The California Report Magazine

This week we're revisiting one of our favorite interviews from our Mixed! series. W. Kamau Bell has centered conversations about race in much of his work as a comedian, author and TV host. But when Kamau, who's black, and his wife Melissa, who's white, had kids, they knew their experiences around race would be much different than their daughters. So The Bells set out to make a film that centers th...

LA Food Bank Welcomes Striking Writers and Actors Actors and writers are still on strike and a lot of folks behind the scenes from screenwriters to stunt doubles – are struggling. To help strikers, some businesses are offering discounts to union members. Actor and comedian Kristina Wong is trying to make sure that while strikers are out on the picket lines, they can get enough to eat. She's become...

Oakland’s Wahpepah's Kitchen Reclaims Native Dishes Crystal Wahpepah wanted to be a chef since she was 7 years old. Like her grandfather and mother, Wahpepah is a registered member of the Kickapoo tribe of Oklahoma. She remembers learning to make fry bread with her aunty and grandmother — and picking berries with her grandfather on the Hoopa Reservation where she spent time as a child. But while g...

When the Castle Fire started burning in August of 2020, it ripped through Sequoia National Park, burning for months and with an intensity that has become increasingly normal during wildfire season. Just one year later, the KNP Complex fire devastated this same region. Together, these two massive fires burned grove after grove of giant sequoias, thousands of the largest trees on earth. Trees found...

Latinos helped build the city of San Jose, though its a history largely forgotten or ignored. This week, we’re highlighting the impact Mexican-Americans have had on the Bay Area's biggest city, through the lens of one Chicana trailblazer. And we'll hear how this activism is helping guide those hoping to keep a fixture of the city's immigrant communities alive, as vendors at the Berryessa Flea Mark...

This week we’re featuring a story from our friends at Code Switch. It’s the little known history of Japanese Americans who were living in Japan during World War II. Recently, reporter Kori Suzuki found out that his own grandmother, who he’d always thought was born in Japan, is a Kibei Nisei, a second generation American who returned after living through the war in Japan. In this story, he explores...

This week we’re featuring the Los Angeles Times’ podcast, “Foretold.” It’s the story of a young mother, Paulina Stevens, who was raised in a Romani American family on the Central Coast. Paulina shared her story with reporter Faith Pinho as she sought to leave the sometimes stifling culture she’d grown up in and the life of fortune telling prescribed for her in her teens.   Learn more about your ad...

One of the biggest stories in hip-hop right now is set to play out in a courtroom later this year, when Atlanta rapper Young Thug goes on trial for gang-related activities. One of the key pieces of evidence cited in the indictment are his lyrics. The phenomenon of rap songs being played in court dates back to the early ’90s, with an early example happening in the Bay Area during the trial of one o...

In 2018, the Woolsey Fire burned nearly 97,000 acres in Los Angeles and Ventura counties. It was one of the most destructive fires in Southern California history. Among the stories that emerged from the fire was one that seemed made for Hollywood: a group of Malibu surfers who stayed behind and helped save their town from the flames. In the new podcast Sandcastles, host and producer Adriana Cargil...

This week we’re bringing you one of our favorite stories from 2022. You’ve probably heard of Bobby Seale and The Black Panthers. Or Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement. But what about Kartar Singh Sarabha and the Ghadar Movement? Or Kala Bagai and the fight against redlining? This week we dive deep into the hidden history of early South Asian activism in our state. How Indian, Pakistani, Bang...

Communities in LA County, like the city of Glendale, are home to the world’s largest Armenian population outside of Armenia. Starting more than a century ago, Armenians fled their homeland during the Armenian Genocide and many of them ended up in California. But now, some LA Armenians are moving in the other direction, back to Armenia. Reporter Levi Bridges traveled to the Armenian capital, Yereva...

This week we're featuring an excerpt from the Kitchen Sisters' special, House/Full of Black Women. For eight years now 34 Black women have gathered monthly around a big dining room table in Oakland, California. They meet, cook, dance, and strategize — grappling with the issues of eviction, erasure, gentrification, inadequate health care, and the sex trafficking of Black women and girls that overwh...

At This Library, You Check Out a Human, Not a Book — and Sit Down to Talk California prides itself on being a diverse state that welcomes folks from all kinds of backgrounds. But actually connecting people who have radically different life experiences — that can be a challenge. The Santa Monica Public Library is hosting events to encourage deep one-on-one conversations between people from differen...

California music legend Chris Strachwitz passed away last month in San Rafael at the age of 91. He was the founder of Arhoolie Records, which championed traditional roots music like zydeco, blues, Norteño and Tejano. Starting in 1960, Strachwitz recorded hundreds of albums documenting this music, traveling to far flung corners of the country to find improbable stars. In 2019, his longtime friends...

When Roe v. Wade was overturned last year, California declared itself an abortion haven, an abortion sanctuary. The governor invited women from around the country to come here for safe, accessible abortions. He even set aside taxpayer dollars to help pay for their travel expenses. But for many people who live here and need abortion care, the state is anything but a sanctuary. Despite having some o...

When John F. Kennedy High School opened in 1967, it was a model of innovation. The Richmond school was designed for flexible scheduling, team-teaching and empowered students to take responsibility for their own learning. It also had award-winning extracurriculars and powerful vocational pathways. All this made it a destination school and one of the few examples of successful integration by race an...

KQED's Erin Baldassari has spent months reporting on what was once the largest settlement of unhoused people in Northern California. The city of Oakland has recently evicted some 300 people who were living in tents and trailers along Wood Street, some of whom had been there for a decade. Now, as residents scatter, many are mourning the loss of the community they had built. Baldassari follows two r...

Back in the early 1900s, the town of Allensworth became the first California town founded, financed and governed by Black Americans. The fertile Tulare Lake region should’ve been a utopia for the Black doctors, professors and farmers who settled there. But historic power dynamics left them, and the Allensworth community today, on the losing side of many water and land use questions. Now, as the Si...

David 'Mas' Masumoto says he farms with ghosts. On his family's organic peach, nectarine and grape farm south of Fresno, California, Mas says the labor and lessons of his ancestors are in the soil and he's passing these on to the next generations. Mas is an author, too, who has delved into the stories of his farm and family in more than 10 books. In his latest, Secret Harvests, Mas writes about th...

W. Kamau Bell has centered conversations about race in much of his work as a comedian, author and TV host. But when Kamau, who's black, and his wife Melissa, who's white, had kids, they knew their experiences around race would be much different than their daughters. So The Bells set out to make a film that centers the lives of other mixed-race kids like them. In a conversation with hosts Sasha Kho...

Parenting is already a challenge, but it can be even more complicated when you’re raising a kid with a different racial identity than yours or your partner’s. Mixed!: Stories from Mixed Race Californians continues as co-hosts Sasha Khokha and Marisa Lagos talk to Dr. Jenn Noble, a clinical psychologist who often works with multiracial families and Rahul Yates, a high school senior and host of the...

Half-and-half. Cream and coffee. Almost every mixed-race family develops their own, sometimes bizarre, metaphors to explain their kids to the outside world. Chicana feminist, playwright, poet and author Cherríe Moraga prefers the term “mixed blood.” Her recent memoir, Native Country of the Heart, is a tribute to her powerful and complicated Mexican mother, Elvira Moraga. It’s a more seasoned refle...

Bay Area Teacher on Growing Up 'Multiracial Japanese American' — and Why Ethnic Studies Matters “Woman. Daughter. Adoptee. AIDS Orphan. Hapa. Japanese-American. Asian. Asian-American. Queer Musician. Writer. Martial Artist. Alive.” Those are the words a 21-year-old Joemy Ito-Gates wrote below a photograph of her taken by artist Kip Fulbeck. Some 20 years later, she’s also now a mother, an ethnic s...

Our series MIXED!: Stories of Mixed Race Californians, continues with a wide ranging conversation with the late UCSB professor Reginald Daniel. He passed away suddenly in November 2022, just a few weeks after speaking with co-hosts Sasha Khokha and Marisa Lagos. Before his death Professor Daniel taught the longest running college course on multiracial identity in the nation.  Daniel's family ident...

Olympic figure skater Tai Babilonia and her skating partner Randy Gardner rapidly ascended figure skating’s ranks to become World Champions in 1979. They were favorites at the 1980 Olympics, but an injury ended their dream of a medal. For our series Mixed! Stories of Mixed Race Californians, co-hosts Sasha Khokha and Marisa Lagos spoke to Babilonia about growing up in a mixed race family in the 19...