The Stoop · Hana Baba and Leila Day

The 100th Episode!

May 23, 2024·42 min·3 clips

Tanya Mosley discovers racial trauma is a 'constant state of being' after a life-changing psychedelic journey.

1. The Stoop's 100th episode is a retrospective in which co-hosts Leela Day and Hannah Bui revisit clips, production moments, and emotional high points from their run covering stories from the Black diaspora. 2. Leela Day and Hannah Bui are the co-hosts; they also reference producer Natalie Parrott and engineer James Rowland of Roof Dog Studio, along with a roster of named editors including Christina Loring, Adjua Jimabrempong, and Megan Tan. 3. The episode anchors itself in the show's founding purpose: producing conversations that stop when non-Black people walk into the room, described early on as 'Black flat-channel convos' and initially branded as 'like a griot, a hair salon, a newsroom and your mama's kitchen all in one.' 4. Leela and Hannah explain the stoopy scale — a one-to-five measure of whether an episode idea contains a twist, something controversial, or something not discussed in the open — and play the game 'Is It Stoopy?' using past episode examples. 5. Clips from the polyamory episode feature Kevin Patterson arguing that practicing polyamory expands what Blackness is rather than placing him outside it, directly countering the 'white people shit' dismissal. 6. A clip about watermelon traces how a racist stereotype has caused some Black people to refuse to eat the fruit in public — including a woman who avoided watermelon for four or five years — while street voices declare they will eat chicken and watermelon without shame. 7. The reparations episode features advocate Cash Gaines setting the criterion that eligibility requires tracing an ancestor to the Freedmen's Bureau or censuses around the Civil War's end, connecting compensated emancipation for enslavers to the reparations argument. 8. Stacey Abrams appears in a clip describing feeling out of place when she first arrived at Spelman, having been given a 'Black urban dictionary' by new friends, and reflecting that when you strip away everything else, Black women are deeply diverse, not monolithic. 9. NPR Fresh Air host Tonya Mosley describes entering a psychedelic experience unsure whether she had experienced racial trauma, having dismissed racist incidents as isolated events; she leaves with the insight that racial trauma is not an incident but a constant state of being for marginalized people. 10. The episode includes a behind-the-scenes segment showing the production process: episode ideation, research, fact-checking, drafting, recording outtakes with a cat interrupting, and the role of editors in pushing for more vulnerability. 11. Engineer James Rowland highlights a sound design moment from Episode 53, Invisible Scars, in which a speaker describes the 'noradrenergic nucleus of the locus coeruleus' — the brain's stress response center — and explains what happens when the 'bear comes home every night.' 12. A retrospective clip about Black body image includes the story of Nanny of the Maroons, a Jamaican Maroon leader who, according to legend, caught British colonizers' bullets with her buttocks and hurled them back. 13. Leela shares the tension around whether to include hurtful words used between Black Americans and Africans, and plays audio of the 'African booty scratcher' rhyme — words Hannah had never heard but says she needed to hear. 14. The episode addresses the decision to pause regular programming during national crises: after the 2017 Charlottesville white supremacist attack and again in May 2020 after George Floyd was killed by police. 15. Leela plays a recorded interview with her 14-year-old biracial niece Ima in Portland, Oregon, who wrote an English class poem about the absence of Black boys at her middle school and was told by her white teacher that she had never noticed this. 16. Hannah describes her family evacuating Sudan during the war that began in April 2019, with homes looted and buildings destroyed, and replays a cassette tape of Abdelgader Salim's song 'Omri Ma Bensa' — 'I'll never forget her' — from Episode 96, Love Song for Sudan. 17. As the cassette plays, Hannah's demeanor shifts; she tells Leela that the music felt nostalgic at first but now carries grief, because recordings like this one may be all that survives of Sudanese culture. 18. The episode closes with a montage of street voices from episodes 58, 72, and 1 — on reparations, watermelon, and Afropunk fashion — followed by a call for listener donations to keep the independent show going. 19. The episode is structured as a loosely chronological look back, mixing production audio, interview clips, street voices, and reflective co-host dialogue in The Stoop's signature narrative format. 20. Long-time Stoop listeners, Black Americans and diaspora members who engage with culture criticism, and anyone interested in how independent Black podcasting builds community will find this episode both a celebration and a document of why the show exists.

As heard by us

A warm centennial episode that folds memory, humor, and cultural inquiry into a clear self portrait.

The Stoop's hundredth episode feels like a look back with a pulse: funny, reflective, and rooted in the show's Black-diaspora perspective. Hannah and Leela move through the laughs, the tears, the moments of doubt, and the questions they were willing to ask out loud, so the…

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Why you'd press play

A 100-episode look back that mixes laughs, hard questions, and the show’s Black cultural lens.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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