B. Brian Foster, "I Don't Like the Blues: Race, Place, and the Backbeat of Black Life" (UNC Press, 2020)

New Books in African American Studies · Mar 11, 2021 · 1h 12m

Brian Foster, self-identified Black boy from rural Mississippi, joins us today for a conversation about his book, I Don't Like the Blues: Race, Place, and the Backbeat of Black Life (The University of North Carolina Press, 2020). In this interview, he shares with us how his experiences growing up in, leaving and returning home to Mississippi shaped his storytelling. Foster first began this ethnographic project as a doctoral student in Sociology at UNC Chapel Hill. As he tells us, the project started as an exploration of educational inequality and race. It became something very different as he…