Code Switch: Recent Episodes
NPR
What's CODE SWITCH? It's the fearless conversations about race that you've been waiting for. Hosted by journalists of color, our podcast tackles the subject of race with empathy and humor. We explore how race affects every part of society — from politics and pop culture to history, food and everything in between. This podcast makes all of us part of the conversation — because we're all part of the story. Code Switch was named Apple Podcasts' first-ever Show of the Year in 2020.
Want to level up your Code Switch game? Try Code Switch Plus. Your subscription supports the show and unlocks a sponsor-free feed. Learn more at plus.npr.org/codeswitch
How the criminal legal system considers who is and isn't Native, and what that means for the Black people who are members of tribal nations. This reporting is part of an audio documentary from Audible called Tribal Justice: The Struggle for Black Rights on Native Land.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
The way football is played and who plays it — from the pee-wees to the pros — tells us so much about race, labor and power in the United States. In a conversation with cultural anthropologist Tracie Canada we explore how starting from young ages, Black players are nudged towards more physically taxing positions that require more strength, athleticism, speed. That affects who gets injured, how they're cared for and how they get paid.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
Critics point out the apparent hypocrisy of a pro-Black rapper like Kendrick Lamar headlining the Super Bowl halftime show, since the NFL isn't exactly an institution that's known for its support of Black lives. So on this episode, we're digging into the history of hip hop and how it's been co-opted.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
Parker has been trying to find her place in the banjo world. So this week, she talks to Black banjo players like Grammy nominee Rhiannon Giddens about creating community and reclaiming an instrument that's historically already theirs.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
Martin Luther King Jr. was relatively unpopular when he was assassinated. But the way Americans of all political stripes invoke his memory today, you'd think he was held up as a hero. In this episode, we hear how King's legacy got co-opted.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
Comedian Youngmi Mayer talks about how her Korean family uses humor as a tool for survival. She gets into the Korean comedic tradition and why the saddest stuff is what makes them laugh the hardest.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
How should Black parents talk to their kids about the police? Gene gets into it with his friend Chenjerai Kumanyika, host of Empire City, a podcast about the history of the NYPD. Chenjerai's show sprang out of his own attempts to talk with his young daughter about the police and what they do.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
Happy New Year, fam! This year, we're celebrating Ecuadorian style: by burning away what we want to let go of from last year and creating space for moving ahead with this year. Code Switch producer Xavier Lopez takes us on his journey to explore the tradition of his childhood, learn its origins, and honor it in his life in New York today.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
Shot and severely injured while visiting family in Vermont in 2023, Hisham Awartani grapples with his recovery in the U.S., and the unfolding war at home in the West Bank.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
Even before Luigi Mangione was arrested for killing United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, the reaction to the shooter was far different than other instances of gun violence.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
Twenty-five years ago, a boy named Eliaán Gonzaález appeared — remarkably alive — in the waters off the coast of Miami. Immediately, his fate became the subject of an international debate: Should he stay in the U.S.? Or should he be returned to Cuba, to live with his father? From our play cousins at Futuro Studios, this is part of their series Chess Piece: The Elián González Story.
We want to hear from you! Please tell us what you think about Code Switch by taking our short survey. Thank you!
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
In his new book, The Black Utopians, author Aaron Robertson tells the story of how Black folks have created many different versions of utopian communities throughout history — and why those communities tend to be especially meaningful during times of political tension and racial unrest.
We want to hear from our listeners about what you like about Code Switch and how we could do better. Please tell us what you think by taking our short survey, and thank you!
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
We continue our conversation about the hellscape of modern motherhood, and look into an alternative to the tradwife lifestyle.
We want to hear from our listeners about what you like about Code Switch and how we could do better. Please tell us what you think by taking our short survey, and thank you!
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
Motherhood in the U.S. is revered. Actual mothers? Not so much. But momfluencers and tradwives are stepping in to fill that void. We dive into that world to understand how it intersects with the incoming presidential administration, what it has to do with white supremacy, and where moms of color fit in.
We want to hear from our listeners about what you like about Code Switch and how we could do better. Please tell us what you think by taking our short survey, and thank you!
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
What lessons should we all be taking from the historic match-up between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris? New York Times political correspondent Astead Herndon says the big takeaway from this election isn't the divide between Republicans and Democrats, it's the divide between political elites and the American public. And he says it may be time to rethink our presumptions about how much voters care about representation.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
There are wild stories about the fraudsters who pretend to be Indigenous, but sometimes casting doubt on people's indigeneity can cause more harm than good. On this episode we hear from the person behind the "Alleged Pretendians List" and someone whose name appeared on that controversial list. The problem? He's legitimately Native.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
The Code Switch team spent Election Day talking to folks about how the outcome might impact them. From green card holding Trump supporters in Queens, to first-time voters at Harris' watch party in DC, we bring you this time capsule of the day before we knew.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
As we take in the news of another Donald Trump administration, we thought who better to turn the mic over to than the hosts of NPR's Politics Podcast.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
The manosphere is a sprawling online ecosystem aimed at disgruntled men. Now a subset of the manosphere aimed at Black men is exposing cracks in Black voters' steadfast support of Democrats. On this episode, we take a look at how the Black manosphere came to be and wonder: could this loose community of aggrieved dudes swing the election?
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
That's how Nagle begins her new book and how she frames the version of history she's telling. The book digs into the past and future of Native sovereignty through the lens of one of the most significant Supreme Court rulings for Native Americans in over 100 years.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
We travel to Dearborn, aka the "capital of Arab America." The Dearbornites we met said that the war in Gaza is the key issue on their minds as they consider how to cast their ballots. What these voters ultimately decide could have huge consequences for the whole country.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
This week on Ask Code Switch, we're getting into the question a lot of minorities face when climbing the ladder at work – am I rising because I'm talented or because I'm tokenized?
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
In the year since the devastating Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed. Even more have been injured or displaced. Still, many Palestinians across the diaspora feel that they aren't allowed to share their stories — that the fullness of their humanity is too often reduced to a few soundbites on the news, or images of people dying. So on this episode, we're revisiting conversations with Fady Joudah and Tariq Luthun — two Palestinian American poets who have tried to carve out space to expand the kind of stories that Palestinians are allowed to tell.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
This week on Ask Code Switch, when it comes to race and dating, how important is diversity in your dating history? What does the race of our past romances say about us? And how do we know when we've crossed the line from preference to fetish?
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
This week, we're looking into the endgame of the racist and false rumors targeting Haitian immigrants. Are the lies being told about migrants across the country part of a strategy to land a bigger lie: that undocumented immigrants could steal the election?
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
Today on Ask Code Switch, we're talking about taste. How we eat, why we prefer certain foods, and where those preferences come from. We're getting into all the things that shape and change our taste buds, from the genes you inherit to falling in love.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
As we close in on the election, it's Trump-supporting Latinos that some pollsters believe could decide this race. So how did we get here? In her new book, Defectors, Paola Ramos explains that part of the story of being Latino has always been this temptation to defect.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
Today on Ask Code Switch, we tackle a question about race, bike lanes and gentrification. Who are bike lanes serving? Are these safety measures protecting everyone equally, or are bike advocates on the wrong side of progress?
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
B.A. Parker brings us around the country to see what access to books is looking like for students in Texas, librarians in Idaho and her own high school English teacher in Pennsylvania.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
This week on Ask Code Switch, we're getting into the politics and power dynamics of race and dishes in the workplace (which is more fraught than you might think). When no one is "technically" the "dishwasher" at work...who's washing the dishes and should you feel some type of way about it?
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
This week on Code Switch, we're doing a different kind of immigration coverage. We're telling a New York story: one that celebrates the beautiful, everyday life of the immigrant. Code Switch producer, Xavier Lopez and NPR immigration reporter, Jasmine Garsd spend a day at Flushing Meadows Corona Park.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
Ask Code Switch is back! Lori Lizarraga and the Code Switch team tackle all new listener questions this fall. From the tacky and tricky to the cringe and candid – we're bringing our race advice to the questions you're scared to ask.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
Michael Vargas Arango was having a fairly typical day — hanging out at his home in Medellín, playing Xbox with one of his friends. Only, when he spoke to his mom during the day, he realized that she had no idea what "friend" he was talking about — she hadn't seen or heard anyone besides her son in the house all day. That was the first inkling either of them had that Michael was dealing with something unusual. It was the beginning of the long road toward Michael being diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. On this episode, we're talking to Michael about how he experiences the world, and how he's helping to educate people about what it really means to live with a rare, stigmatized, and widely misunderstood mental health condition.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
It's been more than ten months since devastating violence began unfolding in Israel and Gaza. And in the midst of all the death, so many people are trying to better understand what's going on in that region, and how the United States is implicated in it. So on this episode, we're looking back to the writing of James Baldwin, whose views on the country transformed significantly over the course of his life. His thoughts offer some ideas about how to grapple with trauma, and how to bridge the gap between places and ideas that, on their surface, might seem oceans apart.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
How do you participate in a faith practice that has a rough track record with racism? That's what our play-cousin J.C. Howard gets into in this week's episode of Code Switch. He talks to us about Black Christians who, like him for a time, found their spiritual homes in white evangelical churches.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
Reality TV has been referred to as a funhouse mirror of our culture. But even with its distortions, it can reflect back to us what we accept as a society – especially when it comes to things like gender, sexuality and race.
On today's episode we get into all of that, zeroing in on the Bachelorette, but also looking at a dating show that's trying to do it differently.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
Why are some female athletes asked to prove her womanhood? To understand how we got here, we're bringing you episode one of Tested, a new podcast series by our play cousins over at Embedded, made in partnership with CBC in Canada.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
Summer is a time when many Americans are taking off from work and setting their sights on far-off vacation destinations: tropical beaches, fairy-tale cities, sun-drenched countrysides. But in her book Airplane Mode, the reluctant travel writer Shahnaz Habib warns of recklessly embracing what she calls "passport privilege," — and how that can skew peoples' images of what the world is and who it belongs to.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
For some authors, finding their book on a "banned" list can feel almost like an accolade, putting them right there with classics like The Bluest Eye and To Kill a Mockingbird. But the reality is, most banned books never get the kind of recognition or readership that the most famous ones do.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
With Kamala Harris entering the presidential race, we look back at what has shaped her personally and politically —from being the self-described "top cop" of California, to taking on a former president with dozens of felony convictions.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
For decades now, drag queens have captured the national imagination. Drag kings, on the other hand, have been relegated to a less prominent position in pop culture. But today on the show, we're telling the story of one Elsie Saldaña — aka El Daña. As someone who started performing in drag in 1965, she's now considered one of the oldest drag kings still performing in the U.S. Over the course of her long performance career, many forces have converged that could have stopped her from taking to the stage. But today, almost 60 years after her debut, she hasn't stopped yet.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
Every summer B.A. Parker returns to Creswell, North Carolina, where her family still has a farm. But she's mostly avoided actually going to the nearby site where her ancestors were enslaved. This week, we revisit the second of two episodes, where Parker and her mom decide to go back to the plantation.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
In part one of two episodes, B.A. Parker meets people who, like her, are grappling with how to honor their enslaved ancestors. She asks herself: what kind of descendant does she want to be?
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
This week we're bringing you the first episode in a new series called Inheriting, created in collaboration with our friends at LAist Studios. In each episode, NPR's Emily Kwong sits down with Asian American and Pacific Islander families and explores how one event in history can ripple through generations.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
Author Mike Curato wrote Flamer as a way to help young queer kids, like he once was, better understand and accept themselves. It was met with immediate praise and accolades — until it wasn't. When the bookgot caught up in a wave of Texas-based book bans, suddenly the narrative changed. And like so many books that address queer identity, Flamer quickly became a flashpoint in a long, messy culture war that tried to distort the nature of the book.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
The promise of "40 acres and a mule", is often thought of as a broken one. But it turns out, some freed people actually received land as reparations after the Civil War. And what happened to that land and the families it was given to is the subject of a new series, 40 Acres and a Lie, by our colleagues at Reveal and the Center for Public Integrity.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
As anti-trans legislation has ramped up, historian Jules Gill-Peterson turns the lens to the past in her book, A Short History of Trans Misogyny. This week, we talk about how panics around trans femininity are shaped by wider forces of colonialism, segregation and class interests.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
This week, we're turning our sights on the word "felon", and looking into what it tells us (and can't tell us) about the 19 million people in the U.S. — like Donald Trump and Hunter Biden — carrying that designation around.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
President Biden just issued an executive order that can temporarily shut down the U.S.-Mexico border to asylum seekers once a daily threshold of crossings is exceeded. On this episode, we dig into how the political panic surrounding what many are calling an immigration "crisis" at the border, isn't new. And in fact...it's a problem of our own creation.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
As war continues to rage in the Middle East, attention has been turned to how American Jews, Muslims, and Palestinians relate to the state of Israel. But when we talk about the region, American Christians, particularly evangelical Christians, are often not part of that story. But their political support for Israel is a major driver for U.S. policy — in part because Evangelicals make up an organized, dedicated constituency with the numbers to exert major influence on U.S. politics.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
This week Code Switch digs into The Ministry of Time, a new book that author Kailene Bradley describes as a "romance about imperialism." It focuses on real-life Victorian explorer Graham Gore, who died on a doomed Arctic expedition in 1847. But in this novel, time travel is possible and Gore is brought to the 21st century where he's confronted with the fact that everyone he's ever known is dead, that the British Empire has collapsed, and that perhaps he was a colonizer.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
As protests continue to rock the campuses of colleges and universities, a familiar set of questions is being raised: Are these protests really being led by students? Or are the real drivers of the civil disobedience outsiders, seizing on an opportunity to wreak chaos and stir up trouble?
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
Daniel Olivas's novel puts a new spin on the age-old Frankstein story. In this retelling, 12 million "reanimated" people provide a cheap workforce for the United States...and face a very familiar type of bigotry.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
This week on the podcast, we're revisiting a conversation we had with Chin about her book, Mott Street. Through decades of painstaking research, the fifth-generation New Yorker discovered the stories of how her ancestors bore and resisted the weight of the Chinese Exclusion laws in the U.S. – and how the legacy of that history still affects her family today.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
In the wake of October 7, and the bombardment of Gaza by the Israeli government, many American Jews have found themselves questioning something that had long felt like a given: that if you were Jewish, you would support Israel, and that was that. But as more Jews speak out against Israel's actions in Gaza, it's exposing deep rifts within Jewish communities – including ones that are threatening to break apart friendships, families, and institutions.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
The Panama Canal has been dubbed the greatest engineering feat in human history. It's also (perhaps less favorably) been called the greatest liberty mankind has ever taken with Mother Nature. But due to climate change, the Canal is drying up and fewer than half of the ships that used to pass through are now able to do so. So how did we get here? Today on the show, we're talking to Cristina Henriquez, the author of a new novel that explores the making of the Canal. It took 50,000 people from 90 different countries to carve the land in two — and the consequences of that extraordinary, nature-defying act are still echoing through our present.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
With the news of O.J. Simpson's death on Thursday, we're revisiting our reporting from 2016, where we took a look into how Simpson went from being "too famous to be Black," to becoming a stand-in for the way Black people writ-large were mistreated by the U.S. carceral system.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
What's a portrait of Frederick Douglass doing hanging in an Irish-themed pub in Washington, D.C.? To get to the answer, Parker and Gene dive deep into the long history of solidarity and exchange between Black civil rights leaders and Irish republican activists, starting with Frederick Douglass' visit to Ireland in 1845.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
It's that time of year again: time to file your taxes. And this week on the pod, we're revisiting our conversation with Dorothy A. Brown, a tax expert and author of The Whiteness Of Wealth: How The Tax System Impoverishes Black Americans And How To Fix It. She talks through the racial landmines in our tax code and how your race plays a big role in whether you get audited, how much you might owe the IRS, which tax breaks you can get, and even which benefits you can claim.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
Many Lakota people agree: It's imperative to revitalize the Lakota language. But how exactly to do that is a matter of broader debate. Should Lakota be codified and standardized to make learning it easier? Or should the language stay as it always has been, defined by many different ways of writing and speaking? We explore this complex, multi-generational fight that's been unfolding in the Lakota Nation, from Standing Rock to Pine Ridge.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
This episode is brought to you by our play cousins over at NPR's It's Been A Minute. Brittany Luse chops it up with New Yorker writer and podcast host Vinson Cunningham to discuss his debut novel Great Expectations. It's a period piece that follows the story of a young man working on an election campaign that echoes Obama's 2008 run. Brittany and Vinson discuss American politics as a sort of religion - and why belief in politics has changed so much in the last decade.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
We've probably said it a hundred times on Code Switch — biological race is not a real thing. So why is race still used to help diagnose certain conditions, like keloids or cystic fibrosis? On this episode, Dr. Andrea Deyrup breaks it down for us, and unpacks the problems she sees with practicing race-based medicine.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
Gene Demby and NPR's Huo Jingnan dive into a conspiracy theory about how "global elites" are forcing people to eat bugs. And no huge surprise — the theory's popularity is largely about its loudest proponents' racist fear-mongering.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
In February of 1942 after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government issued an executive order to incarcerate people of Japanese descent. That legacy has become a defining story of Japanese American identity. In this episode, B.A. Parker and producer Jess Kung explore how Japanese American musicians across generations turn to that story as a way to explore and express identity. Featuring Kishi Bashi, Erin Aoyama and Mary Nomura.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
In the U.S., flavored cigarettes have been banned since 2009, with one glaring exception: menthols. That exception was supposed to go away in 2023, but the Biden administration quietly delayed the ban on menthols. Why? Well, an estimated 85 percent of Black smokers smoke menthols — and some (potentially suspect) polls have indicated that a ban on menthols would chill Biden's support among Black people. Of course, it's more complicated than that. The story of menthol cigarettes is tied up in policing, advertising, influencer-culture, and the weaponization of race and gender studies. Oh, and a real-life Black superhero named Mandrake the Magician.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
To celebrate the history of Black romance, Gene and Parker are joined by reporter Nichole Hill to explore the 1937 equivalent of dating apps — the personals section of one of D.C.'s Black newspapers. Parker attempts to match with a Depression-era bachelor, and along the way we learn about what love meant two generations removed from slavery.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
It's 1969 at the University of Wyoming, where college football is treated like a second religion. But after racist treatment at an away game, 14 Black players decide to take a stand, and are hit with life-changing consequences. From our play cousins across the pond, our own B.A. Parker hosts the BBC World Service's Amazing Sport Stories: The Black 14. Listen to the rest of the series wherever you get your podcasts.
*This episode contains lived experiences which involve the use of strong racist language.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
"Three springs ago, I lost the better part of my mind," Naomi Jackson wrote in an essay for Harper's Magazine. On this episode, Jackson shares her experience with biopolar disorder. She talks about how she's had to decipher what fears stem from her illness and which are backed by the history of racism.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
Taylor Swift has become an American icon, (and she's got the awards, sales, and accolades to prove it.) With that status, she's often been celebrated as someone whose music is authentically representing the interior lives of young women and adolescent girls. On this episode, we're asking: Why? What is it about Swift's persona — and her fandom — that feels so deeply connected to girlhood? And, because this is Code Switch, what does all of that have to do with race?
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
After leaving the Pentecostal Church, reporter Jess Alvarenga has been searching for a new spiritual home. They take us on their journey to find spirituality that includes the dining room dungeon of a dominatrix, Buddhist monks taking magic mushrooms and the pulpit of a Pentecostal church. This episode is a collaboration with our friends at LAist Studios. Special thanks to the Ferriss, UC Berkeley's Psychedelic Journalism program for their support.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
The New York City Housing Authority is the biggest public housing program in the country. But with limited funding to address billions of dollars of outstanding repairs, NYCHA is turning to a controversial plan to change how public housing operates. Fanta Kaba of WNYC's Radio Rookies brings the story of how this will affect residents and the future of housing, as a resident of a NYCHA complex in the Bronx herself.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
When people think back to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, they often remember just the bullet points: Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, and voila. But on this episode, we're hearing directly from the many women who organized for months about what exactly it took to make the boycott happen.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
Martin Luther King Jr. was relatively unpopular when he was assassinated. But the way Americans of all political stripes invoke his memory today, you'd think he was held up as a hero. In this episode, we talk about the cooptation of King's legacy with Hajar Yazdiha, author of The Struggle for the People's King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
Classrooms in Arkansas were at the center of school desegregation in the 1950s. Now, with the LEARNS Act, they're in the spotlight again. Code Switch comes to you live from Little Rock, Arkansas this week to unpack the latest education bill and how it echoes themes from decades past.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
For decades, the ingredients, dishes and chefs that are popularized have been filtered through the narrow lens of a food and publishing world dominated by mostly white, mostly male decision-makers. But with more food authors of color taking center stage, is that changing? In this episode, we dive deep into food publishing, past and present.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
It's that time of year again, fam, when we look back at the past 12 months and think, "WHOA, HOW'D THAT GO BY SO FAST?" So we're taking a beat: for this week's episode, each one of us who makes Code Switch is getting on the mic to reflect on — and recommend — an episode we loved from 2023.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
The Color Purple remake drops this week and to celebrate, we're bringing you this special episode from our play cousins over at Pop Culture Happy Hour. Alice Walker's novel The Color Purple has been adapted a few times. Next week, the new movie The Color Purple hits theaters – it's based on the Tony-winning musical. The 1985 film is remembered as a fan-favorite centering Black women's lives, but this acclaimed adaptation was received quite differently among female viewers and male viewers. Today, we revisit our episode about the original film from our three-part documentary series Screening Ourselves, which explored films through the lens of representation – and misrepresentation – on screen.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
"You can't meditate yourself out of a 40-hour work week with no childcare and no paid sick days," says Dr. Pooja Lakshmin. But when you're overworked and overwhelmed, what can you do? On this episode, host B.A. Parker asks: What are your options when a bubble bath won't cut it?
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
We're bringing you an extra treat this week from our play cousins over at It's Been A Minute: In the credits for 'Renaissance: A Film By Beyoncé' the Queen Bee makes it clear who is in charge. Written by? Beyoncé. Directed by? Beyoncé. Produced by? Beyoncé. And of course, starring...Beyoncé. For someone who is so in control of their own image, what is spoken and what is unspoken are equally loud.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
Kai Cheng Thom is no stranger to misanthropy. There have been stretches of her life where she's felt burdened by anger, isolation, and resentment toward other people. And not without reason. Her identities, especially as a trans woman and a former sex worker, have frequently made her a locus for other people's fear and hatred. But at a certain point, Kai decided to embark on a radical experiment: to see if she could "fall back in love with being human." The result was a series of letters, poems, exercises and prayers that let Kai confront some of the most painful moments of her life, and then try to move past them.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
Traveling is supposed to open your mind and expand your horizons — but what if it doesn't? In her new book Airplane Mode, author Shahnaz Habib suggests that sometimes, traveling does more to enforce our ideas about the world than to upend them. Which means that people with "passport privilege" — AKA, the ability to travel freely from country to country — may end up feeling like the stars of some massive international adventure, while people whose travel is more restricted feel like perpetual interlopers.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
The word "reservation" implies "reserved" – as in, this land is reserved for Native Americans. But most reservation land actually isn't owned by tribes. That's true for the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe in northern Minnesota, where the tribe owns just a tiny fraction of its reservation land. But just northwest of Leech Lake is Red Lake: one of the only reservations in the country where the tribe owns all of its land.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
On this week's Code Switch, we hear from two Palestinian American poets who talk about what it's like to be Palestinian American in the U.S. Fady Joudah and Tariq Luthun say the way their stories are told — or aren't told — has contributed to what they see as an erasure of their identities, and often of their humanity.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
OK, not exactly a computer — more like, the wild array of technologies that inform what we consume on our computers and phones. Because on this episode, we're looking at how AI and race bias intersect. Safiya Noble, a professor at UCLA and the author of the book Algorithms of Oppression talks us through some of the messy issues that arise when algorithms and tech are used as substitutes for good old-fashioned human brains.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
We're bringing you something special from our play cousins over at Embedded: the first episode of a three part series about the often neglected history of trans youth in America. We meet Zen, a Mexican-American, New Orleans native, who is coming into their transness, as we learn about an historic trans person, Bernard, from Alabama in the early 1900s, fighting to be seen.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
More than a decade since B.A. Parker last dabbled in the Black punk scene, she heads to a punk a show, and remembers a question from James Spooner: "What is more liberating than a mosh pit full of smiling Black faces?" Parker talks to James about what it means to be a Black punk, creating the Afropunk Festival and its evolution, and a new anthology he co-edited called Black Punk Now.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
Ada Limón is many things: the U.S. Poet Laureate, a recently named MacArthur "Genius," a Latina, a summer person becoming a fall person. But underneath all those outer identities, she's still in search for the "original animal at [her] core."
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
Being a new parent is exhausting at the best of times. There are diapers to change, bottles to fill, screaming sobs to quiet down. But beyond all the routine chores that come with parenting, there are the larger social questions of how to raise a kid in a complex, unjust, and ever-changing world.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
In her memoir Rivermouth, author Alejandra Oliva recounts her experiences working as a translator and interpreter for people seeking asylum in the U.S. But as she navigates the world of immigration advocacy, she starts to grapple with the question of what it means to help, and what it means to "want to star in the helping."
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
South Baltimore has some of the most polluted air in the country. Local teenagers are fighting polluters back, and slowly building toward climate justice.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
In the past decade, the problem of mass incarceration has gotten increased attention and thought. But in his new book, Mass Supervision, Vincent Schiraldi argues that in those conversations, people often neglect to think about probation and parole — two of the biggest feeders to the U.S.'s prison population. These systems surveil close to four million Americans, which Schiraldi says is both a huge waste of resources and a massive human rights violation. On this episode, we're talking to Schiraldi about how probation and parole came to be, why they're no longer working as they were once supposed to, and why he thinks they might need to be done away with entirely.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
In June, the Supreme Court banned affirmative action at colleges and universities across the country, with one glaring exception: military academies. On this episode, we're asking — why?
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
For centuries, the idea of the "American Dream" has been a powerful narrative for many immigrant communities. But for just as long, many African Americans have known that the American Dream was never meant to include them. So what happens when those beliefs collide? Today ten percent of the Black population in the U.S. are immigrants, and many grapple with this question. In this episode, we'll hear from Claude Gatebuke, who moved from Kigali to Nashville as a teenager in the wake of the Rwandan genocide. He talks about how the move to the U.S. likely saved his life, while simultaneously challenging his belief that he could have a full, meaningful future as a Black man.
This week, the NFL is gearing up for the start of its 104th season. But as this new chapter begins, we're looking at some of the league's old problems with race and diversity — ones that have implications for the coaches, the players, and the fans.
Bad Bunny, the genre- and gender norm-defying Puerto Rican rapper, is one of the biggest music stars on the planet. He has also provided a global megaphone for Puerto Rican discontent. In this episode, we take a look at how Bad Bunny became the unlikely voice of resistance in Puerto Rico. This episode originally aired in January 2023.
When a comedian of color makes a joke, is it always about race, even if it's not about race? Code Switch talks to comedians Aparna Nancherla, Brian Bahe and Maz Jobrani about how and why race makes an appearance in their jokes. Plus, one of our own reveals her early-career dabbling in comedy.
When Richard J. Lonsinger's birth mother passed away in 2010, he wasn't included in the distribution of her estate. Feeling hurt and excluded, he asked a judge to re-open her estate, to give him a part of one particular asset: an Osage headright. But the more Lonsinger learned about the history of the headrights, the more he began to wonder who was really entitled to them, and where he fit in.
For hip-hop's not-official-but-kind-of-official 50th birthday, we dig into its many contradictions. From the legend of the South Bronx block party where hip-hop was born to the multi-billion-dollar global industry and tool for U.S. diplomacy it has become, America's relationship with hip-hop — and the people who make it — is complicated.
Dungeons & Dragons is one of the most popular tabletop role-playing games of all time. But it has also helped cement some ideas about how we create and define race in fantasy — and in the tangible world. This week we revisit a deep dive into that game. What we find about racial stereotypes and colonialist supremacy is illuminating.
There are race books, and there are beach reads, and never the twain shall meet. You know that old truism, right? Well, this is Code Switch (the show about race and identity and romance and drama from NPR), and we weren't willing to accept that dichotomy. So on this episode, we're bringing you a bouquet of our favorite summer thrillers, love stories, memoirs and more — all of which have something to say about race.
Gene Demby and NPR's Huo Jingnan dive into a conspiracy theory about how "global elites" are forcing people to eat bugs. And no huge surprise — the theory's popularity is largely about its loudest proponents' racist fear-mongering.
Brian de los Santos always thought of Mexico as his "home" — despite not having been able to return to his country of birth for three decades. But when he finally got a chance to visit, his conception of what home was and where he belonged totally shifted.
This week, we're sharing the first episode of "Buffalo Extreme," a three-part series from our play cousins at NPR's Embedded. The series follows a Black cheer squad, their moms and their coaches in the year after the racist massacre at the Jefferson Street Tops in Buffalo, New York, just blocks from their gym. NPR hands the mic to the girls and women in that community as they navigate the complicated path to recovery in the year after.
In the second of two episodes, Code Switch co-host B.A. Parker is figuring out what kind of descendant she wants to be. Parker and her mom decide to go back to the plantation where their ancestors were enslaved, because despite the circumstances of slavery, this is where their family began.
Code Switch co-host B.A. Parker digs into what it means to maintain the legacy of her ancestors. In part one of two episodes, Parker goes to a symposium for descendants of slavery and meets people who, like her, are caretakers of "culturally significant historical places."
How do you participate in a faith practice that has a rough track record with racism? That's what our play-cousin J.C. Howard gets into on this week's episode of Code Switch. He talks to us about Black Christians who, like him for a time, found their spiritual homes in white evangelical churches.
On this week's Code Switch, producer Kumari Devarajan finds her demographic clone in actor and comedian D'Lo. Kumari found that when you share so much in common with a stranger who is putting their business on front street for the world to see, it can feel like they're sharing your secrets, too.
Ava Chin's family has been in the U.S. for generations — but Ava was disheartened to learn that so much of what they had experienced was totally absent from American history books. So she embarked on a journey to learn more about her ancestors, and in doing so, to work toward correcting the historical record for all Americans.
One of the most pivotal moments in Japanese American history was when the U.S. government uprooted more than 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry and forced them into incarceration camps. But there is another, less-known story about the tens of thousands of Japanese Americans who were living in Japan during World War II — and whose lives uprooted in a very different way.
The Supreme Court is about to decide on a case arguing that the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) discriminates against white foster parents. Journalist Rebecca Nagle explains how this decision could reverse centuries of U.S. law protecting the rights of Indigenous nations. "Native kids have been the tip of the spear in attacks on tribal sovereignty for generations."
"Three springs ago, I lost the better part of my mind," Naomi Jackson wrote in an essay for Harper's Magazine. On this episode, Jackson reads from that essay about her experience with mental illness, including how she has had to decipher which of her fears stem from her illness and which are backed by the history of racism.
K-pop disrupted pop culture in South Korea in the early 1990s, and later found fans around the world. Vivian Yoon was one of those fans, growing up thousands of miles away in Koreatown, Los Angeles. This week, we're sharing an episode of In K-Pop Dreaming, the second season of LAist's California Love podcast. In it, Yoon takes listeners on a journey to learn about the history behind the music that had defined her childhood.
In 2017, comedian Hari Kondabolu called out Hollywood's portrayals of South Asians with his documentary The Problem With Apu. The film was also a criticism of comedian Hank Azaria, who is white, for voicing the Indian character on The Simpsons. On this episode, Hari and Hank sit down to talk publicly for the first time about that callout and everything that has gone down since.
"You can't meditate yourself out of a 40-hour work week with no childcare and no paid sick days," says Dr. Pooja Lakshmin. But when you're overworked and overwhelmed, what actually can you do? On this episode, host B.A. Parker asks: What are your options when a bubble bath won't cut it?
You finally get through the confusing, stressful work of doing your taxes only to hear back from the IRS: you're being audited. And it turns out that your race plays a big role in whether you get that letter, how much you might owe the IRS, which tax breaks you can get, and even which benefits you can claim.
The male gaze objectifies, consumes and shames people for not fitting into a mold. This week, we're looking at how that affects women in hip-hop. Our play cousins at Louder Than A Riot bring us the voices of artists who won't let the male gaze dominate their careers, stories and personal lives.
Utang na loob is the Filipino concept of an eternal debt to others, be it family or friends, who do a favor for you. In this episode from 2022, we break down this "debt of the inner soul" — and discover a surprising side to this pre-colonial value.
We've all heard about Rosa Parks and her crucial role in the Montgomery bus boycott. But Parks was just one of the many women who organized for years to make that boycott a reality. In this episode, the women behind the boycott tell their own story.
Host B.A. Parker talks to Jasmin Savoy Brown, of the recently-released Scream 6, about playing a queer Black girl who lives. And film critics Richard Newby and Mallory Yu discuss how horror movies can actually help us empathize with each other
For decades, the ingredients, dishes and chefs that are popularized have been filtered through the narrow lens of a food and publishing world dominated by mostly white, mostly male decision-makers. But with more food authors of color taking center stage, is that changing? In this episode, we dive deep into food publishing, past and present.
This week, we revisit an episode from 2018 that looks into how discrimination not only degrades your health, but can cost you your life. We hear the story of Shalon Irving, who died after giving birth to her daughter. Black women like her are 243 percent more likely than white women to die of pregnancy- or childbirth-related causes in the United States. And the latest evidence further supports that this gap is caused by the "weathering" effects of racism.
Brett Woodson Bailey grew up knowing he was the descendant of "the father of Black history," Carter G. Woodson. He also grew up with the support and guidance of his "cousin" Craig Woodson, who is white. In this week's Code Switch, what it means when a Black family and a white family share a last name, and how the Black and white Woodsons became family.
From the dance floors of weddings and bar mitzvahs to the Billboard Hot 100, chances are, you've enjoyed some merengue music – think about the 1998 Puerto Rican hit 'Suavemente,' which topped charts across the globe. But did you know that merengue's path to global fame started in the Dominican Republic, before it made its way to Puerto Rico? In this episode, we hand the mic to our friends at La Brega to unpack the story behind that famous merengue single and how it sums up a complicated and tense history of cultural exchange.
The large majority of NFL players are people of color. The coaches on the sidelines? Not so much. In this episode, we're looking at the NFL's famous diversity plan and what it might tells us about why so many corporate initiatives like it don't work.
In this week's episode, we dive into the traditions and stories that shape Lunar New Year, and why violence and tragedy in the U.S. on the eve of the holiday cuts deep for celebrants. We also visit Monterey Park, California, and talk to its Asian American residents and neighbors about what the "ethnoburb" means to them beyond the shooting on January 21.
In this episode we turn to late 1960s Chicago, when three unlikely groups came together to form a coalition based on interracial solidarity. It's hard to imagine this kind of collaboration today, but we dove into how a group of Black radicals, Confederate flag-waving white Southerners, and street-gang-turned-activist Puerto Ricans found common ground.
Bad Bunny, the genre- and gender norm-defying Puerto Rican rapper, is one of the biggest music stars on the planet. He has also provided a global megaphone for Puerto Rican discontent. In this episode, we take a look at how Bad Bunny became the unlikely voice of resistance in Puerto Rico.
From the world of local TV news, meet Code Switch's newest co-host, Lori Lizarraga! Before she was born, her mother had the nickname "Lori" ready for her, even though her legal name is Laura. The story behind why starts more than a decade before she was born, when Lori's mom came to the U.S. as a kid and had to make a difficult decision.
How do race and class affect the way we eat? What does it mean to "eat like a white person?" And if food inequality isn't about "food deserts," what is it really about? We're getting into all those questions and more with Priya Fielding-Singh, author of the book, How the Other Half Eats.
Whether you're from Ushuaia or East Los Angeles, you've likely heard cumbia blaring from a stereo. From our play friends at NPR's Alt.Latino, Jasmine Garsd and Felix Contreras talk about their common love of the musical backbone of Latin America.
It wasn't until Lisa Phu had her own child that she started unlocking her mother's history. In her new 5-part series called Before Me, Lisa asks her mother, Lan, the questions she should have asked years ago. Lisa tells us what she learned in getting to know Lan in this way.
There are a lot of TV shows to watch out there - so the Code Switch team isn't trying to bring you a list of the "best." Instead, we're chatting about the shows we watched this year that we loved, and gave us something bigger to think about, from Abbott Elementary to Bel-Air.
Republican officials in Louisiana want to change how Black people are counted in voting maps. If their plan is successful, it could shrink the power of Black voters across the country — and further gut the Voting Rights Act.
So many of our perceptions of race have to do with color. How does that change if you've lived in both Black and white skin? Our Executive Producer Veralyn Williams, explores this question in conversation with her sister, Lovis. Lovis has vitiligo, a skin disease that causes loss of skin color in patches.
Bear Carrillo grew up knowing only a few details about his birth parents: when he was born they were university students, the first from their tribes to go to college, and they just couldn't afford to keep him. Decades later, a DNA test kit uncovers a new story.
This episode is excerpted from the Code Switch Live show at the Studebaker Theater in Chicago, featuring special guests José Olivarez, Sultan Salahuddin, Diallo Riddle and Adriana Cardona-Maguidad to talk all about Chicago. Musical guest KAINA provides music!
From BTS to Squid Game to high-end beauty standards, South Korea reigns as a global exporter of pop culture and entertainment. How does a country go from a war-decimated state just 70 years ago, to a major driver of global soft power? Through war, occupation, economic crisis, and national strategy, comes a global phenomenon - the Korean wave. This is an episode from our play cousins Throughline and originally aired September 8th, 2022.
Code Switch's host B.A. Parker, introduces us to our play cousin It's Been a Minute's new voice, Brittany Luse! In Brittany's first two episodes she talks about the representation and contextual history of Black women in politics and Hollywood.
You can follow us on Twitter and Instagram @NPRCodeSwitch, Parker @aparkusfarce, and the new host of It's Been A Minute Brittany Luse @BMLuse!
It's that time of year again: celebrations of the macabre hit a little too close to home and brush up against our country's very dark past. We talk about navigating fake horror amid what's actually terrifying and how scaring ourselves, on purpose, can help us. This episode first ran in October 2019.
More than 10,000 Native human remains are currently sitting in a storage facility in a Maryland suburb. This week, how one small tribe is fighting to get them back to Florida. This episode originally aired October 13, 2021.
Why build a fantasy world that still has racism? B.A. Parker moderates a discussion on Black science fiction and fantasy with authors Tochi Onyebuchi and Leslye Penelope at the National Book Festival.
NPR's Alt.Latino gets a reboot, and for its first episode, they speak with R&B darling Omar Apollo. Apollo shares what it's been like being a role model for queer Latinx kids and the pressure of having to watch what he says now that he's famous.
Dungeons & Dragons is one of the most popular tabletop roleplaying games of all time. But it has also helped cement some ideas about how we create and define race in fantasy — and in the tangible world. We take a deep dive into that game, and what we find about racial stereotypes and colonialist supremacy is illuminating.
Dungeons & Dragons is one of the most popular tabletop roleplaying games of all time. But it has also helped cement some ideas about how we create and define race in fantasy — and in the tangible world. We take a deep dive into that game, and what we find about racial stereotypes and colonialist supremacy is illuminating.
Recently, Republican governors have been sending migrants from the southern border to cities they deem more liberal under false pretenses. The political stunt echoes what segregationists 1962 called Reverse Freedom Rides. This episode originally aired in December 2019.
Recently, Republican governors have been sending migrants from the southern border to cities they deem more liberal under false pretenses. The political stunt echoes what segregationists 1962 called Reverse Freedom Rides. This episode originally aired in December 2019.
Nearly 20% of Americans turned to therapy in 2020. That had us wondering: What exactly can therapy accomplish? Today, we're sharing the stories of two Latinx people who tried to use therapy to understand and combat anti-Blackness in their own lives.
The cost of college has been on everyone's minds, especially with student debt cancellation. Pell Grants are one way many low income students have managed to pay for college. And they exist in large part because of one Black woman who often goes unmentioned.
The cost of college has been on everyone's minds, especially with student debt cancellation. Pell Grants are one way many low income students have managed to pay for college. And they exist in large part because of one Black woman who often goes unmentioned.
In Baynard Woods' new memoir, Inheritance: An Autobiography of Whiteness, Woods reflects on how growing up white in South Carolina impacted his life. He argues that it is crucial for white people in the U.S. to reckon with their personal histories.
When a comedian of color makes a joke, is it always about race, even if it's not about race? In part two of our comedians episodes, Code Switch talks to comedians Aparna Nancherla, Brian Bahe and Maz Jobrani about how and why race makes an appearance in their jokes.
What makes a great joke about race? In the first of two episodes, Code Switch talks to comedians Ziwe, Anjelah Johnson-Reyes and Joel Kim Booster about their favorite race joke they tell: What's its origin story? Why is it so funny? And what does it say about race in America?
The Starz hit show P-Valley takes audiences to a strip club in a fictional town in the Mississippi Delta. Part soap opera, part Southern Gothic, the show focuses on the interior lives of the Black women who work at the club — and the complex social dynamics that shape their lives.
Today on the show, we're bringing you the stories of two families grappling with how best to communicate across linguistic differences. In the first story, a young man sorts through how to talk to his parents about gender in Chinese, where the words for "he" and "she" sound exactly the same. Then, we follow a family who was advised to stop speaking their heritage language, Japanese, based on some outdated and incomplete research.
Fam: We finally have a new co-host of the Code Switch podcast! And we're just a tiny bit excited. So today on the show, we're introducing you to B.A. Parker. Gene chats with Parker about who she is, what drew her to the race beat, and how her encyclopedic knowledge of Oscars trivia will be an asset to Code Switch listeners.
In 1866, the Cherokee Nation promised citizenship for Black "freedmen" and their descendants. But more than a century later, the descendants of the freedman are calling foul on that promise being fulfilled. This episode, from our friends at The Experiment podcast (produced by WNYC and the Atlantic) gets into the messy history and fraught present.
Over the course of this season, we've explored a rich history and complicated present, but what about the future? In the final episode, we catch up with parents who became activated on both sides of the debate over the diversity plan. And, since the diversity plan never came to fruition, we ask...what now?
This week, we're talking about the podcasts that podcasters listen to. These are the shows that members of the Code Switch team cannot tear our ears away from. We think they'd be great for a long car ride, plane ride, or just regular day of vegging out. They get into everything from old people to food to the human body to Oprah. And — surprise, surprise — they all have a whole lot to do with race and identity.
Pat Mitchell is the longtime principal of P.S. 48 – an elementary school in Jamaica, Queens. And while she cares deeply about her students and her work, she has struggled with the growing challenges faced by her school community. In this bonus episode, we look at the pandemic through the eyes of one elementary school principal, and how Covid-19 rocked education in the district – especially on the Southside.
Many immigrants have described the feeling of being different people in different places. Maybe in one country, you're a little goofy, a little wild. In another, you're more serious — more of a planner. In this episode, which originally aired on Latino USA, Miguel Macias explores how his identity has been shaped by both Spain and the United States, leaving him in a state of limbo.
When the District 28 diversity planning process came around, many Chinese parents had already been activated a year earlier by the fight to defend the Specialized High School Admissions Test.
In this episode, we ask why gifted education gets so much attention, even though it affects relatively few students. How do we even define what it means to be "gifted"? And by focusing on these programs, whose needs do we overlook?
Tens of thousands of children were adopted from other countries by parents in the U.S., only to discover as adults a quirk in federal law that meant they had never been guaranteed American citizenship. Much like the Dreamers, these adoptees are now fighting for legal status to ensure they can stay with the only homes and families they've ever known.
In some ways, this entire season was prompted by the parents who organized against diversity planning in School District 28. So in this episode, we're going back to that one ugly meeting, where they unleashed their fear and anger into the rest of the community. So who are these parents, what do they believe and why? Moreover, why were they ready to fight so hard against a plan that didn't exist?
It's the second year that Juneteenth has been a federal holiday — which means it's getting the full summer holiday treatment: sales on appliances, branded merchandise, and for some, a day off of work. But on this episode, we're talking about the origin of the holiday — and the traditions that keep its history alive for Black folks around the country.
Though a lot of parents and educators agree there needs to be some change in District 28, the question remains: what kind of change? When we asked around, more diversity wasn't necessarily at the top of everybody's list. In fact, from the north and south, we heard a lot of the same kind of thing: "leave our kids where they are and give all the schools what they need."
We went to the Southside and asked parents and school leaders directly, what do the schools need?
A new book by Linda Villarosa looks at how racial bias in healthcare has costs for all Americans. Spoiler: Poverty counts — but not as much as you'd think.
Code Switch's Kumari Devarajan found an unlikely demographic doppelganger in D'Lo, a comedian and playwright whose one-person show about growing up as a queer child of immigrants in the U.S. is reopening on a bigger theater stage. But when you share so much in common with a stranger who is putting their sometimes messy business on front street for the world to see, it can feel like they're also sharing your secrets, too.
Until recently, School District 28 in Queens, N.Y., was characterized by a white Northside, and a Black Southside. But today, the district, and Queens at large, has become what is considered to be one of the most diverse places on the planet. So how did District 28 go from being defined by this racial binary, to a place where people brag about how diverse it is?
In the wake of violence and tragedies, people are often left in search of ways to feel safe again. That almost inevitably to conversations about the role of police. On today's episode, we're talking to the author and sociologist Alex Vitale, who argues that many spaces in U.S. society over-rely on the police to prevent problems that are better addressed through other means. Doing so, he says, can prevent us from properly investing in resources and programs that could make the country safer in the long run.
So much of the present day conversation about District 28 hinges on the dynamic between the Northside and the Southside. But why were the North and the South wedged into the same school district to begin with? When we asked around, no one seemed to know. What we do know are the consequences.
Millions of Syrians have been displaced by ongoing civil war. In her new book, Refuge, Heba Gowayed follows Syrians who have resettled in the U.S., Canada and Germany. She argues that finding their footing in their new homes is less about individual choice and more about governmental systems.
In the early 1970s, Forest Hills, Queens, became a national symbol of white, middle class resistance to integration. Instead of public schools, this fight was over public housing. A fight that got so intense the press called it "The Battle of Forest Hills." How did a famously liberal neighborhood become a hotbed of reaction and backlash? And how did a small group of angry homeowners change housing policy for the entire country?
Utang na loob is the Filipino concept of an eternal debt to others, be it family or friends, who do a favor for you. It goes back to pre-colonial times in the Philippines, and can pass from one generation to another. And some Filipino-Americans want to do away with utang all together, especially when it butts up against "American" values of independence and self-reliance. On this week's episode, we break down this "debt of the inner soul" — and discover a surprising side to this value.
School District 28 in Queens, N.Y., has a Northside and a Southside. To put it simply, the Southside is Black and the farther north you go, the fewer Black people you see. But it wasn't always like this. Once the home to two revolutionary experiments in integrated housing, the Southside of the district served as a beacon of interracial cooperation. So what happened between then and now?
In 2019, a school district in Queens N.Y., one of the most diverse places on the planet, is selected to go through the process of creating something unexpected: a diversity plan. Why would the school district need such a plan and why were some parents so adamantly opposed?
Coming soon to the Code Switch feed: School Colors,a limited-run series about how race, class and power shape American cities and schools. Hosts Mark Winston Griffith and Max Freedman take us to Queens, N.Y. – often touted as the most racially diverse place in the world. In 2019, a Queens school district announced that they were chosen to get a "diversity plan." One reaction from local parents? Outrage.
Some call it a riot. Some call it an uprising. Many Korean Americans simply call it "Sai-i-gu" (literally, 4-2-9.) But no matter what you call it, it's clear to many that April 29, 1992 made a fundamental mark on the city of Los Angeles. Now, 30 years later, we're talking to Steph Cha and John Cho — two authors whose books both center around that fateful time.
How can anything be more important than what's happening right now? That's the question a woman named Evelyn Wang is pondering right before she is thrust into a surreal, sci-fi multiverse, in the movie "Everything Everywhere All At Once." On the other side — googly eyes, talking rocks, people with hot dog hands — and an exploration of the dynamics between three generations in a Chinese immigrant family.
In the 70s and 80s, Fashion Fair was an iconic cosmetics company designed to create makeup for Black women of all shades. This is the story of that company's meteoric rise, its slow decline, and the two women who think they can resurrect it once more.
What do you do when all your options for school kind of suck? That was the question some folks on the Standing Rock Reservation found themselves asking a couple of years ago. Young people were being harassed in public schools, and adults were worried that their kids weren't learning important tenets of Lakota culture. So finally, a group of educators and parents decided to start a brand new school, unlike any others in the region.
Lindy Hop is a dance that was born in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s — created and performed by African Americans in segregated clubs and dance halls. But today, one of the world's most vibrant Lindy Hop communities is in Sweden. So what happens when a Black American wants to learn the art form that she first encountered at the hands of her great-grandmother?
It is probably the most radioactive word in the English language. At the same time, the N-word is kind of everywhere: books, movies, music, comedy (not to mention the mouths of people who use it frequently, whether as a slur or a term of endearment.) So on this episode, we're talking about what makes the word unique — and how the rules about its use line up with other words.
This week marks the one year anniversary of a deadly shooting spree in Atlanta, where eight people were killed. Six of those people were Asian American. That violence came after Asian American organizers had been trying, for months, to sound the alarm over a dramatic spike in reports of anti-Asian racism.
Gene Demby and comedian Hari Kondabolu are both new fathers, and they're both learning to raise kids who will have very different identities and upbringings than their own. It's left both of them reflecting on some big questions: How will they teach their children about race? What are the elements of their childhoods that they want to pass on? And what, exactly, is a father anyway?
Figure skating has always been about flair and drama. But what happens on the ice is nothing compared to what goes on behind the scenes. This week, with the help of our friends at the Blind Landing podcast, we're telling the story of Mabel Fairbanks. Fairbanks was a Black and Seminole figure skater who spent her career training figure skaters of color — while navigating the complicated racial and social dynamics that characterized the sport.
At the height of his career, Bill Cosby was one of the most famous men in the United States. He was the biggest and highest paid star in the country, and with his image plastered on billboards, advertisements and television, many people felt like they knew him. Of course, few people really knew Bill Cosby. And many of the people who had seen who he was up close would be traumatized for the rest of their lives.
In 2020, nearly 20% of Americans turned to therapy. Many of those people were looking for a space to process some of the big, painful events they were living through, including the pandemic, a contentious election cycle, and of course, the summer's racial reckoning. But that had us wondering: What exactly can therapy accomplish? Can it mitigate the effects of racism? Help us undo how we internalize racial trauma? Today, we're sharing the stories of two Latinx people who tried to use therapy as a means to understand and combat anti-Blackness in their own lives.
Live from your computer screens, it's Code Switch! Guest hosts Ayesha Rascoe and Denice Frohman joined us to talk poetry and humor with special guests Paul Tran and Hari Kondabolu. Then, Ayesha and Denice answered your questions about race and love.
In Canada, tensions between indigenous fishermen and commercial fishermen have been simmering for decades. On today's bonus episode, from our friends at NPR's Planet Money team, we travel to Nova Scotia to figure out how a group of Mi'kmaw fishermen asserted their rights to fish and what happened when commercial lobsterman struck back hard.
It's Black History Month, which is likely to bring boundless stories of Black Excellence and Black Firsts. So today on the show, we're talking about Constance Baker Motley — a trailblazing civil rights judge who paved the way for many to come after her (including, perhaps, the next Supreme Court justice?) But, as we learned, Motley's life was full of contradictions, and her many achievements also came with many costs.
We hear the phrase "unapologetically Black" thrown around a lot. But what does it actually mean? In this bonus episode from our newest play cousins at NPR's The Limits podcast, actress, businessperson, and author Gabrielle Union talks about what it meant for her to stop paying so much attention to what white people wanted from her.
People lie about being Native American all the time – on college applications, on job applications, in casual conversation. But how do "Pretendians" hurt real Indigenous people and communities? And what does all that mean for people who aren't quite sure if they're claiming or reclaiming?
Since he died this week, André Leon Talley has been described over and over again as "larger than life." But on this episode, brought to us by our friends at NPR's It's Been a Minute podcast, three queer Black men talk about the smaller, more personal moments that made Talley such an icon in the fashion world — and in the broader culture.
We use words related to color to describe different racial categories all the time — Black, white, brown. But how much of race and identity actually has to do with the color of your skin? What if what appears to be "whiteness" is only skin deep? Today we're sharing stories from people of color with albinism whose experiences challenge what many people think they know about race.
It's now been more than a year since the so-called "racial reckoning" that marked the summer of 2020. The country, some said confidently, was having the biggest racial reckoning since the civil rights movement. But since then, the Code Switch team has been wondering...what was actually being reckoned with? And by whom? And what would the backlash be?
What stories do we learn about the history of the United States? Who dreamed up those stories? And what happens when we challenge them? This week on the pod, our play cousins at NPR's Throughline podcast talk to journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones about the historical argument she tried to make with the 1619 project.
This time of year, folks are being inundated with messages about how to become more beautiful. But beauty is an ever-changing goalpost that has everything do with race, class and power.
Y'all, 2021 brought us a lot of TV. Some of it was even good! So this week, we're talking about the shows that had something interesting to say about race, from We Are Lady Parts to Reservation Dogs to City of Ghosts.
Our play cousins at NPR's It's Been a Minute podcast reexamine the so-called "Latin explosion" of the late '90s: What it was supposed to be for audiences across the U.S., and what it actually came to represent.
The term 'Latin Music' can encompass everything from Celia Cruz to Bad Bunny to Selena Gomez to Los Tigres del Norte. It's rock, pop, hip hop, salsa, bachata, reggaeton, and so much more. So...what exactly is the connective tissue? Language? The ethnicity of the artist? Pure vibes? Or is it something else entirely?
How do race and class affect the way we eat? What makes dollar store junk food different from organic junk food? And when did Whole Foods become such a polarizing grocery store? We're getting into all those questions and more with Priya Fielding-Singh, author of the new book, How the Other Half Eats.
When Derecka Purnell was growing up, the police were a regular presence in her life. Years later, the lawyer, activist, and author of the new book, Becoming Abolitionists, realized that her vision of a just society was radically different from the world in which she'd been socialized.
It's Thanksgiving week, so we're bringing you a second helping of one of our favorite episodes, where we answer your questions about race and food. We're getting into the perceived whiteness of vegetarianism, what it means when H-Mart becomes a little too mainstream, and the etiquette around bringing pungent-smelling food to the (proverbial) office.
You already know we love books here on Code Switch — and given that we're smack dab in the middle of Native American Heritage month, we thought we'd introduce you to some of our favorite recent books by Indigenous authors.
When 'Soul Train' first aired in 1971, there had never been a show like it. Fifty years later, that's still true. So this week, we're passing the mic to our friends at NPR's It's Been a Minute podcast, who did a deep dive into the age of Black joy — and Black flyness — that Soul Train kicked off.
If you're Native American, there's a good chance that you've thought a lot about blood quantum — a highly controversial measurement of the amount of "Indian blood" you have. It can affect your identity, your relationships and whether or not you — or your children — may become a citizen of your tribe.
Or do they? This week, we're answering some of your toughest questions about race and your parents. How do you create boundaries with immigrant parents? What dynamics might interracial couples bring to families? And why do so many Black parents want to prevent their kids from looking "too grown"?
The 2020 census data is finally here! At first glance, it paints a surprising portrait of a changing United States: The number of people who identify as white and no other race is smaller; the share of multiracial people has shot up; and the country's second-largest racial group is... "some other race." But resident census-expert Hansi Lo Wang told us that when you start to unpack the data, you quickly find that those numbers don't tell the whole story.
In a small suburb of Washington, D.C., a non-descript beige building houses thousands of Native human remains. The remains are currently in the possession of the Smithsonian Institution. But for the past decade, the Seminole Tribe of Florida has been fighting to get some of them back to Florida to be buried. The controversy over who should decide the fate of these remains has raised questions about identity, history, and the nature of archaeology.
If you've been paying attention to the news over the past couple years, you know what a so-called 'Karen' is: a white woman who uses her race and gender to wield power over someone more vulnerable. But long before most people became familiar with the term Karen, POCs have been calling out Karen-esque behavior.
Black women have always faced immense pressure to make their bodies look a certain way. But if done the "wrong way," achieving that idealized figure can lead to just as much scrutiny and critique. So today, we're talking about the cosmetic procedure known as a Brazilian Butt Lift, and what its rise in popularity illustrates about the type of bodies that do and don't get valued.
Kacen Callender started out as a kid in St. Thomas writing fan fiction. Today, they are the author of multiple middle grade and young adult novels full of empathy, learning, and a healthy dose of high school drama.
But seriously, who? Because while it is Hispanic Heritage Month, the notion of a multiracial, multinational, pan-ethnic identity called "Hispanic" is a relatively recent — and somewhat haphazard invention — in the United States. So on this episode, we're digging into how the term got created and why it continues to both unite and bewilder.
For two decades, many Americans have seen Afghanistan depicted primarily through the lens of war. But that's not the full story — not even close. Afghanistan has a long, rich, complex history and culture. A lot of it flies in the face of the images those of us in the U.S. are exposed to. So this week, our friends at Throughline are helping us understand the fuller story.
Twenty years ago, during the dog days of summer , a fledgling journalist named Shereen Marisol Meraji — maybe you've heard of her? — headed to Durban, South Africa. Her mission: to report on a meeting of thousands of organizers and ambassadors gathered at a global conference on racism. The conference filled Shereen with hope and optimism — all of which would soon be wiped away.
What moral panics reveal about the ongoing freakout over critical race theory in schools.
Kat Chow was 13 when her mother died, and with that loss came profound and lasting questions about identity, family and history. In her memoir, Seeing Ghosts, the author and former Code Switch reporter explores how her mother's death has haunted her through the years, in ways that are profound, tragic and, sometimes, darkly hilarious.
OK, they're not all kids. But they're all students, they're all amazing, and frankly, we're concerned that they might be coming for our jobs. That's right — the Student Podcast Challenge is back, and this year, the stories are more powerful than ever.
It's hot out, places are shutting down again, and things might just be feeling a little bit slow. So in the spirit of spicing things up, we wanted to give you all a question to fight about: How much context should you have to give when talking about race and culture? Is it better to explain every reference, or ask people to Google as they go? Comedian Hari Kondabolu joins us to hash it out.
We talk a lot on this show about people who have been killed by police officers. But there is so much police violence that falls short of being fatal, but forever alters the lives of the people on the business end of it. So this week, we're turning things over to the "On Our Watch" podcast, out of KQED and NPR's Investigations Team.
For much of her childhood, Ashley Ford's father was incarcerated, and her mother struggled to raise her while grappling with her own upended life plans. In her new memoir, Somebody's Daughter, Ford looks at how her upbringing shaped her understanding of childhood, authority, forgiveness and freedom.
Some of the best books can make you feel free — free from your daily grind, free to imagine a new reality, free to explore different facets of your identity. This month, the Code Switch team is highlighting books that dig deep into what freedom really means.
Maria Garcia and Maria Hinojosa are both Mexican American, both mestiza, and both relatively light-skinned. But Maria Hinojosa strongly identifies as a woman of color, whereas Maria Garcia has stopped doing so. So in this episode, we're asking: How did they arrive at such different places?
This month on Code Switch, we're talking about books — new and old — that have deepened our understandings of what it means to be free. First up, a conversation with author Kaitlyn Greenidge about her new novel, Libertie, which tells the story of a young woman pushing back against her mother's expectations of what her life should look like.
Forty years ago this month, the CDC reported on patients with HIV/AIDS in the U.S. for the very first time. In the years since, LGBTQIA+ Americans have been fighting for treatment and recognition of a disease that was understudied, under-reported, and deeply stigmatized. On this episode, our friends at It's Been a Minute with Sam Sanders delve into the history of ACT UP — an organization that transformed the way the media, the government, corporations and medical professionals talked about AIDS.
Anyone with a name that isn't super common in the United States will tell you that the simple act of introducing yourself can lead to a whole interrogation: Where are you from? What does your name mean? Help me pronounce it using words I understand! So on this bonus episode from our friends at the "Where We Come From" series, we're getting into what, exactly, is in a name — and what names can tell us about where we've been and where we're going.
The Supreme Court just ruled on a case that could change the future of college sports, potentially paving the way for NCAA athletes to be paid. But is paying student athletes a good thing? And how would it affect the already fraught racial dynamics of college sports?
Juneteenth commemorates the day that enslaved Texans found out — more than two years after Emancipation Day — that they were free. It's also a day known for celebratory meals and red drinks. But as the holiday becomes more widespread, we wondered: Is there a risk that certain people (and corporations) will try to keep the food and lose the history?
In the wake of several high-profile police killings last summer, support for Black Lives Matter skyrocketed among white Americans. Their new concerns about racism pushed books about race to the top of the bestseller lists, while corporations pledged billions of dollars to address injustice. A year later, though, polls show that white support for the movement has not only waned, but is lower than it was before. On this episode, two researchers explain why last year so-called racial reckoning was always shakier than it looked.
If you're a person of color living in the United States, chances are you've been asked more than you care to remember where you're from — no, where you're really from. In her new series "Where We Come From," NPR's Anjuli Sastry lets immigrants of color answer that question broadly, with the space and context it deserves.
In the spring of 1921, Black residents of Tulsa, Oklahoma's Greenwood neighborhood were attacked by a mob of angry white people. More than 300 people were killed, and thousands were left homeless. Now, 100 years later, Tulsa is still reckoning with what lessons to take from that deadly massacre.
People of color have a diverse set of interests, experiences, backgrounds and cultures. And the way we experience race and racism can be really different. So why do we continue to use big umbrella terms like "POC"? And what do we risk if we lose them?
We've said it multiple times on the show: Latinos are the second largest demographic in the United States. But...what does that actually mean? Are Latinos a race? Ethnicity? Culture? We try (and fail) to answer some of these questions with Dominican American podcaster and entertainer the Kid Mero.
Two friends living in Vermont decided to try a radical experiment: They asked White people in their community to give money directly to their Black neighbors — a DIY, hyper-local "reparations" program, of sorts. Our friends at the Invisibilia podcast took a look at how the community reacted, for better and for worse.
OK, so we weren't really in Philly (it's still a pandemic, after all.) But we did talk all things race and Philadelphia with special guests Erika Alexander and Denice Frohman. On the docket for the night: reparations, basketball, poetry and of course, the word "jawn."
Floyd McKissick, one of the major leaders of the civil rights movement, had an audacious, lifelong dream. He wanted to build a city — from scratch — that would create economic opportunities for Black people and be sustained by the wealth they created. It was called Soul City. And although it's been largely forgotten, he almost pulled it off.
Calls for racial justice are met with a lot of different proposals, but one of the loudest and most enduring is to invest in Black businesses. But can "buying Black" actually do anything to mitigate racism? To find out, we're taking a look at the surprising link between Black capitalism and McDonald's.
We've spent the past year trying to analyze, dissect and intellectualize all the ways that our world has changed. But sometimes the best way to understand our circumstances isn't through data and reports — it's through art and poetry. So this week, we're hearing from some of the country's most critical observers: poets.
Filipinos make up a small fraction of the nurses in the United States, but almost a third of the nurses who have died of COVID-19 in the U.S. have been of Filipino descent. So what exactly is going on? Our friends over at The Atlantic and WNYC tried to understand more about this troubling statistic by telling the story of one woman: Rosary Castro-Olega.
Asian American organizers and influencers have been trying to sound the alarm over a dramatic spike in reports of anti-Asian racism over the last year, and have been frustrated by the lack of media and public attention paid to their worries. Then came last week, when a deadly shooting spree in Georgia realized many of their worst fears and thrust the issue into the national spotlight.
The Blacksonian — er, the National Museum of African American History and Culture — was years and years in the making. It's closed down because of the coronavirus, but we got a virtual tour from the man who devoted his life to giving it life. He's also the first Black leader of the entire Smithsonian Institution. Baller status.
Every two weeks, a language dies with its last speaker. That was almost the fate of the Hawaiian language — until a group of young people decided to create a strong community of Hawaiian speakers — as they were learning to speak it them themselves.
Summer, 2004. The Olympics in Athens. The event? Men's basketball: U.S. versus Puerto Rico. And the whole world knows that Puerto Rico doesn't stand a chance. After all, the bigger, richer, imperial power always wins — right?
We're ending Black history month where we started it...talking about reparations. On this episode, we're joined by Erika Alexander and Whitney Dow, who have spent the past two years exploring how reparations could transform the United States — and all the struggles and possibilities that go along with that.
As the rollout of coronavirus vaccines unfolds, one big challenge for public health officials has been the skepticism many Black people have toward the vaccine. One notorious medical study — the Tuskegee experiment — has been cited as a reason. But should it be?
Marcus Garvey was an immigrant, a firebrand, a businessman. He was viewed with deep suspicion by the civil rights establishment. He would also become one of the most famous and powerful Black visionaries of the 20th century. Our play-cousins at NPR's Throughline podcast went deep on how he became the towering (and often misunderstood) figure that he is.
Too often, Black history is portrayed as a story of struggle and suffering, completely devoid of joy. So we called up some romance novelists whose work focuses on Black history. They told us that no matter how hard the times, there has always been room for love.
Black History Month is here, which means we're diving into big, sticky questions about what exactly it means to be Black. So this week on the show: Who is 'Black enough' for reparations? Because you know...we got some bills to pay.
For decades, residents of Compton and Watts in South Los Angeles had to rely on one particularly troubled hospital for their medical care. A new state-of-the-art hospital replaced it, but faced many of the same challenges: too few beds, too many patients who need serious help, not enough money. Then came the coronavirus.
The Trump administration is coming to a close, but which elements of the Trump era are here to stay? We spoke to NPR's White House reporter, Ayesha Rascoe, about where we were when Donald Trump took office — and what he's left behind.
Like all of you, we are still trying to make sense of Wednesday, January 6, 2021. Because even after the past four years, there are still new iterations of WTF. So on this episode, we're talking police, "terrorism", and the symbols of white nationalism that made it to the floor of the Capitol.
Two close friends both suffered from the same aggressive form of cancer. After years of treatment, one lived and the other died. And while many variables factored into what happened, the woman who survived — reporter Ibby Caputo — couldn't help wondering what role race had played in the outcome.
If 2020 has taught us anything, it's that history informs every aspect of our present. So today we're bringing you an episode of NPR's history podcast, Throughline. It gets into some of the most urgent lessons we can learn from James Baldwin, whose life and writing illuminate so much about what it would really mean for the United States to reckon with its race problem.
This month on Code Switch, we're thinking a lot about family and history. So we wanted to bring you this special episode from our friends at NPR's It's Been A Minute podcast, where producer Andrea Gutierrez tells the story of how her father was involved in the Chicano Moratorium of 1970 — and what that taught her and her sister about their identities.
December is a month when a lot of people are thinking about family and tradition. Reliving memories. Retelling old stories. Each year, those stories get passed down — sometimes with new details, or a different twist. And eventually, many of those stories have nothing to do with what actually happened. This week, we're looking into one such story: the truth, and the lies of it.
Guns. They're as American as apple pie. They represent independence and self-reliance. But ... not so much if you're Black. On this episode, we're getting into the complicated history of Black gun ownership and what it has to tell us about our present moment.
Listen, a lot has happened this year, and it's no shock that some things may have slipped under the radar. So our resident book expert, Karen Grigsby Bates, took a virtual trip around the country to talk to independent book store owners about their favorite underappreciated reads of 2020.
It's no secret that Code Switch is a team full of book nerds. So this week, we're revisiting one of our favorite book conversations, with author Carmen Maria Machado. Her genre-defying memoir, In the Dream House, tells the story of how she survived intimate partner violence, despite having few models of how to deal with, or even recognize abusive dynamics in queer relationships.
Let's face it — we could all use some help right now. So today on the pod, we're looking at a few of our favorite questions about race and identity from our "Ask Code Switch" series. We're getting into food, relationships, money, language, friendship and more, so you know it's about to get a little messy (in the best way.)
It's Thanksgiving week, and like basically everything else about 2020, this holiday is on track to be...let's call it "different." But while the world has changed in innumerable ways this year, one thing that hasn't changed is that the country is still deeply politically divided.
One of the biggest storylines from the 2020 presidential race has ... well, race at the center of it. If you paid attention to the stories about exit polling, you heard a lot of talk about how Latinx and Black voters showed up in bigger numbers this year than back in 2016. But on this week's episode, we also focus on a conversation that's not happening: The one about a group whose support for Donald Trump hasn't wavered. We're talking about the white vote, and in particular, white evangelical voters.
Kamala Harris is the vice president-elect, which marks an impressive list of firsts: woman in the White House; Black woman in the White House, Asian American in the White House; etc. Her Indian heritage has gotten much less attention than her Black identity, and in many ways, it has been complicated by her Black identity. On this episode, we look at what Harris's identities can tell us about dual-minority POCs, South Asian political representation in the U.S., and what it all means at the voting booth.
Election Day has come and gone, but we're still awhile away from knowing what the outcome will be. But while there's a lot we don't about the results, we do know that this election will tell us a lot about what our electorate looks like. With some help from our friends at NPR's politics podcast, we're looking at what happened, and waiting with bated breath to see what this portends for the future.
For a lot of reasons, the 2020 election feels historic. But in one important way, it's like so many elections throughout American history: Black and brown voters are being disproportionately prevented from casting their ballots. On this bonus episode, we're revisiting a conversation with Carol Anderson, author of One Person, No Vote, about what voter suppression has looked like throughout history.
For the first time in election history, Latinos are projected to be the second-largest voting demographic in the country. The reason? Gen Z Latinx voters, many of whom are casting a ballot for the first time in 2020. So we asked a bunch of them: Who do you plan to vote for? What issues do you care about? And what do you want the rest of the country to know about you?
We know his rhetoric has been described as boundary breaking when it comes to race. But U.S. presidents have been enacting racist policies forever. So as President Trump wraps up his first (and maybe only) term in office, we're asking: In terms of racism, how does he stack up to others when it comes to both words and deeds?
The VP candidate's biography and heritage allow people to project all kinds of ideas onto her, and to see what they want to see. But Kamala Harris's identity is a very important lens into not just her own politics, but also Black politics around crime and punishment more broadly.
Why are hip-hop and mass incarceration so entangled in the U.S.? That's the question that our play cousins at NPR Music, Sidney Madden and Rodney Carmichael, set out to answer on their brand new podcast, Louder Than a Riot.
On this week's episode of Code Switch, we talk about the relevance of a 200 year old treaty — one that most Americans don't know that much about, but should. It's a treaty that led to the Trail of Tears, but also secured a tenuous promise.
Fall is the time for glossy fashion magazines, full of dazzling looks and the seasons hottest looks. But this year, we noticed something unusual: The covers of a bunch of major magazines fashion magazines featured Black folks. So we called up fashion critic Robin Givhan to talk about fashion's racial reckoning...and how long before it goes out of style.
Suffice it to say, we use the term "POC" a lot on Code Switch. But critiques of the initialism — and the popularization of the term "BIPOC" — caused us to ask: Should we retire POC? Or is there use in it yet?
The Code Switch team has been mired in a months-long debate that we're attempting to settle once and for all: What kind of books are best to read during this pandemic? Books that connect you to our current reality? Or ones that help you escape it?
How did a police killing in Minneapolis lead people thousands of miles across the Atlantic Ocean to pull down the statue of a slave trader who's been dead for nearly three centuries? On this episode, we're going to the city of Bristol to tell the surprising story.
Adults often find it really hard to talk about race. But kids? Maybe not so much. NPR received more than 2,000 entries in this year's Student Podcast Challenge, and we heard from young people all over the country about how they're thinking about race and identity in these trying times.
Matilda Crawford. Sallie Bell. Carrie Jones. Dora Jones. Orphelia Turner. Sarah A. Collier. In 1881, these six Black women brought the city of Atlanta to a complete standstill by going on strike. The strategies they used in their fight for better working conditions have implications for future generations of organizers — and resonances with the professional sports strikes happening today.
How was the the richest and most powerful country in the world laid low by a virus only nanometers in size? Ed Yong, a science reporter for The Atlantic, says it's the inequities that have been with us for generations that made our body politic such opportunistic targets.
As part of our Ask Code Switch series, we're tackling your toughest questions about race and friendship. We help our listeners understand how race and and its evil play cousin, racism, affect how we make friends, keep friends, and deal with friend breakups. And we're doing it with help from WNYC's Death, Sex & Money podcast. Be a pal and listen.
Black voters are the Democrats' most reliable and influential voting bloc. But this election has underscored the tensions between those Black voters, along generational and ideological lines — which could have major consequences on turnout this fall.
It's hurricane season, so this week, we're bringing you a bonus episode, from the Atlantic's Floodlines podcast. On this episode, "Through the Looking Glass," host Vann R. Newkirk II looks at the way the media distorted what was happening in New Orleans in the days after the storm, scapegoating Black people for the devastation they were subjected to.
The largest public university system in the country, the Cal State system, just announced a new graduation requirement: students must take an ethnic studies or social justice course. But ethnic studies might not even exist if it weren't for some students at a small commuter college in San Francisco. Fifty years ago, they went on strike — and while their bloody, bitter standoff has been largely forgotten, it forever changed higher education in the United States.
At a Black Lives Matter protest in Los Angeles, a young Korean American man named Edmond Hong decided to grab a megaphone. Addressing other Asian Americans in the crowd, he described the need to stop being quiet and complacent in the fight against racism. On this episode, we talk to Edmond about why he decided to speak out. And we check in with a historian about why so many people mistakenly believe that Asian Americans aren't political.
After his daughter's racist and anti-LGBTQ social media posts became public, an Arab-Muslim entrepreneur is fighting to keep his once-burgeoning business alive in the middle of a national — and personal — reckoning with anti-blackness.
On what would have been Diahann Carroll's 85th birthday, we're celebrating the legacy of the actress, model and singer. Reporter Sonari Glinton went to her estate sale and took a tour of some of the objects that represent important moments in Ms. Carroll's life. And because Diahann Carroll achieved so many firsts, the exhibit was more like a civil rights exhibit than an auction.
"Karen" has become cultural shorthand for a white woman who wields her race as a cudgel. And look, we all love to hate a good Karen. But where did this archetype come from? What will the next iteration of Karen be? And what are we missing by focusing on the Karens of the world?
While it's technically possible to win a civil lawsuit against police officers for wrongdoing, there's a reason it almost never happens: a legal technicality called qualified immunity. On this episode, we look at how a law meant to protect Black people from racist violence gave way to a legal doctrine that many people see as the biggest obstacle to police reform.
Every family has a myth about who they are and where they came from. And there are a lot of reasons people tell these stories. Sometimes it's to make your family seem like they were part of an important historical event. Other times, it's to hide something that is too painful to talk about. That last point can be especially true for African American families.
This year, Pride Month intersects with a surge of protests against racism and police brutality. So this week, courtesy of The Nod podcast, we're looking back at the life of Storme DeLarverie — a Black butch woman who didn't pull any punches when it came to protecting her community from violence.
In her new book, The Undocumented Americans, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio writes about delivery men, housekeepers, and day laborers — the undocumented immigrants who are often ignored while the media focuses its attention on Dreamers. "I wanted to learn about them as the weirdos we all are outside of our jobs," she writes.
When the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that DACA could remain in place, recipient Miriam Gonzalez was relieved. As a plaintiff in the case, she's been fighting to keep the program alive since 2017 and we've been following her story. In this bonus episode — an update on Miriam, and why this decision is such a big deal.
The video is horrific, and the brutality is stark. But that was the case in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014 and Minnesota in 2016. This time, though, white people are out in the streets in big numbers, and books such as "So You Want to Talk About Race" and "How to Be an Antiracist" top the bestseller lists. So we asked some white people: What's different this time?
Suffice it to say, the past few weeks have been a lot to unpack. So today, we're bringing you a special bonus episode from our friends at It's Been a Minute with Sam Sanders. The podcast explores how protests have changed over time, and how certain people's thoughts about race are evolving.
Whenever a protest boils up, it's a safe bet that public officials will quickly blame any violence or disruption on "outside agitators." But what, exactly, does it mean to be an agitator? And can these mysterious outsiders be a force for good?
The last few weeks have been filled with devastating news — stories about the police killing black people. At this point, these calamities feel familiar — so familiar, in fact, that their details have begun to echo each other.
Talking about race can get real heavy, real fast. Listening to music is one way people have been lightening the mood and sorting through their feelings. So this week, we're sharing some of the songs that are giving all of us life during this especially taxing moment.
On March 1, two Los Angeles-based capoeira instructors realized a dream almost 15 years in the making — they opened up their very own gym. Two weeks later, California's stay-at-home order went into effect, and the gym shut its doors. This week, we follow the two of them as they navigate how to keep their dream alive in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.
We take on some of your questions about race, the coronavirus and social distancing. The questions are tricky, and as usual on Code Switch, the reality is even trickier.
The coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated issues that disproportionately affect women. So on this episode, we're talking to Mikki Kendall — author of the new book, Hood Feminism — about what on-the-ground feminism practiced by women of color can teach us that the mainstream feminist movement has forgotten.
All month long, we've been answering versions of one giant question: Who counts in 2020? Well, April is poetry month, so we decided to end our series by asking some of our favorite poets who they think counts — and how all of that has changed in these strange, new times.
Many Puerto Ricans grow up being taught that they're a mixture of three races: black, white and indigenous. But on the U.S. census, a majority of Puerto Ricans choose "white" as their only race. On this episode, we're looking into why that is, and the group of people trying to change it.
Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, numbers have been flying at us about the spread of the illness—and then the next minute those same numbers are refuted. This week, we're talking to Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic about why the data is so all over the place, and why that matters, especially for people of color.
It's one of the thorniest questions in any theoretical plan for reparations for black people: Who should get them? On this episode, we dig into some ideas about which black people should and shouldn't receive a payout — which one expert estimates would cost at least $10 trillion.
Many have referred to COVID-19 as a "great equalizer." But the virus has actually exacerbated all sorts of disparities. When it comes to race, black Americans account for a disproportionate number of coronavirus-related deaths in the U.S. In this bonus episode from Slate's "What Next" podcast, reporter Akilah Johnson talks about the many reasons why.
The Principal Chief of Cherokee Nation told his people to stay strong during this pandemic, and to remember how much they've endured over a long history that includes the Trail of Tears. This episode takes a look at the treaty, signed almost 200 years ago, that caused that suffering, and how it's being used now as a call to action.
Right now, the U.S. Census Bureau is trying to count every single person living in the country. It's a complex undertaking with enormous stakes. But some people are very afraid of how that information will be used by the government — especially given how it's been misused in the past. The first in our series about who counts in 2020.
Code Switch is a weekly podcast that explores how race intersects with every aspect of our lives. Hosts Shereen Marisol Meraji and Gene Demby bring honesty, empathy and nuance to challenging conversations.
This week, senior correspondent Karen Grigsby Bates talks with the best-selling author Terry McMillan, famous for her novels Waiting to Exhale and How Stella Got Her Groove Back. The two longtime friends chat about McMillan's latest novel, It's Not All Downhill From Here, and the topics the book tackles: aging, friendship, race and sex.
With all this pandemic anxiety swirling, we thought you might need some music to take your mind off things. So this week, we've got an episode from our friends over at Latino USA. It's about Flor de Toloache, an all-women mariachi group that's making history by bucking tradition and playing a style of music that's usually performed by men.
In matters of race and justice, empathy is often held up as a goal unto itself. But what comes after understanding? In this episode, we're teaming up with Radio Diaries to look at the career of a white writer who put herself in someone else's skin — by disguising herself as a black woman — to find out what she learned, and what she couldn't.
As international health agencies warn that COVID-19 could become a pandemic, fears over the new coronavirus' spread have activated old, racist suspicions toward Asians and Asian Americans. It's part of a longer history in the United States, in which xenophobia has often been camouflaged as a concern for public health and hygiene.
Eighty-five years ago, a crowd of several thousand white people gathered in Jackson County, Florida, to participate in the lynching of a man named Claude Neal. The poet L. Lamar Wilson grew up there, but didn't learn about Claude Neal until he was in high school. When he heard the story, he knew he had to do something. Our final story about black resistance this month is about resisting the urge to forget history, even when remembering is incredibly painful.
How did the party of the Ku Klux Klan became the party of choice for black voters? And how did the party of Abraham Lincoln become 90 percent white? It's a messy story, exemplified by the doomed friendship between Richard Nixon and his fellow Republican, Jackie Robinson.
This is Part II of the story about the 1968 teachers' strike that happened in New York city after Black and Puerto Rican parents demanded more say over their kids' education. We'll tell you why some people who lived through it remember it as a strike over antisemitism.
In 1968, a vicious battle went down between white teachers and black and Puerto Rican parents in a Brooklyn school district. Many say the conflict brought up issues that have yet to be resolved more than fifty years later.
Books help teach us about the world, our communities and ourselves. So this week, the Code Switch team is chatting it up with the authors of some of our favorite recent (and not-so-recent) books by and/or about people of color.
A text message gone wrong. A bachelorette party exclusion. A racist comment during the 2016 debates. When our friends at WNYC's Death, Sex and Money asked about the moments when race became a flashpoint in your friendships, they heard about awkward, funny, and deeply painful moments.
We help our listeners understand how race and its evil play cousin, racism, affect our friendships. And we're doing it with help from WNYC's Death, Sex & Money podcast. Be a good friend and listen.
In light of all the news coming out of Iran, we're talking with Jason Rezaian — an Iranian-American author and journalist who has experienced Iran's contradictions up close.
When Carmen Maria Machado started searching for stories about intimate partner violence in queer relationships, there wasn't much out there. But in her new memoir, she says that type of abuse can still be "common as dirt."
So many people's New Year's resolutions are centered around getting in shape, updating their skincare routine, and generally being more attractive. But beauty ideals have a funny way of reinforcing society's ideas of who matters and why. Once you start to unpack them, things get real ugly real quick.
Can travel change your identity? It certainly did for one man. Alain Locke, nicknamed the 'Dean of the Harlem Renaissance,' traveled back and forth between Washington, D.C. and Berlin, Germany. In doing so, he was able to completely reimagine what it meant to be black and gay in the 1920s.
The shootings of the Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur in the late 1990s are widely thought to be connected, but have never been officially solved. On the latest season of the Slow Burn podcast, Joel Anderson has been examining the rappers' meteoric rises, untimely deaths, and what they illustrate about race, violence, and policing in the United States, then and now.
Many people have heard of the Freedom Rides of 1961, when black and white civil rights activists rode buses together to the South to protest segregation. But most people have never heard of what happened the very next summer, when Southern segregationists decided to strike back, using unsuspecting black families as pawns.
Later this month, a Congressional ban will make cockfighting illegal in U.S. territories. Animal rights activists argue that the sport is cruel and inhumane. But in Puerto Rico, many people plan to defy the ban. They say cockfighting has been ingrained in the culture for centuries, and that the ban is an attempt to wipe out an integral part of Puerto Rican identity.
It's Thanksgiving week, so we wanted to give y'all a question to fight about: How much context should you have to give when talking about race and culture? Is it better to explain every reference, or let people go along for the ride? Comedian Hari Kondabolu joins us to hash it out.
Sometimes, in order to understand yourself, you fumble through a tough conversation with your mom. Other times, you roll up to a sex club with your best friend. In his new fiction podcast "Moonface," producer James Kim explores all the messy, scandalous, cringe-worthy ways that different parts of our identities collide.
Nearly 9 million people in the U.S. are part of a "mixed-status" family: some may be U.S. citizens; some may have green cards; others may face the constant specter of deportation. As the Supreme Court gets ready to decide the fate of DACA — a program that protects some undocumented people from being removed from the country — we check in with three siblings who all have different statuses, and whose fates may hinge on the outcome of this case.
In 1965, a white minister and civil rights organizer, James Reeb, was killed by a group of white men in Selma, Ala. Reeb's death drew national outrage, but no one was ever held accountable. We spoke to two reporters — white Southerners of a younger generation — about the lies that kept this murder from being solved.
It's Halloween, and people are leaning into all things scary. But sometimes those celebrations of the macabre hit a little too close to home, brushing up against our country's very dark past. So how do you navigate fake-horror in the midst of so much that's actually terrifying?
Eighty-five years ago, a crowd of several thousand white people gathered in Jackson County, Florida, to participate in the lynching of a man named Claude Neal. The poet L. Lamar Wilson grew up there, but didn't learn about Claude Neal until he was working on a research paper in high school. When he heard the story, he knew he had to do something.
The President's Twitter feed has become the White House's primary mechanism for communicating with the world. Ayesha Rascoe of NPR Politics took a deep dive into Trump's combative social media universe and found that he does not go after all of the objects of his ire in the same way.
On this episode, we look closer at hit songs that have taken on broader resonances: from a wistful ode to Puerto Rico to a disco classic about outlasting and thriving to an enduring bop about pushy, unfortunate men — i.e., scrubs.
In "Prison City," Wisconsin, white elected officials are representing voting districts made up mostly of prisoners. Those prisoners are disproportionately black and brown. Oh, and they can't actually vote.
How is it that the party of Lincoln became anathema to black voters? It's a messy story, exemplified in the doomed friendship between Richard Nixon and his fellow Republican, Jackie Robinson.
Black Republicans are basically unicorns — they might just be the biggest outliers in American two-party politics. So who are these folks who've found a home in the GOP's lily-white big tent? And what can they teach us about the ways we all cast our ballots?
In many parts of the U.S., public school districts are just minutes apart, but have vastly different racial demographics — and receive vastly different funding. That's in part due to Milliken v. Bradley, a 1974 Supreme Court case that limited a powerful tool for school integration.
Once upon a time, Kai Wright saw a movie called "Punks." A romantic comedy about black gay men, it was like nothing he'd ever seen before. But then it disappeared.
In August of 1619, a British ship landed near Jamestown, Virginia with dozens of enslaved Africans — the first black people in the colonies that would be come the United States. Four hundred years later, some African Americans are still looking to Jamestown in search of home and a lost history.
It's a widely accepted truth: reading Shakespeare is good for you. But what should we do with all of the bigoted themes in his work? We talk to a group of high schoolers who put on the Merchant Of Venice as a way to interrogate anti-Semitism, and then we ask an expert if that's a good idea.
Nickelodeon's Dora The Explorer helped usher in a wave of multicultural children's programming in the U.S. Our friends at Latino USA tell the story of how the show pushed back against anti-immigrant rhetoric — and why Dora's character still matters.
Five years ago, the death of an unarmed black teenager brought the town of Ferguson, Mo. to the center of a national conversation about policing in black communities. Since then, what's changed, if anything, in Ferguson?
It took less than two weeks for Puerto Ricans to topple their governor following the publication of unsavory private text messages. We tell the story of how small protests evolved into a political uprising unlike anything the island had ever seen.
Almost exactly 100 years ago, race riots broke out all across the United States. The Red Summer, as it came to be known, occurred in more than two dozen cities across the nation, including Chicago, where black soldiers returning home from World War I refused to be treated as second class citizens.
This week, an argument about what to call President Trump's rhetoric. NPR editors Mark Memmott and Keith Woods offer different ideas for how news organizations should try to stay credible.
In the 19th century it was mainstream science to believe in a racial hierarchy. But after WWII, the scientific world turned its back on eugenics and the study of racial difference. We speak to author Angela Saini, who says that race science is back.
There's a debate over what to call the facilities holding migrant asylum seekers at the southern border. We revisit an earlier controversy to help make sense of it.
Fifty years after the Stonewall Uprising, queer and trans folks are uncovering hidden parts of LGBTQ+ history. A new exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, "Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Art 50 Years After Stonewall," features works from from queer artists of color who were born in the years after Stonewall. We talked to four of them.
Our listeners suggestions include American history, compelling fiction, a few memoirs—and Jane Austen, re-imagined with brown people.
Every two weeks a language dies with its last speaker. That was the fate of Hawaiian, until a group of second-language learners put up a fight and declared, "E Ola Ka 'Olelo Hawai'i" (The Hawaiian Language Shall Live!!!)
It's a pernicious stereotype, but it was coined in reference to a real woman named Linda Taylor. But her misdeeds were far more numerous and darker than welfare fraud. This week: how politicians used one outlier's story to turn the public against government programs for the poor.
Samin Nosrat is an award-winning chef, cookbook author, and star of the Netflix series Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. She's also an Iranian American woman trying to represent two cultures that are often perceived as being at odds with each other.
In middle school and high school, we're figuring out how to fit in and realizing that there are things about ourselves that we can't change — whether or not we want to. This week, we're turning the mic over to student podcasters, who told us about the big issues shaping their nascent identities.
A Sapphire isn't only a jewel—it's also cultural shorthand for an angry black woman. In this episode, we look at where Sapphire was born, and how the stereotype continues to haunt black women, even successful, powerful ones.
France is the place where for decades you weren't supposed to talk about someone's blackness, unless you said it in English. Today, we're going to meet the people who took a very French approach to change that. (Note: This story contains strong language in English and French.)
When members of the nation's oldest Mexican-American student organization voted to change its name, it revealed generational tensions around the past, present, and future of the Chicano movement.
April is National Poetry Month, so on this episode, we're passing the mic to a handful of talented poets — the people who narrate our lives and help us better understand our own experiences.
For more than two decades, a cellphone store in Washington, D.C. has blasted go-go music right outside of its front door. But a recent noise complaint from a resident of a new, upscale apartment building in the area brought the music to a halt — highlighting the tensions over gentrification in the nation's capital.
In 1968, thousands of students participated in a series of protests for equity in education that sparked the Chicano Movement. But for two of the students at one struggling high school, that civil unrest — which became known as East L.A. Walkouts — also marked the beginning of a 50-year romance. This week, Code Switch is cosigning that love story, brought to us by our play-cousins at Latino USA.
Support for Israel has long been the rare bipartisan position among lawmakers in Washington. But recently, several younger, brown members of Congress have vocally questioned the U.S.'s relationship with Israel — and were met with fierce condemnation, including charges that their criticism was anti-Semitic. On this episode: We're talking about why it remains so hard to have nuanced conversations about Israel.
This week, we tackle reader questions on vegetarianism, the specter of grocery store Columbuses, and the quiet opprobrium directed at "smelly ethnic foods" in the workplace.
Fifty years ago a multi-racial coalition of students at a commuter college in San Francisco went on strike. And while their bloody, bitter standoff has been largely forgotten, it forever changed higher education in the United States.
What does "civility" look like and who gets to define it? What about "respectable" behavior? This week, we're looking at how behavior gets policed in public.
A deadly tornado ripped through Lee County Alabama this past Sunday. An NPR investigation found that white Americans and those with safety nets often receive more federal dollars after a disaster than people of color and Americans with less wealth.
When Colin Kaepernick stopped standing for the national anthem at NFL games it sparked a nationwide conversation about patriotism and police brutality. Black athletes using their platform to protest injustice has long been a tradition in American history. In this episode we tap in our friends at Throughline to explore three stories of protest that are rarely told but essential to understanding the current debate: the heavyweight boxer Jack Johnson, the sprinter Wilma Rudolph, and the basketball player Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf.
Anali, a young woman from Los Angeles, wants to break into the film industry. A local program taught her the skills of the trade and the language, but will any of that that matter in an industry that runs mostly on connections?
Okay, news cycle: you win. We're talking about blackface. This week, we delve into the hidden history of "blackening up" in popular culture — from a certain iconic cartoon mouse's minstrel past to Instagram models trying to pass as black.
Another week of racial controversies, another week of calls to "start a dialogue on race." What does that even mean? We talk to two veterans of one high-profile attempt at a national conversation on race, who have different views of its effectiveness.
Some may think of beauty as frivolous and fun, but on this episode, we're examining a few of the ugly ways that its been used to project power.
Another day, another drama: Last week, a federal judge ruled against the Trump administration's decision to add a controversial citizenship question to the 2020 census. But if the Justice Department has any say, the fight will go on...all the way to the Supreme Court.
Jason Kim and his father were once very close, but drifted apart after the family came to the United States from Korea. They drifted even further after Jason came out to his parents as gay. But after a health crisis, Jason and his father try to reckon with the silence between them. This week, a story about a family's hopes, dreams, and obligations, brought to us by the dope folks at WNYC's Nancy podcast.
Meet one of the people caught up in the Trump Administration's hard-line stance on immigration: Javier Zamora. He was living in the US legally under Temporary Protected Status but when the White House threatened to take it away, Javier went back to El Salvador to apply for a new visa. He didn't know if he'd ever return to the US, his home of nearly twenty years.
This week, we're uncovering the stories behind three American Anthems. First, we hear from two musical greats about their respective versions of "Fight the Power." Next, we learned about the transformation of the children's choir staple, "This Little Light of Mine." Finally, we took a trip down "Whittier Blvd."
Spit into a tube and get in touch with your ancestors! Or not. This week we're revisiting a conversation about DNA, and what it tells us about who we are.
A professor at the University of Texas San Antonio designed a college course based around episodes of the Code Switch podcast! In it, her students learned how to have tough conversations about race and identity, using Shereen and Gene as an example. But after an incident on campus involving the police made national news, their theoretical classroom discussions stopped being polite and started getting real.
We checked in with authors, poets and great literary minds to see what books they think everyone should read this holiday season.
Reporter Julia Simon tells us about a radical miners' union in Birmingham, Alabama. It laid the foundation for civil rights organizers in the South, and holds lessons for the future of labor.
On this episode, we're hanging out with pups. First, is Kat's anxious dog Samson really just a little beagle bigot? Then, the author Bronwen Dickey and the political scientist Michael Tesler explain how the pitbull transformed from America's most beloved sidekick to a doggo non grata.
Gene and Shereen talk to poet Denice Frohman, percussionist Bobby Sanabria, chef Marcus Samuelsson and comedian Ashley Nicole Black at Harlem's World Famous Apollo Theater in New York City.
The news item about the shooting was bare: one man shot another 17 times in a dispute over drugs. The actual story — of a family that feared for its safety but who couldn't rely on the police for help — was far more complicated.
We know where your mind's going to be this week: midterm election results!!! So, we're handing the reins over to our play cousins from NPR's Politics Podcast. They'll tell you what happened and what it all means.
Ron Brown High School was built on a novel notion: a school for boys of color, based on a model of restorative justice. We visited the school last year for several episodes to follow its first-ever freshman class. This week, we're going back to see whether the school's unique approach to education is bearing fruit.
This week: why people don't vote, why people can't vote, and two state races that might have national implications for 2020.
So "The Star-Spangled Banner" is kind of a mess: notoriously tough to sing and with some weird stanzas about slavery. This week, we're looking at two of the country's other anthems with their own messy histories to find out what those songs tell us about American ideals.
This week, we're handing the mic over to transracial adoptees. They told us what they think is missing from mainstream narratives about adoption, and how being an adoptee is an identity unto itself.
Decades before Christine Blasey-Ford testified before lawmakers, the country had another reckoning with sexual misconduct set against the backdrop of a Supreme Court nomination. This week: what we have — and haven't — learned in the years since the Anita Hill hearings about identity politics, sexual harassment and power.
The reckoning that is reshaping Hollywood is finally making its way to the critic's perch. Bilal Qureshi joins us to talk about exciting movies coming this fall, and who gets to judge.
Long before Hurricane Maria devastated the territory, the threat of financial disaster loomed over Puerto Rico. Now, an old, bitter struggle over who gets to chart the islands' economic future is upending life for everyday Puerto Ricans trying to pick up the pieces.
For better or worse, classrooms have always been a site where our country's racial issues get worked out — whether its integration, busing, learning about this country's sordid racial history. On today's Ask Code Switch, we're talking about fitting in, standing out, and standing up for what you believe in.
In a unanimous decision, India's Supreme Court struck down a long-standing ban on gay sex. In light of this, we're revisiting an episode about same-sex love and dating apps for South Asians.
Prodigy made up half of the hugely influential hip-hop duo Mobb Deep, but spent his life in excruciating pain due to a debilitating disease called sickle cell anemia. On this episode, the hosts of WNYC's The Realness podcast chronicle Prodigy's struggle with the disease, share the story of how the disease was discovered, and explain how black revolutionaries pressed their communities (and the President of the United States) to do something about it.
In recent weeks, rumors of a recording of President Trump using the N-Word have resurfaced. But critics have been describing Trump as racist for years. So, if this tape were to exist, would it even matter?
Shereen and Gene head to Alabama to talk about race in the American South. Mayor Randall Woodfin of Birmingham talks about growing up in the shadow of his city's history. The poet Ashley M. Jones shares how she learned to love her hometown. And Gigi Douban of WBHM takes on some tough listener questions about race in the Magic City.
It's a battle that's endured throughout so much of American history: what gets written into our textbooks. Today we tag in NPR education correspondent Anya Kamenetz, and hear from author James Loewen about the book, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong.
What is the "Standard American Accent"? Where is it from? And what does it mean if you don't have it? Code Switch goes on a trip to the Midwest to find out.
We're back this week with the grand finale of the Word Watch Game Show! First, we'll uncover the messy history of the term "white trash." Then we'll get into a ditty that signals ... anything "Asian." Come play with us!
English is full of words and phrases with hidden racial backstories. Can you guess their histories? On part one of this two-part episode, we're unpacking the meaning behind "guru" and "boy."
Olutosin Oduwole was a college student and aspiring hip hop star when he was charged with "attempting to make a terrorist threat." Did public perceptions of rap music play a role? This week we're tagging in our friends at Hidden Brain to tell this story.
Since 1992, the study known as "The 30 Million Word Gap" has, with unusual power, shaped the way educators, parents and policymakers think about educating poor children. NPR education correspondent Anya Kamenetz joins us to talk about what it gets right, and what it misses.
We're going on a trip, and we're taking you with us! From the peak of Mount Denali to the beaches of Queens, we're talking camp, suntans and our favorite summer jams.
Anti-immigrant sentiment is on the rise, and the prospect of mass deportation is in the news. But as much as this seems like a unique moment in history, in many ways, it's history repeating itself.
Online matchmaking sites are making it easier than ever for couples seeking an arranged marriage to meet. Well...not all couples.
We have one story of how blackface was alive and well on network television in Colombia until 2015.
On this episode, the story of one family's struggle to end a toxic cycle of inter-generational trauma from forced assimilation. Getting back to their Native Alaskan cultural traditions is key.
Last week, the NFL announced a new policy to penalize players who kneel during the national anthem. The announcement drew fresh attention to the century-old tightrope that outspoken black athletes — from Floyd Patterson to Rose Robinson to Colin Kaepernick – have had to walk in order to compete and live by their principles.
Hispanos have lived side by side the Pueblo people for centuries—mixing cultures, identities and even bloodlines. But recently, tensions have risen among the two populations over Santa Fe's annual conquistador pageant, known as La Entrada, which celebrates the arrival of the Spanish.
Black-and-gray tattoos have become increasingly popular over the last four decades. But many people don't realize that the style has its roots in Chicano art, Catholic imagery and "prison ingenuity." (Yes, they were called Prison-Style tattoos for a reason.) Freddy Negrete, a pioneer in the industry, started tattooing fellow inmates in the early 1970s. And while he's no longer tatting people up with guitar strings and ballpoint pens, he's still using some of the same techniques he mastered back in the day.
Mother's Day is coming up, so we're taking on your most difficult questions around parenting. We'll talk about choosing a school, raising bilingual children, modeling gender identity, and what to do if your kid's afraid of black people.
We've said it before: The U.S. Census is way more than cold, hard data. It informs what we call ourselves and how we're represented. On this episode, we explore the controversial citizenship question that the Trump administration added to the 2020 census. We also talk about how the U.S. Census helped create the 'Hispanic' label.
Muslims make up a little over one percent of the U.S. population, but they seem to take up an outsized space in the American imagination. On this episode we explore why that is.
Today, Americans tend to think of Jewish people as white folks, but it wasn't always that way. On this episode, we dig into the complex role Jewish identity has played in America's racial story — especially now, when anti-Semitism is on the rise.
It's the force that animates so much of what we cover on Code Switch. And on the 50th anniversary of the Fair Housing Act, we take a look at some ways residential segregation is still shaping the ways we live. We head to a border with an ironic name , before dropping in on a movement to remap parts of the South.
Fifty years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed in Memphis, Tenn. This week, we have two stories about the aftermath of his death. The first takes us to Memphis to remember King's final days. The second brings us to Oakland, Calif., where King's assassination "transformed the position of the Black Panther Party overnight."
People are constantly telling Amara La Negra that she doesn't fit anywhere. Sometimes, she's "too black to be Latina." Other times, she's "too Latina to be black." But Amara says afro-Latinas aren't rare and they're no cause for confusion — they're just in dire need of more representation.
The NCAA men's basketball tournament is going on right now and will bring in hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. The coaches and commissioners who benefit are overwhelmingly white. The players on the court are MOSTLY black. So what, if anything, are those players owed?
"Shouldn't you help out your own community first?" That's the question we're exploring this week via our play-cousins at Latino USA. A black celebrity is criticized for helping a Latino immigrant. On this episode, that celebrity makes his case.
In February 2017, Srinivas Kutchibhotla fell victim to an alleged hate crime. In the aftermath, his widow, Sunayana Dumala, had her life and her immigration status thrown into question. Now, she's trying to figure out what it means to stay — and find community — in the small Kansas town where her husband was killed.
All four of the Gonzalez kids grew up under one roof, in Los Angeles, Calif. But when the oldest was in middle school, she realized that she and her siblings might have drastically different lives. That's because she comes from a mixed-status family, where some members are free to work, and others are constrained by the fear of deportation.
It's Alabama, 1963. A black woman stands before a judge, but she refuses to acknowledge him until he addresses her by an honorific given to white women: "Miss." On this week's episode, we revisit the forgotten story of Mary Hamilton, a Freedom Rider who struck a blow against a pervasive form of disrespect.
To get y'all in the mood for Valentine's Day, we're exploring some of our juiciest listener love questions. Should your race and gender affect how much you pay into a relationship? What's the difference between a preference and a fetish? And what's the quickest way for black women to find love?
If you're Native American, who or what gets to define your identity? We dive into an old system intended to measure the amount of "Indian blood" a person has. We hear from two families about how they've come to understand their own Native identities and how they'll pass that on to future generations.
On the occasion of President Trump's first State of the Union speech, we're looking at where things stand on civil rights at the Justice Department, the state of play for the country's white nationalist fringe, and how Puerto Rico is faring as the federal government prepares to cut off its emergency aid.
When Donald Trump allegedly referred to Haiti, El Salvador and some African countries as "shitholes," we called his comments r-...rr-...really really vulgar. Why were we so afraid to call them racist?
Our episode about multi-racial people and their search for identity struck a nerve. Now we're asking, "What other stories do you want to hear?"
On this weeks episode we hear the story of Shalon Irving, who passed away after giving birth to her daughter. Black women in the United States are 243 percent more likely than white women to die of pregnancy- or childbirth-related causes. There's evidence that shows this gap is caused by the "weathering" effects of racism.
This week, Gene Demby talks with ESPN's Jemele Hill. The SportsCenter anchor discusses becoming a lightning rod in the culture wars and the flimsy partition between politics and sports. And we'll look ahead to a year of looking back: the 50th anniversaries of the tumultuous events of 1968.
In this episode: lessons learned post-Charlottesville, the Latinas who said "me, too" before it went viral, race-and-rep wins in pop-culture and some of this year's real-life losses. You'll yell, you'll cheer, you'll shed a tear.
We're answering your holiday race questions: Why do we still think of Santa as white? Are POCs responsible for calling-out the racism at holiday parties? How do you tell your black family you're a non-believer? And, can you resurrect a dead family tradition?
As of January 1, it will be legal to sell recreational cannabis in California. But as the legal weed market gains traction, people of color who were targeted by the drug war are being left out of the green rush. This week, we revisit the history of marijuana in the U.S. ― and how its criminalization has everything to do with race.
Indonesia is one of the most ethnically diverse countries on Earth. And while that pluralism is embraced in the country's founding documents, its ethnic Chinese minority has been persecuted for generations. NPR's Ari Shapiro tells the story of a young Indonesian of Chinese descent, who is trying to navigate his country's roiling tensions.
It's Alabama, 1963. A black woman stands before a judge, but she refuses to acknowledge him until he addresses her by an honorific given to white women: "Miss." On this week's episode, we revisit the forgotten story of Mary Hamilton, a Freedom Rider who struck a blow against a pervasive form of disrespect.
It's a Thanksgiving mashup episode! We speak to Lin-Manuel Miranda about Puerto Rico, a parenting expert about tense family gatherings, and a Native professor about the truth behind the holiday. And for desert, the debate of our time: pumpkin or sweet potato pie?
Hosts Shereen and Gene take on Chi-City with help from Chicago-natives Eve Ewing and Natalie Y. Moore, plus Code Switch's play cousin, Hari Kondabolu. Ewing opens the show with a poem from her new collection, Electric Arches. Kondabolu talks about his upcoming documentary, "The Problem with Apu." And Moore brings her Chicago-expertise to some tough questions from our listeners.
We spent the past three episodes looking at the first year of a high school for black boys in Washington, D.C. Now, we're taking a look back on our reporting. What does it mean for a school like Ron Brown to exist — and what does that say about our society?
With 40 percent of its students at risk of failing, one radical new high school in Washington, D.C. wrestles with whether to lower its own high expectations.
In a radical new high school in Washington, D.C., the push for academic success sometimes clashes with providing young men the love and support they need to thrive.
Too many young, black men struggle in America's education system. Washington D.C. is trying to do something about it with a new, boys-only high school. NPR's Cory Turner and Education Week's Kavitha Cardoza spent hundreds of hours there, reporting on the birth of a school built on one word: Love.
When a school shuts down, students lose more than a place of learning; they lose friends, mentors and a community. This is an experience that disproportionately affects black students in the U.S. Shereen Marisol Meraji looks at what it's like when a predominantly black suburb outside Pittsburgh loses its only public high school.
The haphazard response to Hurricane Maria has underscored the tricky, in-between space that Puerto Ricans occupy. They're U.S. citizens — although nearly half of the country doesn't know that. But those who live in Puerto Rico don't enjoy many of the same privileges as citizens on the mainland. In this week's episode, Shereen travels to one of the most Puerto Rican enclaves in the country to explore the fraught relationship Puerto Ricans have with their American-ness.
When social interactions become racially charged, sometimes even the most woke among us are prone to faux pas. So this week, we're taking on our listeners' most burning questions about race. We'll talk weddings. We'll talk kiddos. And most of all, we'll talk paletas.
The history of cannabis in the U.S. ― and its criminalization ― is deeply interwoven with race. As the legal cannabis market gains traction, people of color who were targeted by the drug war could be left out of the green rush.
On this week's episode we talk about why certain communities are more vulnerable to catastrophic weather events like hurricanes and heat waves. Saying "mother nature doesn't discriminate," ignores the fact that discrimination exacerbates her wrath.
How do you get black people to buy cigarettes made for cowboys and antebellum-style beer? Turns out, you don't. On this episode: Tom Burrell, who transformed the ad industry with a simple motto, "Black people are not dark-skinned white people."
On this week's episode, a viral video gives us the opportunity to talk about racism towards and within the Latino community. When a Latino flipped over a street vendor's cart in Los Angeles, many were surprised it was a Latino-on-Latino incident. We'll talk about why the video is surprising and why it isn't.
As calls to remove Confederate memorials grow louder, we head to Richmond, Va., where the veneration of Confederate leaders has been a source of local pride — and revulsion — for more than a century.
After a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville spiraled into deadly violence, residents of the Virginia town do some soul-searching. Plus: a scholar on the politics of white resentment, and a GOP operative worries about the party's long-term future.
Spit into a tube and get in touch with your ancestors! Or not. On this episode we interview the founder of a project that uses DNA tests to talk about race in America. And Kim TallBear, a Native American anthropologist, says why she thinks DNA tests don't really tell you much about yourself.
The Census is so much more than cold, hard data. It's about what we call ourselves, the ways we see ourselves and how we're represented. On this episode we ask the former head of the Census bureau why he quit. We talk about how the Census helped create 'Hispanic' identity. And we talk through some of the proposed race and ethnicity categories that may show up on the 2020 questionnaire.
Shereen and Gene mix it up with the pioneering hip-hop radio hosts Stretch and Bobbito. These impresarios ran a legendary show in New York City during most of the 1990s. Now they're hosting an interview podcast featuring guests like Stevie Wonder, Dave Chappelle and Mahershala Ali.
Leila Day and Hana Baba are hosts of a new podcast called The Stoop. It features conversations black people have amongst themselves — but rarely in public. The pair swing by to talk with Shereen and Gene about their show, and share an episode about a very thorny question: Can African-Americans wear clothing and accessories that originated with African cultures they're not familiar with?
This encore presentation goes deep on a case involving a white police officer and an unarmed black man in Charlotte, NC. Videos in police-involved shootings can add detail to these cases, but as our colleague Kelly McEvers of the Embedded podcast reports, what you see depends on who you are.
The U.S. Supreme Court recently decided in favor of Simon Tam, front man of the band The Slants. The group has been fighting the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for nearly a decade, for the right to use the slur.
Shereen and Gene celebrate our first year on the podcast. We take a look back to some memorable stories with updates from the team and some of our guests.
In the aftermath of the acquittal of the officer who shot and killed Philando Castile, Gene and Shereen speak to a reporter who has followed the case since the beginning. We also speak to a friend of Castile's.
Why do some people of color embrace the American flag while others refuse to wave it? In this episode from the Code Switch archives, Gene Demby and Adrian Florido unpack the complicated patriotism and evolving use of the flag with immigrant rights protesters and Native American veterans.
Shereen and Gene look at "racial imposter syndrome." It's what one listener described as feeling fake, or inauthentic, in her identity. We invited listeners to write in, and hundreds of bi-racial and multi-cultural people shared their views. We'll also talk to social scientists about the basic need for belonging and the role language plays in identity. Later, writer Heidi Durrow joins us. She's founder of The Mixed-Remixed Festival, the largest annual gathering of its kind in the U.S.
This week, we follow the strange trend of white dance-music DJs who pass themselves off as black artists. Gene talks to legendary House music DJ Ron Trent. The European producer Guy Tavares chimes in from The Netherlands on what he sees as overhyped controversy. Piotr Orlov, who covers dance music for NPR weighs in on what this all means for music fans.
This week, we join the global conversation on The Atlantic's essay "My Family's Slave," in which Alex Tizon writes about Eudocia Tomas Pulido, who was his family's katulong, or domestic servant, for 56 years. Why did Eudocia's story hit such a raw nerve in the U.S. and the Philippines? Shereen and Gene talk to Vicente Rafael, a professor who has studied and written about the practice in his native Philippines. We also hear from Lydia Catina Amaya, a Filipina who was a katulong in the Philippines and the United States. And we talk to Melissa Tizon, the author's widow. Eudocia Tomas Pulido lived in their home for the last 12 years of her life.
The story of over 100,000 Japanese Americans enduring life in internment camps during WW II is well known, but a few thousand avoided the camps, entirely by, essentially, self-exiling. Code Switch correspondent Karen Grigsby Bates talks with research historian Diana Tsuchida, about the hidden history of Japanese Americans who survived by creating farming communities, like the one in Keetley, Utah. We also hear directly from survivors about life as internally displaced American citizens.
Gene and guest co-host Lenika Cruz, who covers culture at The Atlantic, welcome Alan Yang. He and comedian Aziz Ansari created an Emmy-winning comedy series that stepped comfortably out of the usual TV comfort zones. Master of None just premiered an already beloved second season, and Yang talks about making bold creative choices, crafting inclusive stories, and writing complex characters with an Asian American lead at the center of it all.
Miss Saigon has returned to Broadway. When the hit musical was first performed was controversial for its stereotypes and story and casting choices. Shereen is joined by teammate Kat Chow to explore Miss Saigon's journey in 2017.
Black-ish creator (Kenya) and the show's 17-year-old star (Yara) talk about what's next for them on TV and in real life. Kenya explains why he's never felt pressure to explain cultural jokes. Yara breaks down ways Gen Z is ahead of the rest of us. Plus, they preview a possible spin-off!
We hear from a Latino city councilman who was there when it all went down, a Korean-American who worked at her family's gas station in Compton and a prominent black pastor who gave a memorable sermon to his South LA congregation. Oh, and we tag in our play cousins Mandalit Del Barco and David Greene for this one.
This week, Gene welcomes NPR's Audie Cornish to talk about multi-talented writer, producer and comedian John Leguizamo. As a performer, he's mined his Latino identity through his own family and old New York neighborhoods for decades. Audie interviewed Leguizamo in New York during the current run of his latest one-man show, Latin History For Morons. Now a father, Leguizamo struggles with what he knows and what he can teach his son and daughter about being Latino in the U.S., while challenging himself to be the dad he'd always wanted his own father to be.
Shereen and Gene tackle listeners' reactions to recent episodes. One wants to know the difference between Persian and Iranian. (It's complicated.) Another wants more details about the risks to churches for becoming sanctuaries. (We asked a lawyer.) And a professor gave us a "loving critique" of our episode on Native hunting rights and sovereignty. (Thank you.) Plus a special call-out to the racial imposter in you.
In this Podcast Extra, NPR correspondent Joe Shapiro recalls the life and legacy of Martin Sostre, someone he first reported on as a student in the 1970s. Sostre died a free man in 2015. But he spent at least nine years of his life in solitary confinement, including in the notorious Attica prison. Today, Sostre's life and pioneering prisoners' rights work is largely hidden from the public.
Shereen and Gene welcome reporter Nate Hegyi, who spent a day in Montana with a Nez Perce hunting party, a tribe that faces strong opposition from some who see these rights as unfair and out of sync with modern life.
Gene and guest host Glen Weldon (our play cousin from Pop Culture Happy Hour) explore how comics are used as spaces for mapping race and identity. Gene visits Amalgam Comics and Coffeehouse in Philadelphia, and chats with proprietor Ariell Johnson who is reclaiming the comic book store, which once made her uneasy as a black fan. Meanwhile, C. Spike Trotman, another black woman, has made a name for herself as an online comics publisher of Iron Circus Comics in Chicago. We also talk to artist and designer Ronald Wimberly for his perspective as a black creator who has worked for Marvel and DC, the titans of corporate comics.
Jeanette Vizguerra speaks with Adrian Florido about her experience living in the church where she's taken sanctuary as she fights her deportation case. Jeanette Vizguerra habla con Adrián Florido sobre su experiencia viviendo en la iglesia donde ha tomado santuario mientras disputa su caso de deportación.
Code Switch's Adrian Florido has been covering the new sanctuary movement for us. For this episode, he spoke to key players to understand why hundreds of churches are ready to start a public fight with the current administration to prevent deportations of immigrants living in the U.S. illegally. He also looks at why the movement has to wrestle with important questions: Who controls the story and the message? How much say does an individual or family have in how a sanctuary church leverages their story? Adrian also has a candid talk with Jeanette Vizguerra, who is living inside a Colorado church, as she fights a legal deportation battle. It could be years before she is able to step outside the church. As Adrian reports, the decisions, intentions and relationships complicate the work of sanctuary churches.
It's springtime, and the celebration of rebirth and the New Year in Iranian-American communities is tempered by the recent rise in Islamaphobic incidents and ongoing uncertainties around the travel ban. To mark Nowruz, Gene and Shereen talk about what's bitter and what's sweet with Nilou Motamed, the Iranian-American editor-in-chief of Food & Wine magazine, and visit with Code Switch friend and comedian Negin Farsad.
In Nashville, there was a time when the idea of a "Negro park" ruffled feathers. For more than 80 years, there's been confusion about whether a park originally created during segregation and named for a seemingly nonexistent "Fred Douglas" might have actually been intended to honor the great abolitionist and statesman. Reporter Blake Farmer of member station WPLN explores the park's controversial history and how the city finally decided to clarify the park's name.
Gene and Shereen tackle some Code Switch listeners' questions about race and identity with a voice coach, a professor of children's literature, and two former interns who are now reporters: What's someone really asking when they say "What are you?" Where did the archetype of "The Magical Negro" come from? How has the meaning of "woke" evolved? And what does it mean to sound like an American in 2017? And many other questions in between the lines.
Does wearing safety pins and giving speeches at awards shows make you an ally? On this episode we explore the conundrums of ally-ship with activist and blogger ShiShi Rose, who helped organize the Women's March, Taz Ahmed, co-host of the GoodMuslimBadMuslim podcast, the Reverend Timothy Murphy, and our editor, Juleyka Lantigua-Williams. We also talk with the co-founder of a black-owned company that teaches white people how to be better allies, for a fee.
Puerto Ricans are migrants not immigrants, Spanish and English, domestic yet foreign — as we like to say on Code Switch, it's complicated. A hundred years ago this week, Puerto Ricans became U.S. citizens by law with the passing of the Jones Act. Since then, they've had a complicated and fraught relationship with what it means to be American. Shereen traveled to Holyoke, Massachusetts to explore what the Jones Act has meant to Puerto Rican identity on stateside in the last century. Holyoke has the highest ration of Puerto Ricans living in the U.S. - nearly 50% of residents there have Puerto Rican heritage. An earlier version of this podcast stated that Myriam Quiñonez has three children. She has two.
It's one of the oldest clichés of horror movies: the black guy dies first. But that's not the case in the new film "Get Out," written and directed by Jordan Peele (best known for the Comedy Central series "Key And Peele"). Gene and guest host Eric Deggans chat with Peele about his new film, check in with African-American filmmaker Ernest Dickerson, who's directed many scary movies and TV shows, and dive deep into race in horror-movie history with Robin Means Coleman, who's been analyzing and writing about the genre for over a decade.
Gene welcomes Code Switch reporter Kat Chow as guest host and they camp out at one of the biggest conferences for writers on the planet, held by the Association of Writers & Writing Programs. There, they talk with literary stars and publishing world veterans about everything from hip hop lyricism to the role of the artist in trying political times to buzz-worthy emerging writers of color.
A filmmaker of color is almost certain to win this year's Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. In fact, for the first time, African-American documentarians made up most of the nominees. We talk with Ava DuVernay, whose movie "13th," made her the first black female director to be nominated in this category. And the Emmy and Peabody award-winning documentarian Noland Walker, now of ITVS, tells us about how the film industry has responded to documentarians of color since he started as a production assistant on the landmark PBS documentary series, "Eyes On the Prize" in the late 1980s.
Shereen and Gene are joined by Code Switch's own Adrian Florido to revisit a conversation about how advocates are challenging the narrative of the "good" or "bad" immigrant. Adrian previously reported on what happens when advocates try to champion an undocumented immigrant who was convicted of a crime. For many people, "DREAMers," were considered the most sympathetic characters in the immigration reform drama. But a new administration is in the White House, and what was once a very complicated landscape is changing. Later, economist Ike Brannon from the CATO Institute joins the conversation.
Code Switch listeners join Shereen and Gene in talking about their concerns and frustrations during the first hundred days of President Trump's administration. Our guest is MacArthur "genius grant" recipient Ahilan Arulanantham of the ACLU of Southern California.
We conclude our three part series of conversations on President Obama's racial legacy. It's likely that Barack Obama will be known not only as the first black president, but also as the first president of everybody's race. Many Americans and people beyond the U.S. borders have projected their multicultural selves onto the president. Gene and Shereen are joined by poet Richard Blanco, Angela Rye, head of the political advocacy firm IMPACT Strategies, and NYU history professor Nikhil Singh.
Shereen and Gene continue our conversation on President Barack Obama's racial legacy. Where did the president fall short — or fail — people of color? We hear opinions about Obama's actions as they affected Latinos, African Americans, and Native Americans. Janet Murguia is president of the National Council of La Raza. Simon Moya-Smith is editor of Indian Country Today and a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation. Carla Shedd teaches sociology and African American studies at Columbia University; she wrote the book "Unequal City: Race, Schools, and Perceptions of Injustice."
In the first of three conversations about President Barack Obama's racial legacy,Code Switch asks how much race or racism drove the way the first black president was treated and how he governed. Did the president misjudge the state of race relations in America? Real talk about the Obama legacy is just a click away on this week's podcast. Gene and Shereen are joined by Jamelle Bouie, Slate's chief political correspondent, and Tressie McMillan Cottam, sociologist at Virginia Commonwealth University.
We revisit Gene's conversation with filmmaker Barry Jenkins to close out 2016. Jenkins' latest movie is Moonlight. There's buzz for awards nominations, including the Oscars.
You know it when you see it or, maybe by the smell. It's the holiday dish no one really likes but someone always makes "because it's tradition." Not all food traditions are equally appetizing... but they often remind us who we are. We asked you to tell us about dishes you don't like, but that keep showing up during the holiday season. We check in with poet Kevin Young to find out why chitlins will always grace his table. And restaurateur Genevieve Villamora joins Gene and Shereen to talk about dinuguan ... a traditional Filipino pork stew with strong flavors (made with pig's blood). She avoided it as a kid, but now, it's served at her acclaimed Washington DC restaurant "Bad Saint."
Gene and Shereen ask how much cultural context to give when talking about race and culture. So, how much context should you have to provide? Comedian Hari Kondabolu, co-host of the podcast Politically Re-Active, deals with these questions regularly, both in his stand-up routine and on his podcast.
NPR's Audie Cornish was bused to an affluent suburban school outside Boston in a voluntary integration program. She reflects on her experiences with Gene Demby and talks about stories she recently reported on kids using the program today. Matthew Delmont joins the conversation. He teaches history at Arizona State University and wrote the book "Why Busing Failed."
We present an encore episode from Summer 2016: Shereen Marisol Meraji and Kat Chow talk with Christina Xu about her project to open up a difficult race conversation between younger and older generations of Asian-American families. We hear from a daughter and her father as they discuss why she thought it was important to join Black Lives Matter marches.
For families of color, the recent Presidential campaign season and election results may affect the tone of conversations at Thanksgiving and throughout this holiday season. Shereen and Gene are joined by Kat from the Code Switch Team to dissect dinner table politics. We also hear from people who answered our social media call-out, and later, journalist and professor Asra Nomani and her father Azar talk with Shereen about how they came to terms with political differences in the family. Asra Nomani, a Muslim woman and immigrant, revealed in an op-ed that she voted for Donald Trump.
Actor Christopher Jackson steps down this week from his role as George Washington in the award-winning Broadway show Hamilton. Gene gets an exit interview.
Gene and Shereen digest the surprising results of the presidential election with help from a comedian and a columnist. Negin Farsad hosts the podcast "Fake The Nation." Gustavo Arrellano is editor of "OC WEEKLY" in Orange County, California, and writes the column "¡Ask A Mexican!."
In just a few days, the election will be over. But the racism, anger and fear that have surfaced will still be with us. Gene and Shereen talk with Carol Anderson, historian and author of "White Rage," and Whitney Dow, creator of the Whiteness Project, about what happens to those feelings after Nov. 8.
Just kidding. But seriously, "Moonlight," Jenkins' new film, is the movie of the moment. Gene talks with him about what it took to get the movie made, what it was like to film in the Miami projects where he grew up, and - yep - the theme of black masculinity.
From the Code Switch archives: Gene talks with Ezra Edelman, director of the ESPN documentary "OJ: Made in America." For a long time, O.J. Simpson seemed to be running away from his race. "I'm not black, I'm O.J.!" he'd tell his friends. Gene and Ezra consider O.J.'s identity beyond the frame of the so-called "Trial of the Century." (A warning, this episode has some racially charged language.)
You might call "Dreamers" the most sympathetic characters in the immigration reform drama. But what happens when advocates try to champion an illegal immigrant who's a felon? Adrian and Shereen explore how advocates are challenging the narrative of the "good" and "bad" immigrant.
Awkward comments. Rude questions. Casual racism. What do you do when it happens in your presence? The mental calculus is hard enough. It gets even harder when the comment is coming from your friends or family. Gene, Shereen, and Karen from Code Switch along with special guest Nicole Chung share stories and search for solutions.
It's time for some real talk on trigger warnings. Gene and Shereen dig into it with two college professors. What really happens in the classroom when hard topics come up, especially about race? Are trigger warnings necessary? We also hear the results of an NPR survey of more than 800 professors.
Tupac Shakur died 20 years ago this week. Gene Demby and Shereen Marisol Meraji debate his legacy with the writer Kevin Powell, who covered the rapper for three years until Tupac's death. How should we view Tupac's talents and imperfections today?
Marc Lamont Hill untangles the decades of dysfunction that have led to recent racial flash-points in his latest book, Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond. He talks with Gene Demby about the book, and his support for one particularly unconventional approach to making our justice system more fair.
Many Mexican and Mexican Americans loved Juan Gabriel's music, but ridiculed his sexuality. Can his death open a new conversation about gay identity in the community? Code Switch's Adrian Florido explores how Juan Gabriel's sexuality complicated his fame and relationship with his fans.
From Apu to Ashton Kutcher, mimicking the Indian accent is still widely seen as fair game. Even lots of ABCD's — American-born confused desis — do it. But is it out of love, or mockery? Code Switch's Tasneem Raja talks to Indians with and without accents on what "Thank you, come again" means to them.
Code Switch's Karen Grigsby Bates and NPR movie critic Bob Mondello discuss "Southside With You," a fictionalized version of Barack and Michelle Obama's first date, and other black love stories in film.
Actor Nate Parker is the center of a lot attention these days because of his upcoming movie The Birth of A Nation. Parker wrote, directed and stars as Nat Turner, leader of an historic 1831 slave rebellion in Virginia. Last winter, Parker won a multi-million dollar distribution deal for the movie at the Sundance Film Festival. As the anticipation grows for the film's release, a chapter from Parker's college past has come under scrutiny. He was charged and later acquitted in a rape trial as a student-athlete at Penn State. Code Switch's Karen Grigsby Bates moderates a conversation about how Parker's past and his responses in the present may affect what some already consider an important motion picture. Karen is joined by Gillian White, senior associate editor at The Atlantic, Michael Arceneaux, a columnist for Complex magazine, and Goldie Taylor, an editor-at-large of The Daily Beast.
When a school shuts down, students often lose more than a place of learning; they lose friends, mentors and a community. This is an experience that disproportionately affects black students. Shereen Marisol Meraji looks at what it's like when a predominantly black suburb outside Pittsburgh loses its only public high school. Shereen's reporting, along with that of producer Chris Benderev, was originally produced for the NPR podcast Embedded.
When you have a name like Aparna Nancherla or Maz Jobrani, you get used to people butchering it. These two comedians, who both come from immigrant families, talk to Code Switch editor Tasneem Raja about their "Starbucks names," all of the weird ways people mispronounce their names, and whether having a "difficult" name has impacted their careers.
News stories of conflict involving people of color raise questions about the role of diversity in newsrooms. With the current election cycle drenched with racially charged rhetoric, how do journalists of color deal with the idea of "objectivity," when it can seem at odds with the work of telling hard truths? Gene Demby and Shereen Marisol Meraji talk with veteran political journalist Pilar Marrero whose reporting appears in the Spanish language newspaper La Opinion; and with Wesley Lowery, a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter on policing issues for The Washington Post.
The day after the police shooting of Philando Castile, hundreds of young Asian Americans connected online to write an open letter to their parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, asking them to support movements like Black Lives Matter. It also broached a subject many felt deeply uncomfortable bringing up to their older relatives: anti-black racism in Asian American communities. The letter has set off countless conversations across generations of immigrant families in many different languages. Shereen Marisol Meraji and Kat Chow talk to Christina Xu, who started this project, and listen in to one conversation between a daughter and her father about why she chooses to join these marches.
When Philando Castile was killed by a police officer during a recent traffic stop, it was the last of at least 46 times he had been pulled over by police. How does that happen? And what does it say about policing in communities of color? Gene Demby talks with NPR's Cheryl Corley and Eyder Peralta, who reported on Castile's encounters with local police.
In the aftermath of deadly police shootings of black men and the deaths of five policemen at the hands of a black gunman, Shereen Marisol Meraji and Gene Demby explore perspectives on policing while black. They talk with Gregory Thomas the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives; Michael Rallings, interim director of police services in Memphis, Tennessee; and Jelani Cobb, of The New Yorker, who embedded for nearly a year with police in Newark, New Jersey for the recent PBS Frontline documentary, "Policing The Police."
It's hard to figure out what to say after the horrific violence of the last week, which began with two new viral videos of police shooting black men and ended with a deadly attack by a black gunman on police officers. But Shereen Marisol Meraji, Gene Demby along with Kat Chow of the Code Switch Team got some help from a Dallas resident as well as Harvard historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad, who has written extensively about race, crime and policing.
Why do some people of color embrace the American flag while others refuse to wave it? Gene Demby and Adrian Florido unpack the complicated patriotism and evolving use of the flag with immigrant rights protesters and Native American veterans.
For a long time, O.J. Simpson seemed to be running away from his race. "I'm not black, I'm O.J.!" he'd tell his friends. The he was charged with murder, and his defense team needed that jury to see O.J. as black. So, they had to get creative. Gene talks to Ezra Edelman, director of the new ESPN documentary "OJ: Made in America."(A warning, today's episode has some racially charged language.)
Gene and Kat talk about "rep sweats," worrying over how people of color are portrayed on TV and in the movies. Kat remembers growing up watching TV with her sisters and yelling "Asian!" every time they saw someone who looked like them. Gene admits he is #TeamRafael. Also, a conversation with Hudson Yang, star of the ABC sitcom "Fresh Off the Boat," along with his dad Jeff Yang, a well-known cultural critic.
The tragedy in Orlando this week shook many people in communities that already feel vulnerable...LGBTQ Americans, Latinos, Muslims and people living at the intersection of those identities.
Sure, Ali was the greatest, a humanitarian, an inspiration. He was also a complicated, messy figure. Gene and the team dig in, and wonder what people mean when they say Ali "transcended race."
Black people don't hike? Latinos don't like camping? Asians are afraid of the sun? Adrian and Shereen dig into the stereotypes — and truths — about people of color and their relationship to the great outdoors.
Gene and Shereen dig into why it's so hard to talk about white identity in America — and why it's really important that we figure out how.
Here's a preview of our new podcast, exploring how race and culture collide with everything else in our lives.