Code Switch

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 h...

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. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and...

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. See pcm.adswizz.com for inform...

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. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. 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 bel...

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. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to man...

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. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy P...

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...

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. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship...

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? See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. 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. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponso...

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 book got 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...

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. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our col...

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. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your...

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. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. 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 . See pcm.adswizz.com for information about ou...

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 organize...

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,...

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? See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manag...

Daniel Olivas's novel puts a new spin on the age-old Frankenstein story. In this retelling, 12 million "reanimated" people provide a cheap workforce for the United States...and face a very familiar type of bigotry. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy

This week on the podcast, we're revisiting a conversation we had with Ava 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. See pcm.adswizz.com for information...

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...

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 Henriqu...

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. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcas...

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. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal d...