavour in everything. I remember when I first went to India and my mom's ancestral home, her eldest sister-in-law, raw milk from the dairy and churning that raw milk into butter, literally by hand turning it into butter and then that butter over the stove you melt it. Obviously we take a shortcut here, we just get sticks and pounds of unsalted butter, we melt that salted butter and the film, you know that film the way that accumulates on top, you just keep skimming it off and then what you're ending with is what I call liquid gold. Every Indian probably has their one favorite piece of dairy I'd call it, that they were not willing to give up. And so if you add all these different, billions of us, we don't all eat everything, but we have our favorite dairy. Dairy is integral to our culture, our religion, you know the cow is our deity. Culturally as Hindus and Sikhs as well, the mother cow feeds her people through milk. So it's a respect as well.

AMT: Of course, no matter where in the world you come from, milk is a fundamental food in our lives, but it seems as long as we've been enjoying milk in one form or another, it has been the subject of debate. Whether it's the question of just how healthy milk really is, debates over breast versus bottle feeding or culinary fine points such as whether dairy and seafood should ever meet, milk's elemental nature has been the subject of a centuries long food fight. Mark Kurlansky looks at this history in milk, a ten thousand year food fracas and he joins us from New York. Hello.

MARK KURLANSKY: Hi.

AMT: When did India become the world's largest milk producer?

MK: Well fairly recently, you know India is actually on its way to becoming the world's most populous country. It's already the most densely populated and its population keeps increasing and India is going to become the most everything because it has the most people.

AMT: Dairy has played a role in India's political history, including on the path to independence. Why did dairy farmers hold a boycott in the '40s?

MK: It's very much the same idea as Gandhi's salt marchers because the British were controlling production and keeping the price too high and cutting out local producers. And so it was an expression of independence to defy this British way of doing things and produce, have Indians produce their own milk and sell it for cheaper. So they formed cooperatives, which remained and co-operatives became a symbol of Indian independence and until fairly recently most dairy in India came from co-operatives. Now private dairies are taking over more, but these cooperatives were very important politically and socially because there was a movement to have women's dairy co-operatives because when they first set co-operatives women were kind of cut out of everything, which is odd because in Indian culture and in almost every culture in the world it's the women who produce the milk, you know, they're the ones that milk the cows and bring the milk in. But somehow they were being excluded from these dairies. And so then the independence movement set up specifically co-operatives, women-run co-operatives.

AMT: And China is also trying to catch up with India and the U.S. in milk production. How big of a role have dairy products historically played in China?

MK: Well that's the odd thing. Very little. Very, very little. If you go back and in Chinese history, the only time you find milk products by and large, is as a really rarified treat of the aristocracy. And it was long believed by the outside world that the Chinese were all lactose intolerant. That's obviously not true because if you're lactose intolerant you can't fashion your way out of it and milk has come into fashion as has everything Western. And now about 40 per cent of Chinese use milk.

AMT: So what's changed for the Chinese?

MK: Well as far as lactose intolerance goes we don't really know, we don't really understand, has it changed, or you know a lot of people think they just never were lactose intolerant. They just didn't have a tradition of dairy because you know, had they been lactose intolerant, if you suddenly started introducing all this milk and yogurt and everything, it wouldn't have worked. It's now extremely fashionable, but they have a problem that they had a huge scandal that dairy, some private and some government, were putting toxic chemicals in their milk to have them score higher on protein. And you know, children died and now the Chinese, you know the Chinese go abroad, they buy enormous amounts of milk to bring back because they don't want to use Chinese milk.

AMT: Where did the use of animal milk for human consumption first begin?

MK: Well we don't know exactly, but presumably you know, I mean really milking wild animals is pretty much impossible so it was probably after animals became domesticated about 10,000 years ago. We don't know what animals were first used, but given the places where this first began, they were probably either goats or camels. And it's important to understand that milk, liquid milk for drinking, for many, many centuries was not a popular thing. Because for reasons nobody understood, you could get sick from it. So milk was largely used to make yogurt and cheese and other sort of byproducts.

AMT: Where did it first begin though, the milking of animals?

MK: We think in Sumeria, but you know Sumeria is where written language began. So it's not surprising that the earliest records of milk and a lot of things are from Sumeria because they were the first ones who were writing.

AMT: Remind us where Sumeria is on a modern map.

MK: Iraq.

AMT: You've tried all kinds of milks from different animals, what do they taste like?

MK: Well you know it's funny, we're most accustomed to cow milk, which is the blandest of milk, which is not why it's the most popular. It's the most popular because cows are the most productive animals. But when you start tasting others, like goat milk and sheep milk and camel milk and yak milk, all these things, they're all much more flavourful than cow milk.

AMT: Which was your favorite?

MK: Well it depends on for what, my favorite yogurt was yak yogurt, which I think you can only get in Tibet. And one of the few things you can get to eat in Tibet, but yak yogurt is great. Camel ice cream, which I had in Dubai is fantastic. Most of my favorite cheeses are sheep milk. I like goat milk cheese also. You know, cow doesn't rank up there very well, but I think that's because we're used to it, so it's ordinary.

AMT: It might depend on what you're having it with, kind of like a wine.

MK: Yeah I mean there are people who don't like those distinct flavours of sheep milk or goat milk or something. And you know, so they would prefer cow milk, but you know the camel milk ice cream that I had in Dubai, you know it had that animal flavor of camel milk, a bit like sheep milk, but it blended really well. And they had you know these great flavors, you know, Saffron ice cream and Cardamom ice cream.

AMT: Sounds lovely.

MK: Yeah it was great.

AMT: How have the health benefits of milk been seen over the course of centuries?

MK: Well it's always been controversial, especially because up until the age of pasteurisation, people were getting sick and dying a lot from milk. So it was a hard sell that milk was healthy and yet people did believe that. An issue was, you know, should it be animal milk or should it be human milk. But then animals became more and more in use and then there was this great controversy, which still exists over which animal's milk is healthiest for you. I mean Gandhi swore by goat milk, he wouldn't have anything, but goat milk. Some people say donkey milk, the thing about all these milks is that these animals obviously are very different from us. They're built differently, they have different digestive system and these milks were evolved in nature to nurture these animals, so if a milk was evolved to nurture a calf, why would that necessarily be good for human, considering calfs have a totally different digestive system with a series of stomachs, instead of one stomach. One of the reasons a lot of people think donkey milk is good is because donkeys are, their digestive track is much closer to human than other animals.

AMT: If milk was for a long time something dangerous, why would people keep drinking it?

MK: You know that is a very good question, which I constantly was asking myself while studying the history of this. As a basic people, completely aware of the risks and yet they would do it. If you go back to old recipes there were all sorts of precautions. There's a lot of old recipes that begin, go to the barn and milk the cow. So you have this bucket of fresh milk to work with. Because they had learned without understanding why that milk that stood around a lot, could make you sick. But you know I really don't have a good answer for your question, it's extraordinary that they kept using milk. In New York City, in the 19th century, 50 per cent of the deaths in New York City were of people under the age of five. And most of those deaths were caused by milk.

AMT: And why was that?

MK: Because it wasn't clean. They used to set up dairies in the city, next to a beer brewery and then feed the cows the slop that was left over from the beer banking and there was no hygiene at all, I mean they were just filthy places. There's lots of, you know, journalists who went in and described these horrible places that were producing this milk and -you know, a lot of times because the cows were under-nourished and badly nourished, the milk would be translucent and kind of bluish and they put chalk in it to make it look whiter and it was terrible stuff. And people kept buying it and using it.

AMT: But so that's really about the production and processing, right. I mean so that gets us to the issue of raw milk. Raw milk sale and distribution is prohibited in Canada. But how dangerous is it?

MK: There's two ways to answer that, you could say very dangerous or you could say not at all. It depends how it's produced at the time that pasteurization was learned about and there was a big movement for pasteurization to do something about this horrendous infant mortality, there were people who were arguing against pasteurization and for raw milk and for something they called certified milk, which meant that all the milk would be produced raw, but it would be heavily monitored by regulators and making sure that it was clean and healthy. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with it. That milk is good to drink and people could argue that it's actually better than pasteurized milk, because pasteurization kills a lot of good stuff. The problem was that it's difficult to do. It's a public health problem. You know, public health people said, 'oh God, we can't do all this, let's just tell everybody they have to pasteurize.' And then you know it's all safe and it's easy to monitor and regulate. And we can go to the dairies and make sure they have pasteurization equipment in place and that's the end of it. So that's you know what happened.

AMT: So in essence, it's not the issue of whether raw milk is good or bad, it's got more to do with, if you're making, if you're producing milk on a large scale it is more convenient to regulate pasteurized milk. It's easier.

MK: Yes. It's easier to monitor.

AMT: But it doesn't mean raw is bad, it just means you have to really know about the origin of where that's coming from?

MK: Raw isn't bad at all, assuming it's taken proper care of.

AMT: OK. Now it's not just animal milk that has been controversial, how long has there been a debate over whether human breast milk is best for babies?

MK: Since, just about forever. This has always been a controversy and this was a controversy that went on and on and still goes on. Actually in the U.S. these days, breastfeeding is probably more popular than it's ever been in history because breast pumps have gotten so good. And Obamacare covers them. So a very high percentage of women are breastfeeding and affluent women are breastfeeding and it always used to be, you know, something that the poor people did, more than the rich people. I mean if you were really poor, it was the most inexpensive way of getting milk.

AMT: Well and you talk about wet nurses as well, women who breast feed other women's children. How have wet nurses been seen through history?

MK: Well interestingly, there was always this idea that the personality, the character of a wet nurse, would affect the child who was drinking her milk. So you know everybody was always looking for wet nurses that were of good character. You know, if you had a bad tempered wet nurse, you'd have a bad tempered kid. And it even got into these all these theories about hair colour, you know whether blonde wet nurses were better or brunette. Everybody seemed to agree that redheaded wet nurses were to be avoided. But you know you think about, if people believed this then what does it mean to have animal milk. Actually there was this belief that if a child was raised on goat milk they would become very sure-footed.

AMT: It's interesting though because you make the point that women are judged for breastfeeding, but then what nurses were judged as well.

MK: Oh yes, very much so, except there was this odd difference that in slave societies, the slaves were the wet nurses. Then you know, it wasn't an issue of character, so horrible, it was a monetary issue. You know women who lactated was more valuable.

AMT: And wet nurses have had a lot of regulation over the course of history as well, isn't that right?

MK: Yes even, you know, going back to the Code of Hammurabi, always, your child's health depended on this wet nurse. There were all sorts of things that wet nurses did that they shouldn't have like if they didn't have enough milk they would slip in some animal milk and nobody wanted to have an alcoholic wet nurse.

AMT: That's interesting, I didn't realize that animals had been used to nurse babies directly as well. Yes and you know, in the days before pasteurisation when you know, they just understood that the fresher out of the animal the milk was, the safer it was. And so sometimes you would just take the baby and put it right on the animal. They used to particularly do this in orphanages.

AMT: What animals would they use?

MK: Often goats.

AMT: And were there any health problems related to that?

MK: No it's very healthy to drink milk straight out of the animal. I had a friend who had a goat farm in Vermont and I went there and I would make myself an espresso in the morning, go out and milk the goats and I would squirt a little of the milk into my espresso and have this great cappuccino, you know because it comes out hot and foamy and I used to think if this is the origin of cappuccino, but it's not really.

AMT: And then we were talking about women, they've also played a big role in dairy production through history. What was the public image of milkmaids?

MK: First of all, it's interesting that all societies, I mean not just Europeans and Tibet and India, everywhere, it was the women who milked the animals and provided the milk and originally were the cheese makers. You go back and you look at pictures and images of milk maids and they were always very healthy looking and almost sexual thing, you know, the wholesome fleshy milk maid.

AMT: What was the reality of that work for women?

MK: Oh it's just really tough work. It's interesting talking about gender roles. I noticed in Tibet where they still do that with yaks and if the yak wasn't producing, it was the man's job to drag over the calf and get them started and then the woman would continue to milk the yak.

AMT: Interesting. You also write about dairies of delight, that's sort of the creation of little dairies for women to pretend they're working. What was that about?

MK: Yeah I mean, you have to think about the, just the vanity of useless rich people. Aristocracy would, I mean Louis the 16th did one for Marie Antoinette. Aristocracy would make these perfect little beautiful dairies, where everything in them was beautiful and you know they'd use beautiful porcelain and you know, the princess could go to her dairy and milk some cows and it was kind of a hobby.

AMT: Marie Antoinette never got to use her dairy of delight, did she?

MK: She never got to use her dairy. She ran into some difficulties.

AMT: So she was executed before they finished making it?

MK: Yes. Yes. I mean he gave it to her, but it wasn't finished, you know. So it was something for her to look forward to later, but well we all know how that went.

AMT: It's just interesting though that it would be seen by the aristocracy as something to play at, where as you'd point out, it was a lot of work.

MK: Yeah I mean, not just in France, in England and a lot of countries, it was like this thing about you know, wealthy people who never did a day's labour in their life, found it amusing as a hobby to do a little labour.

AMT: When did dairy stop being women's work?

MK: When it became industrial. There was a big conflict between the belief when cheese, when they started industrializing cheese, factories would not hire women and cheese makers would not hire men and believe that men didn't know how to make cheese and you had to have women to make cheese. And this was a big problem for cheddar and some of the other big industrial cheese makers and eventually they trained men and became convinced that men could make cheese as well as women. Instead of going in the better direction, which would have been providing women with factory jobs.

AMT: I want to ask you about dairy farmers, what pressures have shaped dairy farms into the big businesses most of them have become?

MK: Well the fundamental problem is that one way or another there is a price fixed for milk and this price is always much too low. It doesn't really work well for the, well what it does is it gives all the advantage to huge industrial farms and makes it almost impossible to be a small family farm.

AMT: Well what kind of pressures are there on the individual independent dairy farmer?

MK: Well you have to follow the whole history of the thing and until they had milking machines. Milking machines changed everything because when animals were milked by hand, you really couldn't have a large farm. The larger the farm, the more hands you had to hire and you just couldn't produce a lot of milk. Once there were milking machines, there was no limit to what you could produce. So now farms got larger and larger and the smaller ones were competing with the larger ones and losing.

AMT: You've kind of made the point that we need to appreciate the dairy farmer more.

MK: Yeah, I mean it was really one of the things, it's a really, really tough job. You know I came away with this understanding that farmers are just incredibly hard-working and dedicated people.

AMT: So why has milk been such a lightning rod for controversy over so much time.

MK: It's a combination of things. First of all, you know you're talking about the health of babies, so you know that's something people care about a lot, but also just the idea of either using a natural bodily fluid or substituting it with an animal fluid is a huge and sensitive decision and then which animals and how those animals are cared for, it all becomes really important. You're talking about health and you're talking about the health of children.

AMT: And you know you've documented so many controversies through the ages, is there another controversy looming?

MK: Well, I mean there's one thing, I bet it will be a controversy and that is that they're increasingly using robotics in dairies. Now the reason for this is that dairy farmers all over the world, in China, in Australia, in U.S. and everywhere, have told me they cannot get people to work in dairies. You know it doesn't pay well and it's really hard work and they can't get enough help and so they're turning to robotics. And the future dairies will be very robotized already, you know, milking machines are pretty robotic and I imagine that there will be this big controversy and there will be people who will pay extra money to have a human-produced milk.

AMT: OK, well we heard it from you first.

MK: Okay.

AMT: Mark Kurlansky, thanks for your work.

MK: Thank you. Nice talking to you.

AMT: Nice talking to you. Bye-bye.

MK: Bye.

AMT: Mark Kurlansky, author of "Milk: A 10,000 Year Food Fracas." He's also the author of 30 other books. He joined us from New York City. Let us know if milk and dairy are favourites of yours. To drink hot or cold, and cheese, Paneer, cow, goat, yak. Let us know. Tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Email us from our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. That's our program for today. Stay with Radio One for Q. Now after our conversation about the black artists and musicians taking on the big issues in American society, today we're going to leave you with some music from Janelle Monae. The artist made waves at the Grammys this year, when she gave a passionate speech in honour of the Time's Up movement against sexual harassment. She released her new album "Dirty Computer" last week. This is the song, "Americans." I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thanks for listening to The Current.

[Song: 'Americans' by Janelle Monae]

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May 8, 2018 episode transcript

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