An empty playground above dark soil and buried remains, with the words The Blood in Our Soil: Beneath the laughter. Beneath the swings. Beneath our feet.

About the project

Violence is not only something that happens.

It is something that is organized—through land, through labor, through law, and through the conditions of everyday life.

The central argument

It is built into the land itself.

The places we move through every day are not neutral. They carry the imprint of decisions about power, race, labor, and control, often in ways that are easy to overlook unless you know how.

The Blood in Our Soil is a narrative, nonfiction podcast that examines violence as a spatial and structural phenomenon rather than a series of isolated events.

In each episode, I trace how particular places carry the imprint of decisions about power, extraction, race, and control. The question is never only what happened here. It is how that history remains active in the present.

Across seasons, the series expands into more intimate and less visible terrains while holding to the same central claim: violence is structured into the conditions of everyday life.

Creator and host

Tomi Castle-White, PhD

Tomi Castle-White is an anthropologist and writer whose work examines how inequality, space, violence, and power shape everyday life. Her scholarship is grounded in extensive ethnographic fieldwork, including years living and working in a Brazilian favela.

The Blood in Our Soil brings that anthropological way of seeing to American landscapes: careful attention to what is visible, what is missing, and who benefits from the way a place has been made.