The Native Land Podcast appeared at the 2025 AFROTECH Conference, where they engaged in political conversations with attendees in a welcoming, home-like setting.

During this year’s event, political correspondents Angela Rye and Tiffany Cross, along with Andrew Gillum, taped a live episode of the popular iHeartRadio show at the Innovation Stage. They allowed attendees to ask questions about the political landscape and offered thought-provoking insights into how policy and power shape the lives of Black Americans and other groups.

Following the taping, Rye and Cross sat down with Blavity to discuss how the podcast is still about informing, educating and moving people to act.

How ‘The Native Land Pod’ keeps evolving

Rye and Cross talked about building power offline through resources and tour stops, choosing smart engagement over empty debate, as well as pushing audiences to be more resourceful, verify news, and think beyond circulating clips. After recently crossing the 100-episode mark and adding Bakari Sellers to the lineup, Rye and Cross said this next chapter is about sharpening focus without losing the core mission.

“We have always desired to inform, to educate, to engage folks politically, and to get people involved. I think that we end every show with calls to action for that reason. We want people to lean in,” Rye told Blavity. “One of my proudest moments with the show was watching how people engaged with the petition to pardon Marilyn Mosby. I think that it represented not just what we can do as [the] Native Land Pod, but what a Native Land Pod community could do when we really bring our minds and hearts together. I do not think that it is going to shift at all with Bakari.”

“I think Black people do not have the capacity or privilege to even respond to the greater good sometimes because we are always responding to a crisis in our own lives,” Cross added. “We have never really reached true equality. There has never been a time where we were just sitting around, exhaling like, life is good. We are dealing with our own personal crisis and family issues.”

Andrew Gillum, Angela Rye, and Tiffany speaking at the 2025 AFROTECH Conference. (Photo: Adrianna Hall)

With that lens of informed action and the daily pressures our communities shoulder, Rye and Cross brought the dialogue to the most immediate lever of power close to home: participation in local ballots.

“It is the 60th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act this year. We have less of the Voting Rights Act than we have ever had. Section 4 and Section 5 are gone. Section 2 is hanging in the balance before the Supreme Court right now. There were arguments on Section 2, whether Section 2 is constitutional, just two weeks ago,” Rye stressed. “When you do not have the protections, how will you act if you still take this franchise for granted? I do not think it is a privilege. I think it is our right. It should be a constitutional right. If we do not exercise our franchise, it may not be here for us to exercise.”

What matters more now: choice or clout?

In a moment where platforms and politics collide, Cross talked about how Black voices deserve multiple lanes without blacklisting. Marc Lamont Hill, being a co-host on The Joe Budden Podcast, was referenced as an example.

“For me, my intention was that Marc should not be there. The subtext is that should not be Marc’s only option. Marc should have an option to be on a CNN, on an Al Jazeera, and on a Joe Budden [show] if that is where he chooses to be. He should not be blindsided or kicked out or blacklisted from mainstream media because he expresses an opinion that is unpopular at the time,” she said.

Cross added, “Before it was cool to support Palestine, Marc had already pursued graduate studies studying Arab issues. He understands Middle East policy very well. For all of us who know him, we can say emphatically [that] he is not anti-Semitic. He was bold enough to speak his truth, and Black people have always done that.”

Attendees during Andrew Gillum, Angela Rye, and Tiffany’s discussion at the 2025 AFROTECH Conference. (Photo: Adrianna Hall)

Additionally, Cross mentioned that engagement should be grounded in psychological safety, and the goal is to inform the community, not feed the outrage machine.

“If people get something out of what Marc is saying in that space, I applaud it. As long as he feels, and I will use Angela’s term ‘psychologically safe’ there, then yes,” she said. “I hope everybody who heard that conversation meets the challenge to spend more time informing the community and less time trafficking in things that I find to be toxic, insulting to women, and insulting to our people as a whole.”

This led Rye to point to their internal culture as the model, where curiosity and context come before critique.

“We have a family on our pod where we give each other the benefit of the doubt. It would be nice if, as a people, we worked harder to find points of understanding,” Rye said. “Maybe the reason Tiffany is saying something is not her ministry is because she grew up having these arguments, and her bandwidth for it is waning. Maybe she feels called to do something different in this moment. It would be really nice if people got more curious and said, ‘Help me understand why.’ I hope our platform provides that.”

How ‘The Native Land Pod’ is taking civic conversations beyond its typical realm

As feeds get faster and attention spans shrink, Rye and Cross shared what it will take to rebuild habits of reading, learning, and following facts beyond the headline.

“When it comes to readership, I need people to understand that not every piece of information is going to come to you with a little hip-hop beat and a TikTok dance to it,” Cross said. “It actually requires your focus and you have responsibility as a citizen, but more importantly as a Black person, to have responsibility over your own life and livelihood, to take the time to read. If we are in a space where somebody telling you to read something is considered elitist, then we are further behind than I thought.”

The Native Land Pod co-hosts have taken their podcast out of the studio and on the road to meet their fans and community in real life in hopes of showing the Black community “where their power lies.” With a soft launch of the podcast’s Substack on October 8, they shared the stories and opinions that will live beyond the podcast, offering room for deeper dives and timely takes.

“One thing this platform gives us that I am really looking forward to is the opportunity for people to be direct with us. They can receive things directly from us, in video and in print, that they have been starved from,” Rye said. “There are people who are our friends who have lost their jobs in major publications and major newspapers throughout the country. We want to make sure they are getting information that is unfiltered, not ‘What is Donald Trump going to say about this.’ It is the raw, unadulterated truth.”

tiffany cross

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