Prologue : Self-portrait with America
Before it was a country, America was first a light for Walid. Projected into his child’s eyes by a white-edged cathode-ray television set, in the Val-de-Marne.
It was not yet a dream. But it was already a refuge: the world of TV shows, cartoons, ordinary heroes who, one day, are given the chance to reveal who they truly are. Then, one evening in January 1991, the programme is interrupted. Baghdad appears on screen, war enters the family living room, and history stops having only one version.
Later would come hip-hop, the aftermath of 9/11, the first trip to New York, Obama, Trump. And one question that never went away: what remains of that childhood light Walid once took for America?
You can also listen to this episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and your favorite podcast platform.
Episode #1 – Black America
Michael Jackson, Michael Jordan, Michael Johnson. Then Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, hip-hop, and Boyz n the Hood. As a teenager in the 1990s, the America that spoke most deeply to Walid was embodied by its Black icons. Voices, bodies, a way of carrying oneself, an energy, but above all a way of inhabiting the world: turning style into language, anger into power, memory into counter-narrative, and struggle into a global imaginary.
In Atlanta, with the writer, curator and historian TK Smith, and the visual artist and scholar Fahamu Pècou, one question comes into focus: what does it mean to carry a culture celebrated everywhere, when real equality remains contested at home?
From the Great Migration to Atlanta’s rise as a Black Mecca, from Obama years to Trump’s return, Black America explores the paradox of a Black culture at the heart of the American Dream’s imagination — yet still kept at a distance from its promise.
You can also listen to this episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and your favorite podcast platform.
Episode #2 – License to Belong
At school in the Paris suburbs, Walid was taught that America is a melting pot: a country where coming from somewhere else was not a problem, but part of the story – even something you could be proud of.
Born there, raised there, American. Period.
For years, one idea seemed to make that promise real: birthright citizenship.
But belonging is something else. It is the moment your voice counts — when you too get to help define the “we.”
In Atlanta, Walid sits down with Gyun Hur, a Korean American artist and educator, and Amenah Arman, a Palestinian American trauma therapist. Both grew up with mixed messages about what their families’ choice of America was supposed to mean.
Both are professionals navigating a political climate that shapes their work — and sometimes pushes against it.
Both are also mothers, now facing the same question: What do you pass on, when belonging feels like permission granted by others?
You can also listen to this episode on Spotify, Apple Podcast and your favorite podcast platform.
Episode #3 : Nuevo South
Out May 19th 2026
Episode #4 : Betting on Us
Out May 26th 2026
A bilingual documentary mini-series by Walid Hajar Rachedi, with editorial and production support by Ryad Maouche and Laura Taouchanov.
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