Here’s someone who can definitively answer “Yo, Is This Racist?”
Andrew Ti’s racial-issues blog has birthed a podcast that determines whether certain people and ideas are in the wrong (spoiler alert: yes, they are).
One day, years ago, Ti was engaged in a bout of typical, boring office banter when a coworker mentioned the cartoon character Yosemite Sam. This person pointed out how Yosemite Sam sometimes utters a string of cartoon swears, among them the term, “Cotton pickin’.” (Usually when he’s crazy mad at Bugs Bunny.) It slowly dawned on everyone involved that they all had this same shared memory, and it had somehow never bothered them before. Within five minutes, Ti had created the Yo, Is This Racist? tumblr to catalog such prickly concerns.
By the time I got a national syndication deal with Public Media International and moved to Los Angeles in 2007, I’d already been podcasting for a while. Contrary to what I’d imagined, though, the syndication deal wasn’t going to be enough to pay my bills. Given that L.A. is where my former co-host lived, I thought I’d start a new show with Jordan that consisted of all the stuff we used to do in college that wouldn’t fit on a nationally syndicated public radio show. Right around that time, some other opportunities also emerged. All of a sudden, we went from having this one radio show that was also a podcast to having a podcast network with four shows.
