History Is Not What It Seems, Always

Bingeworthy sits down with Chenjerai Kumanyika, Host and Creator of Empire City

Empire City is a massive, multi-year project that spans genres. It comes to us from Wondery and Crooked, and premiered at Tribeca.

But what is it? Sure, it’s clearly a narrative podcast, but it’s also a serious scholarly work on another level. The sheer volume of narration allows it to veer into audiobook territory. But then the mad sound design makes it feel like an audio equivalent of a graphic novel.

Put this all together and you land in another zone, which is required reading, what should be curriculum for any historian of New York City, or the history of law and order. The Impact Guide is coming, for those who might be wondering, and while this series follows the particular history of New York City, the examination is relevant to most major cities.

Empire City is more than six hours of history you probably haven’t heard. Even if you know some of this history, I can almost guarantee that you haven’t heard it in the way that Kumanyika and his talented team have put it together.

When you listen to the way Kumanyika’s voice

The way it commands a room and captivates an audience, it’s easy to assume he’s always been a radio guy, that he was plucked out of a crowd because of his God-given talent. His voice is one of the great narrative voices in this industry today. It is iconic. It is emphatic. It is empirically excellent.

But the subject of his voice, specifically what it sounds like, as he described to me: “A big black man in a big black man’s body, with a big black man’s voice,” was not where his audio career began.

In 2015, after he had finished his PhD, right around the time he took his first job as a professor, he enrolled in a Transom Workshop. As part of the course, he was required to make a short radio piece, which would be shared with the public and broadcast on KISL on Catalina Island.

But when he sat down to write his narration, the way he would portray and position his voice, he ran into a problem.

[Kumanyika]: What came in was like Ira Glass and Sarah Koenig, who I have to say have beautiful voices. I want to be clear. There's no shade on their voices.
But that was not how I spoke.”

When he returned from this experience, he corraled his thoughts and wrote a piece: Vocal Color in Public Radio, which Transom.org published as a Manifesto. The piece got a lot of public media attention, from NPR and others. This was also, in some ways, his beginning. It also opened the doors to Gimlet Media, where he helped create the podcast Uncivil. And then John Biewen called, to ask him to collaborate on Seeing White, the second season of the two-time Peabody-winning podcast Scene on Radio.

What can you look for inside Empire City?

Kumanyika is a scholar, a professor, a podcaster, an activist, and a father. So when he sat down to think about what’s really behind the motto of the NYPD: “To Serve And To Protect,” he needed to go back to the beginning to figure this out. And for him, the beginning was more than 180 years ago.

[Kumanyika] The police are the institutions who essentially have failed to keep people safe, for over 180 years. What's practical about that? While their budget went up?

By the time the BLM movement was in full force in 2020, Kumanyika had already spent years thinking about how the media responded to the new era of body cameras that police wore.

[Kumanyika]: I was really starting for the first time to grapple, in a serious way, in a scholarly way, with what the nature of the police is, some of it was happening in the background, but. I think seeing the cycle play out right that every, that all of us lived through between 2000…and it depends on how far you want to go back.

But if you want to, if you want to go back to like, you know, Mike Brown or Trayvon Martin, and just watching this repeat…you start to wonder: How is it that this institution is so resilient?

But for him, the cameras were not enough to explain the problems with the various police departments. The problem was much deeper than that. The popular media sentiment at the time was that everything we needed to know about the problems with the police could be seen in the video footage.

[Kumanyika]: And I was like, actually, what we need to know about the police is before our eyes, before the act of seeing something that has to happen through analysis.

In a future post, I’ll share the entire audio version of my conversation with Kumanyika: where the spark of the idea came from, how he worked with two massive teams at both Wondery and Crooked Media, why his kindergarten-aged daughter was his guiding light for the arc of the series, and where it all goes from here.

But for now, just before the holidays begin - Happy Thanksgiving to my US-based friends — here’s just four minutes of pure Chenjerai to tide you over until then.

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