Strange Fruit #64: African-American Voices in Classical Music

We're celebrating Black History Month on Strange Fruit, and so is our sister station, Classical 90.5. Their series, African-American Voices, runs throughout the month and highlights the contributions of black performers and composers in the world of classical music. WUOL's program director Daniel Gilliam joined us this week to talk about the series and play us some wonderful music from some of the featured artists. In our Juicy Fruit segment, we talked about trans activist Janet Mock's appearance on Piers Morgan Live, in which the host made several comments about how she "used to be a man" and was "born a boy" (online promotion of the segment was similarly sensationalized, asking, “How would you feel if you found out the woman you are dating was formerly a man?”) We used this incident to talk more about the importance of pronouns and respectful language with trans folks, and the right of everyone to choose what language they use to identify themselves.