Comedian W. Kamau Bell has two daughters, and tries to figure out just how much about the violent history of racism and oppression his four-year-old can handle.
As a new high school principal, Dr. Whitfield felt moved by the national renouncement of racism he saw all around him in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.
Ira reads from an editorial from a 1957 newspaper in Jackson, Mississippi. It tries to scare white southerners about the NAACP by describing a Chicago human rights campaign called "Take a Negro Boy Home Tonight." The idea behind the campaign? "Racism can be combated by intimate relationships between Negro boys and white girls." No such campaigns really existed in Chicago.
Alex Blumberg takes us to an American classroom where students are reading a classic, The Education of Little Tree, by Forrest Carter. The book is marketed as a simple homespun autobiography of a Cherokee orphan.
Writer Malcolm Gladwell, reads from a story that he first wrote for the New Yorker magazine about his cousins, who immigrated to the U.S. from Jamaica 12 years ago.
The response to Rob and Reyna’s Facebook post is loud and immediate. This officer has a past and people have thoughts about him in the town he works, Muskegon, Michigan.
Emanuele Berry and Ira Glass watch a Soviet film from 1936. A bizarre cameo of an African American baby in an all-white crowd makes Emanuele wonder about what it’s like to be Black in a country with so few Black people.
During her sophomore year in high school, Nevaeh was targeted in a secret text message chain by a handful of her peers. She’d come to learn the text chat was a mock slave trade where her photo and photos of other Black classmates were uploaded, talked about as property, and bid on.
Producer Neil Drumming talks to someone who was not happy with the results of Tuesday’s election. Janelle, who’s black, is bracing herself for the coming days.
Hundreds of thousands of Gulf residents evacuated before the storm and followed the whole thing from afar. Cheryl Wagner left for Gainesville, Florida, where her friends advised her to buy a gun and a mean dog before returning home to New Orleans.
Host Ira Glass talks with Kayla Hernandez, a seventh-grader who likes to reminisce about when she was a child, back in fifth grade. She visits Room 211 in her school, where her fifth grade class met, and looks at her old books, thinks about what happened there.
Host Ira Glass talks with Kayla Hernandez, a seventh-grader who likes to reminisce about when she was a child, back in fifth grade. She visits Room 211 in her school, where her fifth grade class met, and looks at her old books, thinks about what happened there.
Ira tells the story of Lisa Mahone, who was pulled over by a police officer who she says was acting really weird. When he pulled a gun on her, Lisa decided to call 911 — on the cop.
DeSantis has passed law after law about what can and can’t be taught in Florida classrooms. Reporter Emmanuel Dzotsi followed how things unfolded at Florida State.
A documentary by Cecilia Vaisman and Christina Egloff, with Jay Allison, about a white woman named Carolyn Wren Shannon, who grew up hating blacks in a Catholic neighborhood, and how her attitudes change.
Reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, who has investigated integration in schools for years, joins ChanaJoffe-Walt to interview the Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. The Obama Administration saysit’s in favor of integrating the schools, but doesn’t seem to do so much to promote it.
Reporter Aaron Reiss found a woman that an entire community calls, in order to find out the names of the very streets they're walking on. She's the gatekeeper for a series of secret underground maps of New York City.