Georgia made history this week: The state elected a Black Senator on Tuesday for the first time ever. Rev. Raphael Warnock, a Morehouse graduate who serves as senior pastor of the storied Ebenezer Baptist Church once pastored by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., will be representing Georgia in the Senate as soon as the results are certified. Along with …

This week on System Check we are saying farewell to 2020 and hello to 2021 with our first System Check Book Club. Your hosts Melissa and Dorian first aired this Book Club as a Live Event on YouTube and Facebook just in time for holiday reading. While the original show was over two hours long, for our podcast this week we decided to share with you s…

President-elect Joe Biden has made history: This week, he announced that Rep. Deb Haaland would be his pick for head of the Interior Department, the first Native American person ever to a Cabinet-level position, making Biden’s Cabinet the most diverse in history. This kind of representation is important, but it’s not enough, because far from Washin…

Defund. That one word has motivated thousands across the country to take to the streets this year to end police violence against Black Americans, and it has also become the punching bag for some Democratic politicians to explain their electoral misfortunes this cycle. But that word, defund, also explains why the United States surpassed 3,000 deaths…

Seventy-eight: That’s the number of days between the Presidential election and the Presidential inauguration. Much needs to be accomplished in those days for the peaceful transition of power. The stakes are higher than you think, and there are life-and-death implications for the lives of millions of Americans affected by our system of the transfer …

There are a lot of jobs we as a country don’t value. Think farm work, child care, service jobs—these low-wage, often racialized and gendered jobs form the backbone of our economy, but if you’ve worked in any of these fields, you know how hard it can be to make ends meet on these jobs. Three of Dorian Warren’s grandparents were janitors, another job…

This week, your co-hosts Melissa Harris-Perry and Dorian Warren get personal. Melissa’s Grandma Rosa lived and worked in poverty in the Jim Crow south. She was a seamstress who suffered from arthritis, and she made tremendous personal sacrifices to ensure her twin sons, William and Wesley, could go to college and create a legacy of achievement and …

When Stacey Abrams won the Democratic primary in Georgia’s gubernatorial election two years ago, System Check hosts Melissa Harris-Perry and Dorian Warren wrote an article for Time Magazine, saying, “If Abrams can win the general election and become the first black woman governor in U.S. history, in a Southern state that sits in the heart of the ol…

How did we get here? How did we get to the end of a week in which Americans cast 160 million votes, the highest number ever in a general election and the highest voter turnout among eligible citizens in over a hundred years, a week in which one candidate received almost 4 million votes more than the other one, and we still don’t know who our next p…

Welcome to System Check. On this podcast, we’re going to break down the big, unwieldy, seemingly immovable systems that structure our politics and our lives. In the ten episodes in this season, we will delve into the history of these systems, and along with our guests, we will seek ways to move beyond or redesign these systems. In our first episode…

Lights are blinking. Alarms are blaring. The dashboard of our democracy is warning us that it is time to check our systems. On System Check, the latest podcast from The Nation, hosts Melissa Harris-Perry and Dorian Warren turn down the frenzy and tune into some remarkable folk with the wit and wisdom to diagnose what ails us. Dorian and Melissa tal…