We cover race, identity and culture here at Code Switch, and we're not the only ones. So we decided to pull together a weekly roundup of our favorite journalism and commentary about race from the world of public media and beyond. (And, uh, we're still looking for a name for this thing! If you've got any suggestions, holler at us@NPRCodeSwitch.)
It Was A Big Few Weeks For Coverage Of Whiteness
Apocalypse or Racial Kumbaya? America After Nov. 8: We'd be remiss in not shouting out our own episode of the Code Switch podcast, in which we wondered what's going to happen to all the anxieties that white people have been feeling over this campaign season.
Will I Know Anyone At This Party?This American Life's Zoe Chace shows the way that fears about immigration and Muslims have played out in St. Cloud, Minn., a mostly white town that has seen an influx of Somali immigrants.This American Life
In 2016, A Crisis of White Identity: This is a good primer on the fear of "cultural change" that seems to be driving populist movements in both the U.S and the U.K. What are the connections between #Brexit and Trumpism? Amanda Taub,The New York Times
The White Flight of Derek Black:His father was the creator of Stormfront, the popular online message board for white nationalists. And he was all set up to follow in his father's racist footsteps — until he went to college. Eli Saslow,The Washington Post
Other Reflections On Current News
The View From Standing Rock's Two Front Lines: A profile of two people on opposite sides of the heated fight over the Dakota Access Pipeline: a Native American activist protesting its construction and a sheriff's deputy trying to keep the peace.Jack Healy,The New York Times
Donald Trump's Inconvenient Racial Truth:Donald Trump's stump speeches about the horrors of inner-city life may have been aimed at the fears of his white base. But Nikole Hannah-Jones has a counterintuitive take. She writes that Trump was speaking more directly about the struggles of working-class black folks than any major presidential candidate in years. Nikole Hannah-Jones,The New York Times
What Beyonce's 'Daddy Lessons' Had To Teach:The pop superstar's surprise performance at the Country Music Awards was fraught with tensions: the whiteness of the genre she was celebrating, the social conservatism of its fans, and her recent outspokenness on issues of police violence.Spencer Kornhaber,The Atlantic
Smart, Compelling Stories On Big Topics
The Problem We All Live With: In the event that you somehow missed it last week, John Oliver's funny, incisive take on racial segregation in schools — and especially schools in Northern cities that like to see themselves as beacons of racial progress — implicates us all. HBO's Last Week Tonight
'Good' And 'Bad' Immigrants:Our Code Switch teammate Adrian Florido traveled to Tijuana to tell the story of Jose Alvarez, who embodies a tension in current immigration policy. The Obama administration says it deports "felons, not families." Jose is a felon (he already served his time 20 years ago) who has a family in Southern California. Adrian had a great piece on NPR and a longer take in our recent podcast episode "Who's A Good Immigrant, Anyway?" NPR's All Things Considered
How A Theory Of Crime And Policing Was Born, And Went Terribly Wrong:Shankar Vedantam retraces the intellectual history of "broken windows" policing, which has had disastrous ramifications for black and Latino communities. NPR's Hidden Brain
'We Don't Want To Read About You In "The Whirl" '!:A fun look at the tawdry Detroit weekly that for more than a half-century served up salacious gossip about the city's black bourgeoisie and finger-wagged at the community's ne'er-do-wells — and topped it all off in rhyming pentameter. Scott Eden,The Believer
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