Advertising, marketing, the entertainment industry and even the news media are selling us something. And what they’re selling usually isn’t good for us. Racist imagery like Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben are only the tip of the iceberg. Professor Gene Shelton reveals the racism behind advertising, and gets real about reclaiming our representation in media. This is a stirring conversation on how we all advance Black liberation when we up our media literacy game! BHY is produced by PushBlack, the nation’s largest non-profit Black media company - hit us up at BlackHistoryYear.com and share this with your people!

Food is family, culture and LIFE! As food writer Adrian Miller and Chef Rock Harper remind us, African food traditions are healthy, abundant and delicious. So how did we get to a place where we're told soul food and our food traditions are toxic? It's time to lift up our food culture! BHY is produced by PushBlack, the nation's largest non-profit Black media company - hit us up at BlackHistoryYear.com and share this with your people!

Our story begins in Nubia and the Nile Valley, the Kingdom of Kongo, the Mali Empire, and the Great Zimbabwe. Dr. Runoko Rashidi reveals how the origins of Black people lie in great, ancient African civilizations and how our hidden history spans the globe. BHY is produced by PushBlack, the nation's largest non-profit Black media company - hit us up at BlackHistoryYear.com and share this with your people!

The Black vote is powerful. Just look at the massive amount of voter suppression and intimidation oppressors direct at the Black community. It confirms what we know: our vote is nothing to play with! So what will we do with all that power? The New Georgia Project's Nse Ufot has a few ideas. Ufot opens Season 2 of Black History Year by digging into voting rights, organizing, and what the 2020 election means for the Black community. BHY is produced by PushBlack, the nation's largest non-profit Black media company - hit us up at BlackHistoryYear.com and share this with your people!

Learning your history makes you - and your people - stronger. As Black people, we know we’re left out of the history books. That the media images are skewed. That we need access to experts, information and ideas so we can advance our people. Black History Year connects you to the history, thinkers, and activists that are left out of the mainstream conversations. You may not agree with everything you hear, but we’re always working toward one goal: uniting for the best interest of Black people worldwide. BHY is produced by PushBlack, the nation’s largest non-profit Black media company - hit us up at BlackHistoryYear.com.

Kerry Washington and Gabrielle Union bring an inspiring level of wisdom, humility, humor and Black pride to this conversation on Black motherhood. Give it a listen and then share it with every mother, father, sister, brother, other mother and friend in your life. This is for all of us!

Medical treatment disparities for Black women is as old as America. Dr. Dorothy Roberts, a professor of Africana Studies, Law, and Sociology at University of Pennsylvania, has been producing groundbreaking work on race and gender that focuses our attention on urgent, contemporary issues in health, social justice, and bioethics. For this BHY, we dig deep with Dr. Roberts on the history and present legacy of forced sterilization, reproductive choice, and even the misguided idea that reproductive health is “a white woman’s issue.”

Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. DuBois, even Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. all have a place in one of the most obscured parts of our history - the Black tradition of gun ownership. Douglas Jefferson, the Vice President of the National African American Gun Association, argues that for Black people in America to be fully vested as citizens, we have to be able to experience the fullest freedom every single liberty granted in the Constitution - including the right to lawfully bear arms.

American history is a mess. We’re taught our ancestors were docile, child-like beings who were too incompetent to find a way out of slavery - but we’re expected to study and admire the slaveholding leaders of the American Revolution! We are taught that non-violent protest and forgiveness are the only ways we can achieve our goal of liberation, which can only be granted by benevolent white people. But that’s not the whole story: our true history is LOADED with examples of Black resistance. Dr. Brandon Byrd shows how history reveals the truth about how our ancestors and contemporaries have risen up against oppression, and he takes us inside the most successful Black rebellion - an event that shook the world and challenges the status quo even today.

No matter how many tickets we buy, or how many hours we watch, Black Americans still have very little influence over what film or television gets made - or how it portrays us. The images of Black people pumped out to the mainstream range from affirming to annoying to actively damaging. Morehouse’s Dr. Stephane Dunn helps us unpack how we got here. She is one of the founding members of Morehouse’s Cinema, Television, & Emerging Media Studies Program, serves as its program director, and takes us from "Birth of a Nation" to "Good Times" to Tyler Perry.

“I remember hearing somebody describe freedom as the ability to wake up in the morning and decide what you want to do with your day.” Dr. Boyce Watkins, founder of the Black Business School, has plenty to say about personal freedom, Black liberation, and self-determination. For Watkins, black economic advancement can’t be reduced to whether you are for, or against, capitalism, socialism or any other “ism.” Instead, it’s about wielding economic opportunities to empower ourselves and our people.

“We must face the fact that in America,” said MLK, ”the church is still the most segregated major institution.” For Black people, the church has traditionally been a place of restoration, renewal, community, and collective action. But even during the vigor and heat of the Civil Rights Era, with church leaders like MLK up in front, the role of Christianity did not go unquestioned in Black America. And now, with the “prosperity gospel” as loud as ever, we’re interrogating this pillar of our culture. The Rev. Michael-Ray Mathews of Faith In Action helps understand how we got here, and what we should be asking of our faith communities if we’re truly interested in Black liberation.

Learning your history makes you - and your people - stronger. As Black people, we know we’re left out of the history books. That the media images are skewed. That we need access to experts, information and ideas so we can advance our people. Black History Year connects you to the history, thinkers, and activists that are left out of the mainstream conversations. You may not agree with everything you hear, but we’re always working toward one goal: uniting for the best interest of Black people worldwide. BHY is produced by PushBlack, the nation’s largest non-profit Black media company - hit us up at BlackHistoryYear.com.