Book of the Day

In 'Friends and Family,' a police encounter strains a friendship between two moms

I think Nora comes into this thinking that love and kindness and openheartedness and her wealth can almost lift Nathan, her adopted black son, out of race, right, into class.

Book of the Day

In 'History by a Hair,' DNA offers answers to an old question about Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson wrote the most famous phrase in American history, all men are created equal. And yet, if he bore children with Sally Hemings, who were born into slavery, it seemed like a paradox and a contradiction.

Fresh Air

Best Of: Rhiannon Giddens / Investigating Diddy’s Rise & Fall

The work that I do is very culturally difficult, because what I'm doing is, in a large part, I'm talking about very difficult things in our history to mostly white audiences, you know. So every night, I'm sort of just burying everything, you know, so that people can have an emotional connection to some really, really difficult history. I shouldn't have to do that, you know.

Fresh Air

Best Of: Rhiannon Giddens / Investigating Diddy’s Rise & Fall

And the years pass, and you continue to perform blackness for people in a way that is palatable, right? In a way that keeps everybody there and not walking out the door. And that is only something I can do for so long, you know.

Code Switch

Why can’t people be normal about the WNBA? | Code Switch

The WNBA's rise has been fueled as much by a love for hoops as for the politics of it all. The league is obviously predominated by women who are black or queer or both and who are also really politically outspoken and all of that helped draw in lots of new liberal fans. But it also helped make the W a target of conservatives and the volume of that tension has really ratcheted up this year.

Fresh Air

Colin Kaepernick is still fighting – for justice and for his football career

I saw how people would treat me when I'm by myself versus when my parents were there. And I also knew that our house wasn't one that talked about race or talked about issues or problems more broadly. And again, instinctively, as a black boy, I didn't think they would believe me.

Code Switch

Banana Ball's racial minstrelsy past

Lots of black folks and lots of people in black baseball really did not rock with the clowns. So, we can go back to the 30s when they started as the Ethiopian Clowns.

TED

“To My Bones” / “As the River Flows” / “In Dictum” | Wallis Bird | TED

Don't tell me borders are for jobs and civic order. When I know you see it differently, you want your pallet white. You want it clean.

Book of the Day

Robinne Lee's 'Crash Into Me' portrays middle age as complicated – and sexy

As you know, privileged as you may be or as attractive as you may be or whatever it is, if you are not white presenting in certain spaces, your narrative is different. Your experience of the world is different. and your identity is different because part of your identity is responding to how you have been perceived for your entire life.

Code Switch

Why the World Cup is race and class all the way down

Race and class and identity like always seem to be right there on the surface at the World Cup every 4 years. Like, maybe more so than any other sporting event.

Book of the Day

Eddie Glaude on the tension at the center of America's milestone birthdays

America imagines itself at once as a beacon of freedom and as a white republic. And you can't hold those two views together without contradiction. Without depositing a kind of madness at the heart of the nation.

Book of the Day

'Kin' and 'When Two Feathers Fell from the Sky' fictionalize the Jim Crow South

Black women are either stereotyped as terrible mothers or just bottomlessly maternal. And so I was really interrogating what does it mean to mother by choice? And what does it mean to mother not by choice?

Code Switch

How anti-DEI hit the military | Code Switch

Crossing the ocean to fight for freedom abroad that he wasn't even fully granted at home.

Book of the Day

Laverne Cox on her childhood, 'Walden' and her new memoir 'Transcendent'

When I um read Walden when I was a freshman in high school, I was just sort of like transcendentalism. This is like this is what I want wanted to do my whole life. I wanted to transcend how people see me because I was assigned male at birth and because I'm black and poor in the South. I want to transcend this body. I want to transcend like time and space. And I finally had a word um for what I longed to do and what I felt like I was here to do.

Code Switch

The 'white genocide' myth is shaping immigration policy | Code Switch

The claims of persecution behind this refugee program are based on this wildly debunked far-right conspiracy about South Africa. That white farmers are being killed by gangs of black South Africans and that their land is being seized by the government.

Book of the Day

Laverne Cox on her childhood, 'Walden' and her new memoir 'Transcendent'

I wanted to transcend how people see me because I was assigned male at birth and because I'm black and poor in the South. I want to transcend this body. I want to transcend like time and space. And I finally had a word for what I longed to do and what I felt like I was here to do.

It's Been a Minute

What does freedom actually look like? | It's Been a Minute

All throughout the north, black people are on high alert because slave catchers are out sort of like ICE, snatching people off the street, picking them up, throwing them in jail, throwing them in these holding pens, sending them back to slavery. Even if you were born in freedom, you felt like your life was at risk.

Fresh Air

Best Of: A family split by race / Eddie Glaude Jr. on America at 250

My grandfather kept Edward's secret right from the very beginning out of a sense of protectiveness for him. He knew that this was a very dangerous and risky thing that Edward was doing. Black men who were found to be posing as white could face all sorts of violence, even death in the Jim Crow era.

Code Switch

Trump's 'weaponization' fund steals reparations blueprint

On this 250th birthday of the United States, the bill that would allow Mother Randall to be compensated is languishing in some congressional committee somewhere. Bills for black reparations for slavery have sat collecting dust for decades, but people convicted for their roles in January 6 came way closer to official government sanctioned redress than anybody in those groups. So, who counts as having been harmed by the state?

It's Been a Minute

What to expect when you're expecting racism

Part of the punchline of the book is that black people can't purchase an escape from racism. We can't buy ourselves out of anti-blackness in the US. Moreover, black people know this.

It's Been a Minute

Who gets to 'do' revenge?

I was stunned at the desire to protect the image of an extremely violent man simply because he's black.

Fresh Air

Richard Pryor’s daughter Elizabeth is a scholar of the N-word

The word has two distinct pronunciations, she says, which signal entirely different meanings. The hard 'er' ending, she says, has historically been used as a weapon — a way of saying you are less than human. The soft 'a' ending, she says, is used within the Black community as a term of familiarity and even affection.

The New York Times

How Black Voters in Alabama Are Fighting G.O.P. Redistricting

As a Black woman in this country, just about every right that I have is some type of law that can be overturned. And in my lifetime, I'm actively watching those efforts happen.

Fresh Air

Richard Pryor’s daughter Elizabeth is a scholar of the N-word

The word is doing a tremendous amount of work in American culture and society, and it's a problem that causes real harm to people. And one of the ways that we can actually address that problem with more than hand-wringing or more than shock is to actually understand how it works.

Fresh Air

Richard Pryor’s daughter Elizabeth is a scholar of the N-word

It's the most volatile word in the American language. It has been used to harm, to bond, to challenge, to unite, to separate. It's impossible to discuss American history, literature, and culture without it.

Fresh Air

Richard Pryor’s daughter Elizabeth is a scholar of the N-word

The word is doing a tremendous amount of work — it's marking race, it's marking power, it's marking intimacy, it's marking hatred, it's marking love. And what's extraordinary about it is that it can mark all those things simultaneously.

Code Switch

Why so many Americans never learned to swim

In the US, about eight out of 10 children from households with incomes below $50,000 a year have few to no swimming skills. That's according to the American Red Cross. About 64% of black children have few to no swimming skills. For Latino children, it's 45%. For white kids, it's about 40%. And you know, not to get all heavy, but these disparities around swimming line up with drowning deaths in the US, which are most likely to affect poor kids and kids of color.