Podcast
Afternoon Coffee Break with Darren Watts
Hosted by Darren Watts · EN
Every day is racism for black people. Most people are not open-minded to understand racism, nor are most people open to believing in racism. Afternoon Coffee Break with Darren Watts serves two purposes. One, education in discrimination. Two, a platform to talk about racism. Dive in with me to learn the history and the hypocrisy of those who don't believe racism exists. We will look at current events involved with racism as well. Let's have an uncomfortable conversation.
116episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
After The Brew: Still Adjusting, Still Exhausted, Still Moving
3d ago00:08:13Tap to summarizeA few days out from saying goodbye to Luscious, Darren talks about how strange it is adjusting to a house with the gates gone and the rooms wide open — the small absences hitting harder than expected. He also gets honest about the exhaustion that bled into yesterday's episode, tracing it back to an unplanned office day, church, and the kind of social drain that's been a pattern since his 2024 COVID diagnosis — a pattern that still hasn't been formally recognized as long COVID, nearly three years later. Celeste Warren has graciously rescheduled for August 4th. A dietitian appointment is coming up in 30 minutes that he almost forgot about. He knows he should be resting. He's doing the opposite anyway.After The Brew, Darren Watts, Afternoon Coffee Break, grief, pet loss adjustment, long COVID, post-viral fatigue, exhaustion, social anxiety, ADHD, office stress, Celeste Warren, dietitian appointment, chronic illness, real talk, Black podcast, June 2026, pushing through, undiagnosed, self-awareness,
Transcribe →Hate Crimes Through 2024: Illinois — A Mosque, a Penitentiary, and a Six-Year-Old Named Wadea
4d ago00:23:40Tap to summarizeIllinois reports more hate crimes than almost any state this series has covered — 347 documented incidents in 2023 alone. But scale isn't the only thing that sets this state apart. Religion is Illinois's second-largest bias category, far above what this series has documented anywhere else, and three specific federal cases explain why.In 2017, a domestic terrorist militia called The White Rabbits drove from Illinois to Minnesota and bombed the Dar al-Farooq Islamic Center while worshipers gathered for morning prayer. In 2021, two white supremacist inmates at Illinois's Thomson Penitentiary beat a fellow inmate to death because he was Jewish — one was later sentenced to life. And on October 15th, 2023, in Plainfield Township, a six-year-old Palestinian American boy named Wadea Al-Fayoume was stabbed to death by his family's landlord; his mother was severely wounded protecting him. The Attorney General himself issued a public statement on the killing.This episode goes through the full cumulative data — bias types, offense types, locations shaped by Chicago's transit system, and an offender-race breakdown more evenly split between White and Black offenders than any state this series has documented so far. It holds the grief of three different communities — Muslim, Jewish, and Palestinian American — without ranking one above another, because the mechanism connecting all three cases is the same one this series has named in every state: somebody deciding a life mattered less because of a category, not because of anything that person did.00:00 - Disclaimer01:01 - Introduction02:34 - The Thesis04:37 - Opening07:22 - The Background10:34 - The Data16:17 - Personal Thoughts20:23 - ClosingAfternoon Coffee Break with Darren Watts. Follow the show wherever you listen. Rate and review on Apple Podcasts — thirty seconds, it matters. Number 17 Cult All Time. Number 33 Business News All Time on Goodpods — because of you.
Transcribe →After The Brew: Saying Goodbye to Luscious
6d ago00:29:15Tap to summarizeDarren explains why he stepped away from After The Brew for two days — Luscious, Darrell's 15-year-old dog, declined rapidly over the course of a week, and Thursday and Friday were spent watching him suffer, weighing an impossible decision, and ultimately saying goodbye. Darren walks through the entire day in detail — the wait at the first clinic, the decision to go to Noah's Animal Hospital instead, Darrell's final words to Lucious, and the quiet weight of walking back into a house that suddenly felt different. He's grateful to his sister Nicole for stepping in to help cover the cost, and grateful, above all, that Lucious is no longer in pain. It's a long episode. It needed to be.After The Brew, Darren Watts, Afternoon Coffee Break, Lucious, pet loss, euthanasia, grief, family, Darrell Watts, losing a pet, end of life decisions, Noah's Animal Hospital, hard goodbyes, real talk, Black podcast, June 2026, family grief, gratitude, relief from suffering,
Transcribe →Twice in Ten Days: Jeremiah Spearman and the Cost of Walking Home
6d ago00:21:09Tap to summarizeSixteen-year-old Jeremiah Spearman doesn't have a car. Walking is how he gets places. Twice in ten days, that walk ended in handcuffs. On June 4th, he was tackled to the ground by Battle Creek's Gang Suppression Unit while walking to his aunt's house in his socks. On June 14th, walking home past an Arby's, he was stopped again. "Someone call my mom," he yelled. "This is the second time." No charges were filed either time.The officer's written report from the second stop claims Jeremiah was wearing a full face covering — one of the details cited to justify the stop. The city's own dashcam footage, obtained separately, appears to show his face uncovered the entire time. That's not a matter of camera angle. It's a specific claim in an official record that the city's own evidence doesn't support.Police Chief Shannon Bagley has defended both stops as appropriate. Battle Creek's mayor has said he's concerned about the officer's aggressiveness but is deferring to the city's Community Oversight Board, which reviews the case July 8th. A law professor and former Michigan State Police detective has weighed in on the legal standard at play — and why handcuffing someone changes the legal stakes the moment it happens.This episode also connects Jeremiah's story to Price Lomonte, a Black man stopped this month for simply walking through a wealthy, mostly white Grosse Pointe neighborhood — and what it means that one of them walked away clean while the other ended up on the ground, twice.00:00 - Disclaimer01:01 - Introduction02:34 - The Thesis04:23 - Opening07:15 - The Background11:25 - The Data14:11 - Personal Thoughts18:58 - ClosingAfternoon Coffee Break with Darren Watts. Follow the show wherever you listen. Rate and review on Apple Podcasts — thirty seconds, it matters. Number 17 Cult All Time. Number 33 Business News All Time on Goodpods — because of you.
Transcribe →A Knee on a Teenager's Neck, a Paid Vacation, and a Stranger Who Stepped In
6d ago00:19:20Tap to summarizeOn Juneteenth weekend in Elyria, Ohio, body camera footage shows an officer placing his knee on the neck and upper back of a 15-year-old girl while she was already being handcuffed by other officers. A 39-year-old stranger named Marcus Dowdell, with no connection to the girl or her family, stepped in to help. He ended up in handcuffs, then in the Lorain County Jail, charged with assault on a peace officer. The officer whose conduct prompted the police chief himself to say, on the record, "I have concerns regarding the officer's actions" — is on paid administrative leave.This episode goes through what's documented and what's genuinely disputed. Elyria Police Chief James Welsh and Mayor James Brubaker have both spoken publicly about the incident, with Brubaker directly invoking George Floyd's death. Attorney Alex Bodiford, who represents both Dowdell and the 15-year-old, has been blunt about the paid leave: "They're giving this guy a paid vacation. He's probably in Disney World as we speak." At the same time, a use-of-force expert who reviewed the footage raised a legitimate question about exactly how much pressure reached the girl's neck versus her upper back — a real point of dispute that fuller body camera footage could resolve, and hasn't yet.What isn't in dispute: a stranger who tried to help a teenager is facing more serious legal jeopardy right now than the officer whose conduct a sitting police chief has already called concerning.This is a developing story. We'll follow it as the investigation and Dowdell's case move forward.00:00 - Disclaimer01:01 - Introduction02:34 - The Thesis04:25 - Opening06:38 - The Background10:16 - The Data13:27 - Personal Thoughts17:05 - ClosingAfternoon Coffee Break with Darren Watts. Follow the show wherever you listen. Rate and review on Apple Podcasts — thirty seconds, it matters. Number 17 Cult All Time. Number 33 Business News All Time on Goodpods — because of you.
Transcribe →After The Brew: When Absent-Mindedness Cost Me a Conversation That Mattered
1w ago00:09:27Tap to summarizeDarren records this episode in real time, working through frustration with himself after missing a scheduled conversation with Celeste Warren — a conversation he'd spent real time preparing for, with notes, quotes, and coffee in hand. He gets honest about what's shifted for him lately — reading and retention taking longer, needing to manage things differently than he used to — and shares a paraphrased quote from her book about the power of face-to-face conversation in a divided world. This isn't a polished episode. It's Darren thinking out loud, in real time, about what it means to fall short of his own expectations for something that actually mattered to him.After The Brew, Darren Watts, Afternoon Coffee Break, Celeste Warren, DEI, missed interview, absent-minded, self-accountability, ADHD, neurodivergent, frustration, honest reflection, podcast guest, real talk, Black podcast, June 2026, cognitive changes, face to face conversation, common ground, self-compassion,
Transcribe →Hate Crimes Through 2024: Idaho — The State That Tried to Build a White Homeland
2w ago00:26:34Tap to summarizeIn the 1970s, a man named Richard Butler moved to a twenty-acre plot outside Hayden Lake, Idaho and put up a sign that read White Kindred Only. He called the compound that followed the international headquarters of the white race. It took a civil lawsuit — not a federal prosecution, but two Native American plaintiffs who were beaten by Aryan Nations guards — to bankrupt the organization in 2000. The compound was burned down in a fire department training exercise. The land is a park now.Twelve states into this series, and for the twelfth time, Anti-Black bias leads the cumulative hate crime data — 71 of 228 documented incidents in Idaho. But this state tells a second story too. Sexual Orientation is the second largest bias category here, and that number reads differently once you know that in 2022, thirty-one members of the white supremacist group Patriot Front were arrested in Coeur d'Alene, allegedly en route to disrupt a Pride event — twenty years after Hayden Lake and less than twenty miles away.This episode goes through the DOJ's official year-by-year numbers (a rising trend, not a decline), the full cumulative bias and offense data, three federal case examples including an attack on a transgender library employee in Boise, and the specific regional history that explains why white offenders account for roughly three-quarters of identified cases. It also sits with a number that's hard to look past — 28 documented hate crime incidents at elementary and secondary schools.The compound is gone. The data it left behind isn't.00:00 - Disclaimer01:01 - Introduction02:34 - The Thesis04:53 - Opening08:20 - The Background12:46 - The Data18:32 - Personal Thoughts23:09 - ClosingAfternoon Coffee Break with Darren Watts. Follow the show wherever you listen. Rate and review on Apple Podcasts — thirty seconds, it matters. Number 17 Cult All Time. Number 33 Business News All Time on Goodpods — because of you.
Transcribe →A One-Year-Old Named Kohen: What the State's Own Statement Already Tells You
2w ago00:21:58Tap to summarizeOn June 14th, 2026, Senatobia, Mississippi police responded to a shoplifting call at a Walmart and opened fire on a sedan carrying one-year-old Kohen Kartier Wiley, his mother Vellesiya Wiley, and a family friend. Kohen was killed. The friend was critically injured. The state's own account says officers already knew there was a child in that vehicle before the shooting — which raises the obvious question of why the response was still gunfire.Two accounts of what happened next directly conflict. The state says the driver moved toward officers and nearly struck one. The family says the car was moving away — and cellphone footage reportedly obtained by a Memphis television station appears to support that version. Only one of these can be true, and the body camera footage that could resolve it has not been released. Authorities have asked the public to avoid speculation while the investigation continues — the same authorities who released their own account of contested facts before any evidence was made public.This episode goes through what's documented and what's alleged: the family's statement, the state's statement, the protests in Senatobia, the officer placed on administrative leave but not named, and the pattern this case fits into — including the killing of Renee Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis earlier this year, where official accounts and video evidence also diverged.This is a developing story. We'll follow it as more comes out.Timestamps00:00 - Disclaimer01:01 - Introduction02:34 - The Thesis04:20 - Opening09:13 - The Background12:09 - The Data14:50 - Personal Thoughts19:19 - ClosingAfternoon Coffee Break with Darren Watts. Follow the show wherever you listen. Rate and review on Apple Podcasts — thirty seconds, it matters. Number 17 Cult All Time. Number 33 Business News All Time on Goodpods — because of you.
Transcribe →Juneteenth: What We're Actually Celebrating, and What's Still Unfinished
2w ago00:21:40Tap to summarizeOn June 19th, 1865, Major General Gordon Granger rode into Galveston, Texas and read General Order Number 3. The Emancipation Proclamation had already been law for two and a half years. Texas hadn't been told. That gap — between freedom existing on paper and freedom actually reaching the people it was owed to — is what Juneteenth commemorates. Not a clean ending. A delayed delivery.This episode walks through the real history: the 1866 origins in Texas churches and community gatherings, the commercialization of the 1920s and 1930s, the renewed meaning the holiday took on during the Civil Rights Movement, and its arrival as a federal holiday in 2021. It names Claudette Colvin — fifteen years old, nine months before Rosa Parks, refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus and telling police it was her constitutional right to stay. She passed away this past January at 86.Then it connects 1865 to right now. The same pattern — a right that exists on paper while lagging or failing in practice — shows up today in a weakened Voting Rights Act, in documented disparities in jury selection, and in unequal access to basic medical technology like continuous glucose monitors, where Black patients are prescribed and use the devices at significantly lower rates than white patients with the same diagnosis. None of this is overstated as something it isn't. It's named precisely, because the truth is serious enough on its own.Juneteenth isn't a holiday about something finished. It's a reminder that delivery has to be defended, generation after generation. Celebrate hard. And remember the names.00:00 - Disclaimer01:01 - Introduction02:34 - The Thesis04:18 - Opening06:41 - The Background10:23 - The Data13:39 - Personal Thoughts19:12 - ClosingAfternoon Coffee Break with Darren Watts. Follow the show wherever you listen. Rate and review on Apple Podcasts — thirty seconds, it matters. Number 17 Cult All Time. Number 33 Business News All Time on Goodpods — because of you.
Transcribe →After The Brew: Storms Missed Us, Second Brain Scan & Round Two with the Heart Monitor
2w ago00:12:14Tap to summarizeDarren walks through a quieter but still packed day. The severe weather that threatened Indianapolis shifted south and spared the city, though parts of southern Indiana saw real damage. He's got a second brain scan today to check for changes, and he's preparing to push back harder on getting his lower back MRI approved — something he feels has been ignored for too long. Friday brings a two-week heart monitor, following last year's tachycardia diagnosis tied to post-COVID symptoms — even though long COVID itself hasn't been officially recognized on his chart. He's got a guest conversation with Celeste Warren coming Monday, a possible Juneteenth episode in the works, and an ongoing insurance appeal for a continuous glucose monitor that he's saving the full details of for an upcoming Substack piece. Quiet on the surface. A lot moving underneath.After The Brew, Darren Watts, Afternoon Coffee Break, Indianapolis weather, tornado watch, brain scan, MRI, lower back pain, heart monitor, tachycardia, long COVID, post-COVID symptoms, continuous glucose monitor, insurance appeal, Celeste Warren, Juneteenth, podcast guest, patient advocacy, chronic illness, medication reminders, self care, real talk, Black podcast, June 2026, investigative journalism,
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