Episode One: Old White Guy Gets Woke

When Dan Wakefield moved back to his hometown of Indianapolis in 2005, he saw it with a different lens and was re-awakened, in his 80s, to the history of racism and the erasure of Midwestern black culture that he had been blind to as a child. He brought a lifetime of his own civil rights reporting and things he hadn’t understood in long friendship with writer James Baldwin to bear on what he saw and heard, and the result is the essay “Old White Guy Gets Woke” and his comments on the racial crisis as it manifests today.