Public radio journalists and best friends, Hana Baba and Leila Day are talking everything diasporic in their joint podcast The Stoop.

From Black immigration to colorism, the two don’t take their duties “dialogin’ about the diaspora” very lightly.

"We wanted to create a space where we could combine journalism and storytelling and talk about things that we felt were overlooked," Day, a New York-based podcast producer at Pineapple Street Media, said in an emailed statement to Blavity.

The cultural discourse between the two women first began when Baba and Day worked for the same newsmagazine in the Bay Area.

“Being the 'onlys' in the news department, we worked at, we would always find ourselves having these side conversations in the kitchen or the hallway about blackness, identity, and recommendations for hair braiders," Baba, a California native who works as a host/reporter for NPR’s Concurrents newsmagazine, told Blavity.

In 2016, they took those conversations to another level when “The Stoop” first premiered on NPR Story Lab.

The podcast was chosen as one of three to receive funding from the public radio service. And it sure proved worth the investment.

In addition to mental health and debunking the “angry black woman” myth, the two also touched on a subject less widely discussed in the community in season one.

Whereas Black America has become more exposed to white appropriation of Black culture than we’d ever like to be, the two dove into appropriation among Black cultures — a topic which the two felt needed to be tackled.

“Well, in season one we knew we had to go deeper into this debate that we kept seeing come up online about black people wearing African clothing,” Day said. “We decided to go straight to the AfroPunk music festival in Brooklyn to get that conversation going. The episode was called ‘Nice Tribal Wear, Now Take It Off,’ and in it we asked can it be appropriation for black people to wear African clothing? We had some very candid, sometimes uncomfortable conversations with people.”

But not all episodes are made the same.

“Sometimes, we just want to hear stories that just remind us about love and giving love and feeling it,” Day said. “So we thought about this a lot and one of our episodes is about family love, and specifically black men giving love, it’s called, “Why is it so hard for some black folk to say I love you?”

In their second season, they’re looking to dive even deeper.

"In season two, there are conversations about colorism, from a skin bleaching kiosk in Sudan, to asking where are the brown bodies in some of these classical ballet companies?" Baba said.

“We’re also untangling some of this controversy around the hair chart that was created to help naturals understand their textures, but it’s also creating some tensions about the lack of representation of kinky haired women."

What makes their podcast such an unapologetic gem is that the storytellers are not afraid to try out different ways of conveying a narrative — and they use their difference in cultural backgrounds to enhance listeners’ experiences.

“I’m a daughter of Sudanese immigrants, Leila is African-American,” Baba said. “We’d rant, rave, and dissect everything black -about something we caught on Blavity from fashion and style, to the latest study on black mental health, to race, love, both of us being told we ‘sound white’, black immigration – but also questions we had for each other- like : how do I, the African, feel about Leila wearing a Nigerian gele? Is that appropriation? Or – why is Leila being curious if I have natural hair under my hijab?”

"There is no shortage of diverse topics,” Day said. “The beautiful thing about the stories is that they’re from very different black experiences. ‘The Stoop’ is more about the people you meet, and the stories they tell. No matter where you are within the diaspora, you can learn something or hopefully challenge yourself to think of something in a different way.”

Baba and Day said for their latest season, they’re focused on switching up the narrative.

"This season is less about how do we make this thing and more about, we’re making it…these stories will be told.”

You can listen to season two of “The Stoop” here.

Hana Baba and Leila Day

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