CHICAGO — This is a story about a podcast in which two old friends rarely disagree, always get along, and though they are discussing race and social justice and the sorry state of the world, voices remain low, tones remain civil and conversation always seems thoughtful.
Basically, Man Bites Dog these days.
In fact, they stay so reasoned, casual and frank — so relaxed on issues that fill heated city council meetings and TikTok posts in 2022 — you can imagine their podcast driving certain listeners nuts. It’s called “Some of My Best Friends Are ...,” and that title itself is a provocation, a play on the hoariest of racial bona fides, the sort of shallow social assumptions that tend to characterize the way we tiptoe around race. It’s a clever title. They are best friends. Exactly the sorts to never fall back on, “Some of my friends are ...”
Khalil Gibran Muhammad is best known as a Harvard-based authority on race and inequality; Ben Austen made his name writing about the legacy of race and discrimination in Chicago. Their reputations precede them. Last September, after a year of development by Malcolm Gladwell’s Pushkin Industries production company, “Some of My Best Friends Are ...” launched, and on just the fourth episode, Muhammad played a recording that was left on his voicemail about a TV appearance he had recently made. The listener had a proposition: He suggested that Muhammad fly to a midway point in the United States, and once there, Muhammad could call the man a racist to his face.
The man was a stranger.
He just felt, I suppose, implicated.
The thing is, and maybe this is naive, if they had flown across the country and met? I bet that guy would have been charmed. I bet he would recognize their common ground.
Thirty-five years or so ago, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, short, thin, a little nerdy, deeply into making money, playing tennis with best friend Ben Austen when he wasn’t working as the teenage bookkeeper for a Hyde Park computer store, was not particularly political. Nor was he especially woke. His father, Ozier Muhammad, was a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer for Newsday, living in New York City, one of the leading journalists on the famine in Ethiopia. His mother, Kimberly Muhammad, had been the director of special projects for Chicago Public Schools. His great-grandfather, Elijah Muhammad, who had died a decade earlier, was the fabled, longtime leader of the Nation of Islam.
Muhammad came of age during the Reagan Revolution, yet social justice didn’t register very loudly. He was in high school, he explains. Still, years later, memories would filter through: Visiting his father in New York City and hearing crack vials snap beneath their feet on the sidewalk. Being stopped after curfew by Chicago police and patted down; all of the friends with him would be white, but only Muhammad, who is Black, would be searched.
“I’m telling you this because, in hindsight,” he says, “what I didn’t understand, what didn’t make sense to me then, was a huge part of what was happening in this country.”
Ben Austen wasn’t exactly woke, either.
He uses that word, “woke,” self-consciously, with air quotes, dating himself. He’s 50 now; Khalil is 49. They spent most of high school together. Classmates and friends from their Kenwood High School days still remember them being inseparable, as fixtures of 1980s Hyde Park. Austen was preppy and tall, with lots of girlfriends. He grew up in the Jackson Park Highlands of South Shore; he was neighbors with Jesse Jackson. His parents were active in Harold Washington’s mayoral run. During a CPS teacher strike, his father, Ralph Austen, a professor of African history at the University of Chicago, had Ben and Khalil read a book about World War II and then write him a report; he was not about to watch them waste time. And yet, they remained apolitical. Austen said, “Even later, I remember seeing ‘Malcolm X,’ the actor playing Khalil’s great-grandfather looked like Khalil, there’s this surge of Black consciousness happening, but we didn’t talk about it.”
Soon enough, they would leave Hyde Park for college and fall into more predictable circles. Austen’s friends would be white, Muhammad’s friends would be Black. They grew apart. They sound sincerely hurt when they recall this, all that lost time. In high school, “Ben would be at family gatherings, at holidays, backyard BBQs,” Muhammad remembers. “Everyone would be Black but Ben, and maybe my mother’s friend Martha.”
“I hooked up with Martha,” Austen says.
“OK, Martha was 80,” Muhammad says, looking at me flatly. “No, seriously, Ben’s parents would always make me feel welcome, too. I’d be there (for dinner) on Shabbat.”
“You were the son who followed in my father’s footsteps,” Austen adds quietly.
As they got older, as they became two of the leading voices on race and social justice in the country, they would think about Hyde Park and realize how rare their friendship was.
A few decades later, last fall, during a single November day in their old neighborhood, a university student was shot to death in a robbery. Around the same time, during the lunch hour, someone began firing from a car in downtown Hyde Park, at 53rd and Harper (no one was killed). Earlier that morning, a man was stabbed to death in a fight. Hyde Park — which likes to imagine itself relatively safe, as the steadfast, academic, progressive bubble within a vast and segregated metropolis — shuddered.
So, about a week later, as they had been doing for months, Muhammad and Austen recorded a new episode of “Some of My Best Friends Are .…” As they taped, the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict was announced. On that episode, you can hear a confluence of anger and fear. Austen — a journalist, a contributor to the New York Times Magazine and author of the acclaimed “High-Rise: Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing” — still lives in Hyde Park, a short walk from 53rd Street. Muhammad — a professor of history, race and public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School, director of the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project, former director of Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, board member of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and sought-after corporate lecturer on structural racism — lives now in the upscale suburb of South Orange, New Jersey.
A few months earlier he moved his mother out of Chicago, to live with him in New Jersey, partly so that she could be closer to her grandchildren, but also, she mentioned to her son that she had bought a gun. She didn’t feel safe in Chicago anymore. He asked her to please take the gun back; then he moved her to New Jersey, to live with him.
He explained this on the show.
Austen sounded unsettled.
He said, as a resident, he’s hearing a lot of fear. He’s hearing a lot about plans to leave Chicago. “I hate hearing it. I hate it.” When he hears someone is leaving, he can’t help think, this ship is sinking. The more Chicagoans abandon Chicago, the worse it will get.
Muhammad said that his mother even told him, maybe Trump was right — maybe send the National Guard. You could hear the cringe in his voice. He fears overreaction, a suffocating increase of policing, the inevitable loss of privacy. They both do. Before the episode ended, Austen noted how necessary changes often appear “pie in the sky,” impossible to accomplish, which gave Muhammad, as a historian, an opening: Many 20th-century reforms like Social Security were partly “a response to crime in white working-class communities, and it worked.” Their point was, it’s not “utopic” to expect large-scale meaningful change from a government.
Again, they agree.
“Some of My Best Friends Are ...” is sort of like this, episode after episode. They discuss race and social justice, culture and sometimes their hometown; they talk about critical race theory and prison reform and Dave Chappelle and religion. And broadly, they agree. Even by the dulcet standards of the podcasting ecosystem, there’s a lack of tension and anxiety. By design. They don’t debate; they discuss, joke. They sound like friends who have known each other for decades, long before they had careers. Indeed, they draw on the conversations they have all the time about race.
“In a way, I realize we are probably using this show to unpack who we were back then (as teenagers) and what was that moment was,” Austen said. “You can be scholarly about that, or you can unpack two friends, one Black, one white, driving to the North Side on Halloween, wearing bags over their heads, realizing today, what a bad idea.”
They discuss social justice in that rarest of ways — as an act of shared responsibility.
Eric Williams didn’t really agree with their podcast on policing and the violence in Hyde Park. At least not all of it. About seven years ago, he moved his stylish gift shop, the Silver Room, from Wicker Park to 53rd and Harper. He found himself in an old-school community where longtime residents joked, better be a good neighbor. “You move here and you have Black families, Jewish families, you have the intellectuals at University of Chicago, you have activists on top of all that — so, no I’m not fearful here, there was way more crime in Wicker Park. But that said, it’s also an illusion of safety.”
He saw those bullets flying back in November. “I’m here every day, in what’s now called downtown Hyde Park, so as a small-business owner, I’m not concerned about too many police.” That said, he still listens to every episode of “Some of My Best Friends Are .…” During a fellowship at Harvard, he took a class with Muhammad. He said, “I don’t always align with them, but their insights — you do start to see the world differently.”
And that’s the sweet spot herPushkin doesn’t share audience statistics, said co-founder Jacob Weisberg (a Chicago native himself), but broadly, the podcast’s audience has grown exponentially since the fall. Those who listen, they listen to everything, week after week. Which is not unusual for a well-liked podcast, of course. But there’s chattier, pass-around-among-your-friends kind of loyalty with this one, said Sachar Mathias, the podcast’s showrunner and director of content for Pushkin, which produces, among other shows, “Gladwell’s Revisionist History,” “Be Antiracist With Ibram X. Kendi” and “Double Date with Phil Donahue and Marlo Thomas. ““I actually hear a lot of talk from my friends on this show — that never happens to me. I don’t know if it’s because we’re in a moment in this country where things are so polarized, it’s helpful to know, yes, there’s still shared experience out there.” Jean Harvey, a friend of Austen and Muhammad from their Kenwood years, listens, too. “There’s a lot of buddy podcasts out there, but you never get the context of a friendship. And there are woke podcasts where everything is so gut wrenching. Even if I didn’t know them, this is informative with a light nature that makes it easy to embrace.”
At the end of each episode, Austen and Muhammad even say “I love you” to each other.
Which is not as contrived as it sounds.
The show began in the early days of the pandemic, with Muhammad, who was recommended to Pushkin by Harvard historian and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore. He was developing a documentary-style podcast anchored at a pair of high schools as they incorporated race and racism in their curriculums. “But I was told it would cost $1 million,” Muhammad said. “When COVID put the kibosh on it, we wanted something easier.” He turned to Austen, who said, “Our conversations, in life, are naturally about this.” Austen was thinking of writing a biography of Rahm Emanuel, then began a book on the contemporary history of parole. He was writing on Mount Greenwood, Laquan McDonald. “He was writing pieces on Chicago I was learning from,” Muhammad said. “I was speaking nationally, and being asked about America after George Floyd, and Ben, a journalist, was closer to the action. Part of what I was learning was coming from my best friend.”
Though “Some of My Best Friends Are ...” leans at times on their shared experiences in a divided country, from the first episode they also deftly poked at the disconnects and absurdities of supposedly shared experiences, starting with the unchecked assumptions that anchor generations worth of mixed-race buddy movies. They began with Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy in “48 Hours,” then moved into “Lethal Weapon.” There is a message here, they agreed, and in part, it’s a misleading calculus, that just having relationships with someone of another race is enough. Which then makes white America feel good, Muhammad decided. Austen agreed: “You don’t have to give up very much ... in fact, you gain a friend.” Tucked in there was genuine appreciation (especially for “48 Hours”). These these things are complicated; you can love a movie without avoiding blind spots.
With each new episode, reaction came in.
They heard from listeners, they heard from journalists, and part of the time, they heard from a country, Black and white, that takes comfort in tropes and easy assumptions. Austen was accused on Twitter of being too mediocre to sit alongside Muhammad, who must have been exceptional — no less than a Harvard professor! — to even land a podcast. Muhammad was asked by interviewers to describe “a time Ben said something (expletive) and racist to me, the presumption being that we had to work though it, and I would explain, ‘No, didn’t happen.’” They presented themselves as friends who saw color, and who saw race, but ... well, it is possible to complete that thought without a but.
As they see it, they found their lane: Open-minded Americans eager to learn something new, Muhammad said, “but maybe too anxious to accept as a given the way Ben and I think about the world.” Which is also known as, Americans who like to say they are open-minded.
In other words, their podcast is a byproduct of growing up in Hyde Park. Or at the very least, informed by their memories of growing up and attending an integrated school in Hyde Park. Austen lived in South Shore then; Muhammad lived in the Regents Park apartments overlooking school. The other day, after meeting at his home, Austen and I walked to 53rd and Harper, with Muhammad on the phone the whole time, watching from FaceTime. Aside from annual weeklong family vacations together on Martha’s Vineyard, they haven’t seen each in person much lately; they record the podcast from their homes.
Austen led me into Virtue, the celebrated restaurant on 53rd, which, back when they were at Kenwood, was a computer store. They became friends here. It was owned by Jon Chimene, a graduate student studying with Austen’s father, a part-time tennis coach who hired them initially to do stuff like paint the ceiling and label floppy disks. They sold a relatively new product then, the affordable home computer. Muhammad was only 12 when he started. Austen joined a couple of years later. Muhammad was his boss. Austen also bagging groceries down the street at Mr. G’s Finer Foods (now Hyde Park Produce); eventually, when Muhammad moved to Mr. G’s, he ran the deli counter.
We stood in the corner of Virtue, overlooking 53rd and Harper.
“We would sit here and watch the traffic,” Austen said.
“A Benetton across the street then,” Muhammad noted, “perfectly in line with being an MTV kid then — we were all the same, right? Just different colors, that was the thinking.”
“Completely different here,” Austen said.
“Turn the phone to the left, Ben.” Austen spun on his heels, camera extended in his hand. “Yeah, OK, identical in one direction, completely different in another direction.”
“That guy jumped out and began firing here,” Austen said, referencing one of the shootings on that bleak day in November. “Kenwood kids everywhere.”
At the end of the ‘80s, when they were in high school, there were more murders annually in Chicago, and yet Austen said, perhaps because it was Hyde Park, or because of the ignorance of youth, they didn’t feel that same dread that they feel today. Amanda Williams, the acclaimed Chicago artist, a friend of Austen’s who attended Lab School a few blocks away, said, “Hyde Park felt just like a bubble then. It was an era. Jordan was coming into being, Oprah was coming into being, hip hop was rising. We lived in this place where Blackness and culture was already lauded, so in a lot of ways, you felt confident. You could think, maybe the world is for me.” Certainly, a mixed-race friendship like Austen and Muhammad was not unusual in Hyde Park, said Harvey. “In the context of America, yeah, it is unusual for a lot of people, but Hyde Park back then fostered some sense of independence.”
“Ben, Khalil, their circle,” said Chimene, “they were the smartest people in the room, comfortable in their skins. You didn’t see future Harvard professors because they all seemed like that. Not that I want it to sound like utopia.” Bill Gerstein, former owner o—f Mr. G’s and a well-known civic leader around Hyde Park, “It wasn’t racial Camelot, but you did hear from people who grew up there who said similar things, when they finally left and saw how the rest of the world lives, they’re shocked.”
Muhammad and Austen felt something like that.
They were surprised how segregated the world could be.
Eventually they would leave, get married, build careers and new circles, have children — what happens to a lot of people — but they eventually found a way back to a meaningful friendship. The podcast means they may be closer than when they were kids. They do have tensions, “but they’re more like nuanced tensions,” said Cher Vincent, their producer (herself a Kenwood graduate).
“We experience the world differently,” Austen said, “we just do, but in a lot of our politics and sense of community, we are aligned.”
“When we disagree it’s in details,” Muhammad said. “But details are important, more structural. If we say, Ben’s white, I’m Black, we’re going to work out our differences, that doesn’t advance the conversation. That doesn’t take you very far. With this kind of work, the devil is in the details. We don’t start with, is race relevant, but rather, how much does race matter, or how does it matter. If you start at yes, race, racism, it is relevant, then you have something.”
They really do say they love each other when they finish talking. They do feel a little self-conscious about using it as a sign-off, at the end of each episode. No one wants an authentic expression of affection to be a trademark. But they say it all the time.
“I notice, though, K,” Austen said, “that you tend to say ‘l love you,’ and I say ‘I love you, man,’ which kind of says you sort of can’t embrace fully your own masculinity.”
“Not true, Ben. Not true, Ben. You’re thinking of a Paul Rudd movie, and this is real.”
See? They fight.
———
