WUNC has launched a new podcast highlighting current events with a southern focus. It's called "The Broadside" and is hosted by Anisa Khalifa.
The first two episodes are available now. One explains how "y'all" is spreading way beyond the south, and the second explores how a basement in the mountains of North Carolina might hold the keys to the climate crisis.
Khalifa talked with WUNC host Eric Hodge recently to preview the podcast and the topics it is exploring.
This is an excerpt of an edited transcript of that conversation. You can hear the full interview by clicking the LISTEN button at the top of this post.
Before we get to y'all, can you explain the origin of The Broadsides' name?
"You might have heard the name broadsheet. They were theses single pages, originated around the time that the printing press was first invented, and they would cover a single topic. It could be a political topic, could be a song, news, and they were topics that would be relevant to people's daily lives — something that they were talking about, something that was important to them. And so, we just thought, bring that proto newspaper to the 21st century."
I've been living in North Carolina for 23 years. I'm still not sure I've earned the right to use y'all, but it's on the move without my help. What role does hip-hop music and culture play in that process?
"I have also been in North Carolina for 25 years and I have a similar relationship to y'all — didn't start using it until very recently. But we talked to Dr. Antonia Randolph, who's a sociologist at UNC-Chapel Hill, and she specializes in the topic of hip-hop."
"So, because hip-hop is ambient, you might have heard y'all and heard your young people using it. And I think it's unavoidable to pick up y'all as one of the words that's you might use in everyday life."Dr. Antonia Randolph, UNC-Chapel Hill
Is it also spreading now because it is a non-gendered pronoun?
"Yeah, and this is something that PhD candidate Brody McCurdy — who's studying linguistics at N.C. State — brought up, which I hadn't thought about before, but he shared some really interesting points about it.
"The 90s were the first time that someone did a study about this and linguistics, noticing the trend and asking, 'Why is this happening?' As you know, as someone who lives in the south, the southern accent is very stigmatized, in the rest of the country and even across the world, it's associated with a lot of stereotypes. So why this pronoun that is so — I mean, almost as a meme, it's associated with the South — and yet it's becoming popular, not just in the rest of the U.S., but Canada, Europe; like it's become part of global English."
"You see a lot of what I call late y'all adopters who adopt the pronoun, because they see it as this really useful, gender-neutral way to address a group of people."Brody McCurdy, PhD candidate at N.C. State
Can you give us a sneak-peek at upcoming topics?
"So, the next episode is going to be about a climate data bunker in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It's the National Climate Data bunker, which I honestly had no idea — before our producer Charlie Shelton-Ormond started working on this story — that it even was there, but it has climate data going back to the 1700s.
"Another one that I'm really excited about, and which is very close to my heart, is a story I've been working on for over a year now about the rise of Asian American Studies in the south. And this is, you know, a movement that started during the Civil Rights Movement. The movement for ethnic studies started in California, and it has had waves, but it really hasn't gotten a foothold in the south until very recently. As someone who was an Asian American student and who wanted to study Asian American Studies, it's something that I really care about."
Anisa Khalifa is the host of WUNC's newest podcast, "The Broadside." New episodes will be available on Thursdays wherever you get your podcasts.
