The Reply All team takes a look at the Test Kitchen, and what those mistakes mean for the future of the show. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
From Gimlet, this is reply all.
I'm Emanuel Jocely.
Around 10:00 p.m.
on Tuesday, February 16, I got a voice memo from a friend.
It was pretty short and pretty direct.
None of this is your problem to fix, my friend said.
Stay the fuck out of it.
For those of you who don't know, the event my friend was telling me to stay the fuck out of was a full blown reckoning of a race and work culture that took place on Twitter involving this show and a series we made called the Test Kitchen, which was about the systemic racism at a food magazine called Bon Appetit.
Not long after we published the second episode of that series, former colleagues of ours at Gimlet spoke publicly about their honestly, really horrible experiences working as young black people at our company, which is overwhelmingly white.
Some of these allegations actually centered on this show and how some members of our team, including PJ Vote and Shuffy Pitimane, who were the editor and reporter on this series, opposed the Gimlet Union, which was formed two years ago in large part by people of color.
In the aftermath of that online reckoning, PJ and Shrufi left the show.
I've been thinking about the message my friend sent me a lot lately, because what I'm doing literally right now, on the air, on video calls every day, is the exact opposite of staying out of it.
Which is to say, after all of the tweet threads, after the New York Times articles, after the notes app apologies, after everything that's happened and all the people this show has let down, a very familiar course of events has transpired.
The white leader guy has left the stage, and a black guy is talking to you about it.
That fact doesn't feel good to anyone, but it is what's happening.
The truth is, despite my friends warnings, I have definitely not stayed the fuck out of things.
After PJ and Shuffy left the show, I was a part of trying to figure out exactly where we went wrong publishing this series, which we'll get too later on in this episode, I jumped on the phone alongside my colleagues and called the former employees of Bon Appetit, who we'd failed, and I was there and we decided not to continue airing the series.
I did a lot of that stuff because I felt, and still feel, really awful about the way he failed so many people of color.
But also, as I dug deep into what had happened, I was doing the work that I think some of you might be doing right now, learning about things that have happened on this show and at this company, thinking about all the people who've left, but also just thinking about who remains and about what remains.
Like, what is left of this show that's worth carrying on and being a part of what is reply all.