Fernanda Santos and Jamilah King step into the co-host chairs to discuss the shooting of 16-year-old Ralph Yarl and a New York Times report about migrant child labor in the U.S. Then in our roundtable, Maria and Julio get into the latest attacks on reproductive rights and the state of the Supreme Court with Jessica Mason Pieklo, senior vice president and executive editor of Rewire News Group, and co-host of the podcast Boom! Lawyered.

ITT Staff Picks: 

• “A white man shot an unarmed Black teen and remained free for days. When community leaders and activists say Ralph and his family deserve better, clearly the bungled arrest of the perpetrator is evidence that justice is being served slowly,” writes Toriano Porter in this opinion piece for the Kansas City Star.

• “Certain antisocial forces are trying their darndest to prevent all of our children from growing up and maturing into the kind of people who can make this democracy functional. And people keep putting them in power,” writes Imani Perry for The Atlantic.

• Garnet Henderson writes about the Online Abortion Resource Squad, which provides accurate and supportive information about abortion on Reddit, via Rewire News Group.

Photo credit: AP Photo/Nathan Howard

Maria and Julio discuss the ProPublica report about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas accepting luxury trips from major Republican donor Harlan Crow. They also talk about the Tennessee legislature’s expulsion of two Democratic members. Then in our roundtable, we get into the nuances of the Latino Muslim community with Rahim Ocasio, co-founder of the Latino Muslim organization Alianza Islamica, and Hazel Gómez, board member and faith-based community organizer with Dream of Detroit.

ITT Staff Picks: 

• Read the full ProPublica report detailing the extent of the luxury vacations Justice Clarence Thomas received as a gift from billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow.

• “I wasn’t elected to be pushed to the back of the room and silenced. We who were elected to represent all Tennesseans — Black, white, brown, immigrant, female, male, poor, young, transgender and queer — are routinely silenced when we try to speak on their behalf. Last week, the world was allowed to see it in broad daylight,” writes Justin J. Pearson in this pearson-tennessee.html">opinion piece for The New York Times. 

• This article for NBC News examines the growing demographic of “mixed ethnicity” Latinos and how they navigate their Latinidad.

Photo credit: Rahim Ocasio

We’re back with a brand new episode and new format! Maria and Julio break down the criminal arraignment of former President Donald Trump and discuss Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ comments on immigration. Then, we dive into President Biden’s immigration policy with Erika Pinheiro, executive director of Al Otro Lado, and Silky Shah, executive director of the Detention Watch Network.

ITT Staff Picks:

• Dhruv Mehrotra writes about the potentially illegal tool that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is using to gather data from abortion clinics, elementary schools, and news organizations, in this article for WIRED.

• Alex Samuels talks about Biden’s move to a more right-wing stance on immigration, in this article for FiveThirtyEight.

• “Although blanket coverage of Trump exposes viewers to his more unfavorable qualities, his political messages get through loud and clear. He gets to define the debate, his opponents, and even the people covering him. And both Trump and his staff are aware of this dynamic, which is why they always try to make him the center of attention. Human beings tend to remember sensational lies and smears, but can get fuzzy about the dry fact-checks that debunk them,” writes Adam Serwer in this article for The Atlantic.

Photo credit: AP Photo/Fernando Llano

This next episode of our Best of ITT series takes us back to 2016, and our conversation with  Mike German, fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty & National Security Program. Maria and Julio talk to Mike about what he learned about the white supremacist movement  during his time as an undercover FBI agent, and how the media is missing the real story.

ITT Staff Picks:

• Nazgol Ghandnoosh writes about white supremacy’s hold on legal institutions and how it disproportionately affects Black and Indigenous communities, in this article for The Sentencing Project.

• “Concerns intensified after law enforcement failed to stop multiple incidents of white supremacist violence committed at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and a leaked FBI report revealed it had created a new domestic terrorism category called “Black Identity Extremists” that labeled Black activists protesting racist police violence as threats” writes Michael German in this article for Brennan Center.

• More than 300 members of the far-right group, The Oath Keepers, are also members of the Department of Homeland Security, according to this article by Nick Schwellenbach that was published in POGO.

Our Best of ITT series continues with this roundtable from 2019. Maria and Julio are joined by Shamira Ibrahim, culture writer on race, identity and politics, and Margari Hill, co-founder and executive director of the Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative, to discuss how the intersecting identities of being a Black Muslim woman lead to anti-Blackness both within the Muslim community and in the United States at large.

ITT Staff Picks:

• Shamira Ibrahim writes about the power of photography and photo archives in preserving the rich culture and story of the Black community and rejecting negative stereotypes assigned to them, in this article published in Harper’s Bazaar.

• Maram Ahmed highlights some of the talented Black Muslim women behind the rise of British Hip-Hop, in this article for Refinery29.

• “Speaking to CNN about McCarthy’s proposal, Omar suggested that her religion played a role. She said of her colleagues that “many of these members don’t believe a Muslim refugee, an African, should even be in Congress, let alone have the opportunity to serve on the Foreign Affairs Committee,” writes Philip Bump in this article for The Washington Post.

Our Best of ITT series continues with this episode from January 2017. Maria and Julio lead a discussion with legendary actress Rita Moreno about her star-turning role in “West Side Story” and her role in the reboot of Norman Lear’s classic television series, “One Day at a Time.” As they go behind the scenes of many of her most recognizable roles, both old and new, they get into issues of representation, accents, and race.

ITT Staff Picks: 

• Frances Negrón-Muntaner writes about Rita Moreno’s impact on the Puerto Rican community and on American culture as a whole, in this article for PBS. 

• Actor Antonio Banderas writes about his experience voicing the “Puss in Boots” character for almost two decades and how it changed his career and the industry as a whole, in this column for The Hollywood Reporter. 

• Raul A. Reyes writes about Raquel Welch’s complicated relationship with her Latina identity throughout her life and career as a Hollywood star in 1960s America, in this article for NBC News.  

The next episode of our Best of ITT series is from July 2019, and it gets into the significance of Black feminism. Maria and Julio talk with writer and activist Feminista Jones about her book, “Reclaiming Our Space: How Black Feminists Are Changing the World From the Tweets to the Streets.” They also discuss the influence of hip-hop on women's sexual liberation, the importance of mental and spiritual health, and Black women speaking out on their experiences with sexual abuse in the #MeToo era.

ITT Staff Picks:

• Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes about the Black feminists of the Combahee River Collective and the divisions within the feminist movement, in this article for The New Yorker. 

• “Dorothy Pitman Hughes passed away at the age of 84 after a long, active life spent advocating for equality and human rights for all people. Known as a pioneering feminist activist, Hughes devoted her time and resources to serving people with the greatest needs,” writes Feminista Jones in this article for InStyle.

• Kaitlyn Greenidge writes about the Sisterhood, a 1970s Black women’s writing group that rose from the Black power and women’s movement and focused on creating work for each other rather than the white mainstream, in this piece for Harper’s Bazaar.

We continue our Best of ITT series with this live episode from May 2018. Maria and Julio take the stage at DePaul University in Chicago with David Luis “Suave” Gonzalez, artist and a former juvenile lifer, to talk about Latinos and mass incarceration. Along with hearing Suave's story, Julio also interviews Maria, who at the time had been covering Suave's story for more than 25 years.  

ITT Staff Picks: 

• In this bonus episode of the Suave podcast, Maria and Suave reflect on everything that has happened in the year after their podcast was released, including the fact that they won a Pulitzer. 

• Tamar Sarai writes about how prison policies have increasingly limited extended family visits and how that also limits the relationships and access to intimacy for incarcerated people, in this article for Prism Reports. 

• “In its premiere, Inside Story travels to Louisiana, where we find a community group protesting the state’s decision to move some youth to Angola, a notorious prison for adults,” write Lawrence Bartley and Donald Washington, Jr. to preface their documentary essay for The Marshall Project.  

Our Best of ITT series continues, as we celebrate our 7th year anniversary! In this episode from July 2020, Maria and Julio are joined by authors and historians Daina Ramey Berry and kali.html">Kali Nicole Gross to talk about their book “A Black Women's History of the United States.” They analyze the history of Black women in America and their legacy of activism, resistance and entrepreneurship.

ITT Staff Picks: 

• Olivia Lapeyrolerie writes about the incredible life’s work of Marvel Cooke, a Black reporter and union organizer, who inspired Black women activists such as Angela Davis and spent her life fighting systemic inequities and the exploitation of Black people, in this article for Teen Vogue. 

• “The challenge of solving the Black wealth gap is informed by another time in our past when Black people were the wealth of this nation,” writes Daina Ramey Berry in this piece for The Boston Globe. 

• The Free Black Women’s Library features a collection of four thousand books written by Black women and Black non-binary authors and celebrates these authors through workshops, readings, story circles, performances, cultural conversations and a monthly reading club. 

We’re continuing our Best of ITT series to celebrate seven years of In The Thick with this episode from June 2022. Maria and Julio are joined by Ibram X. Kendi, founding director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research, for a conversation about his book “How to Raise an Antiracist.” They discuss the evolution of his antiracist scholarship, the rise in mass shootings and white supremacist attacks, and how Black and brown communities can work together in solidarity.

ITT Staff Picks: 

• Kathryn Joyce writes about New College in Florida, a once liberal arts college that is being transformed into a right-leaning institution by DeSantis, who wants to replicate this motion across the country, in this article for Vanity Fair. 

• “What I found in How to Be A (Young) Antiracist was a kind of meditation on the ways that the personal is, as they say, political,” writes Janell Ross in this interview with author Ibram X. Kendi, for Time Magazine. 

• “The maintenance of racism has required the public’s ignorance of racism. The public’s ignorance of racism requires a perpetual undermining of public education,” argues Ibram X. Kendi in this excerpt from his book "How to Raise an Antiracist," published by USA Today.