4:00 PM PACIFIC TIME: MONDAYS - FRIDAYS
Hard Knock Radio is a drive-time Hip-Hop talk show on KPFA (94.1fm @ 4-5 pm Monday-Friday), a community radio station without corporate underwriting. Hosts Davey D and Anita Johnson give voice to issues ignored by the mainstream while planting seeds for social change.
In this Hard Knock Radio segment, you and AI expert X. Eyeé walk listeners through the real story of the past year in tech and AI, way beyond the hype about fancy tools and the United States versus China headlines. X explains that California has quietly become the world’s main regulator of AI by passing …
This Hard Knock Radio conversation is a year-in-review on tech and AI, with host Davey D chopping it up with Quency Phillips of Lighthouse Innovation Center and social entrepreneur/author Darian Rodriguez Heyman. They start by framing 2025 as the year AI moved from “wow” to “woven in” – no longer just a flashy search trick … Continued
Davey D talks with writer and geographer Alex Werth about his new book On Loop: Black Sonic Politics in Oakland and how sound, race, and power collide in the town’s history. Werth explains that although he was trained by anthropologists, his grounding in geography helps him track how Oakland as a place has been made and remade through … Continued
Host Davey D brings on Minneapolis–St. Paul journalist and activist Georgia Fort to dig into ICE raids, attacks on Somali communities, and the growing repression of journalists and protesters in Minnesota and beyond. Georgia starts by describing a November 25 raid on St. Paul’s East Side where several hundred people showed up and three journalists … Continued
Davey D opens by grounding listeners in the fight over ethnic studies in California, focusing on AB715 and how claims of antisemitism are being used to roll back gains and potentially chill K–12 ethnic studies. Sameer frames this as part of a larger right-wing strategy coming out of the Heritage Foundation’s “Project Esther,” a companion … Continued
Davey D opens Hard Knock Radio by framing housing and policing as intertwined crises, then centers the conversation on Rahim Kurwa’s book Indefensible Spaces: Policing and the Struggle for Housing. Kurwa begins with the story of Michelle Ross, a Section 8 voucher holder who moved from Los Angeles to Palmdale in 2008. Once there, she … Continued
On this episode of Hard Knock Radio, host Davey D sits down with Joshua Davis, a history professor at the University of Baltimore and author of Police Against the Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back. The conversation digs into a part of civil rights history that is usually blurred … Continued
A revealing look at how negative biases against women of color are embedded in search engine results and algorithms Run a Google search for “Black girls”―what will you find? “Big Booty” and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms. But, if you type in “white girls,” the results are … Continued
On Hard Knock Radio, I sat down with Jelani Cobb—dean of Columbia’s Journalism School, longtime staff writer at The New Yorker, and a thinker rooted in Hip Hop’s habit of connecting dots across time. We talked about his new book, Three or More Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here (2012–2025). I called it “a book … Continued
The conversation opens with Davey D breaking down a quiet but devastating move by the Trump Education Department that declared key careers like nursing and teaching as “non professional” for federal loans. He frames it as a slick attack on Black and Brown communities, women, and working class folks who rely on those pathways for stable work … Continued
The interview centers on the book Visualizing Palestine: A Chronicle of Colonialism and the Struggle for Liberation and the broader work of the Visualizing Palestine collective. You open by situating the book in a moment of media consolidation, censorship, and classroom bans, framing it as both an archive and a living tool for narrative struggle. Editor Jessica … Continued
