Code Switch
Episodes
The return of the U.S.'s oldest drag king
24 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
For decades now, drag queens have captured the national imagination. Drag kings, on the other hand, have been relegated to a less prominent position i...
Honoring my enslaved ancestors: Episode 2
17 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Honoring my enslaved ancestors: Episode 1
10 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
How one event in history can ripple through generations of a family
03 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
The truth and lies behind one of the most banned books in America
26 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 immediat...
Some freed people actually received '40 acres and a mule.' Then it got taken away.
24 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 a...
The history of trans misogyny is the history of segregation
19 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Should we stop using the word "felon"?
12 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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....
100 years of immigration policies working to keep out immigrants
05 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 cross...
White evangelical Christians are some of Israel's biggest supporters. Why?
29 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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. ...
Falling in love in a time of colonization
22 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Why the trope of the 'outside agitator' persists
15 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
As protests continue to rock the campuses of colleges and universities, a familiar set of questions is being raised: Are these protests really being l...
In 'Chicano Frankenstein,' the undead are the new underpaid labor force
08 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 f...
Exclusion, resilience and the Chinese American experience on 'Mott Street'
01 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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, t...
How Jewish Communities Are Divided Over Support of Israel
24 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In the wake of October 7, and the bombardment of Gaza by the Israeli government, many American Jews have found themselves questioning something that h...
The Rise and Fall of the Panama Canal
17 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Panama Canal has been dubbed the greatest engineering feat in human history. It's also (perhaps less favorably) been called the greatest liberty m...
Reflecting on the legacy of O.J. Simpson
12 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 "to...
How Frederick Douglass launched generations of Black and Irish solidarity
10 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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...
WTF does race have to do with taxes?
03 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
It's that time of year again: time to file your taxes. And this week on the pod, we're revisiting our conversation with Dorothy A. Brown, a tax expert...
Who does language belong to? A fight over the Lakota Language
27 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Many Lakota people agree: It's imperative to revitalize the Lakota language. But how exactly to do that is a matter of broader debate. Should Lakota b...
Getting let down by the 'Great Expectations' of electoral politics
20 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
This episode is brought to you by our play cousins over at NPR's It's Been A Minute. Brittany Luse chops it up with New Yorker writer and podcast host...
In the world of medicine, race-based diagnoses are more than skin deep
13 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We've probably said it a hundred times on Code Switch — biological race is not a real thing. So why is race still used to help diagnose certain cond...
This conspiracy theory about eating bugs is also about race
06 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Gene Demby and NPR's Huo Jingnan dive into a conspiracy theory about how "global elites" are forcing people to eat bugs. And no huge surprise — the ...
The musical legacy of Japanese American incarceration
28 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In February of 1942 after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government issued an executive order to incarcerate people of Japanese descent. That l...
Why menthol cigarettes have a chokehold on Black smokers
21 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In the U.S., flavored cigarettes have been banned since 2009, with one glaring exception: menthols. That exception was supposed to go away in 2023, bu...
Before the apps, people used newspapers to find love
14 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
To celebrate the history of Black romance, Gene and Parker are joined by reporter Nichole Hill to explore the 1937 equivalent of dating apps — the p...
How college footballers led the fight against racism in 1969
09 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
It's 1969 at the University of Wyoming, where college football is treated like a second religion. But after racist treatment at an away game, 14 Black...
What it's like to be a Black woman with bipolar disorder
07 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"Three springs ago, I lost the better part of my mind," Naomi Jackson wrote in an essay for Harper's Magazine. On this episode, Jackson shares her exp...
Taylor Swift and the unbearable whiteness of girlhood
31 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Taylor Swift has become an American icon, (and she's got the awards, sales, and accolades to prove it.) With that status, she's often been celebrated ...
A former church girl's search for a new spiritual home
29 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
After leaving the Pentecostal Church, reporter Jess Alvarenga has been searching for a new spiritual home. They take us on their journey to find spiri...
What happens when public housing goes private?
24 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The New York City Housing Authority is the biggest public housing program in the country. But with limited funding to address billions of dollars of o...
The women who masterminded the Montgomery Bus Boycott
17 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
When people think back to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, they often remember just the bullet points: Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, and voila. But on th...
Everyone wants a piece of Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy
10 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Martin Luther King Jr. was relatively unpopular when he was assassinated. But the way Americans of all political stripes invoke his memory today, you'...
67 years after desegregation, Arkansas schools are in the spotlight again
03 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Classrooms in Arkansas were at the center of school desegregation in the 1950s. Now, with the LEARNS Act, they're in the spotlight again. Code Switch ...
Women of color have always shaped the way Americans eat
27 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
For decades, the ingredients, dishes and chefs that are popularized have been filtered through the narrow lens of a food and publishing world dominate...
Here are our favorite Code Switch episodes from 2023
20 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
It's that time of year again, fam, when we look back at the past 12 months and think, "WHOA, HOW'D THAT GO BY SO FAST?" So we're taking a beat: for th...
Revisiting 'The Color Purple' wars
18 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Color Purple remake drops this week and to celebrate, we're bringing you this special episode from our play cousins over at Pop Culture Happy Hour...
This is what "real self-care" looks like
13 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
"You can't meditate yourself out of a 40-hour work week with no childcare and no paid sick days," says Dr. Pooja Lakshmin. But when you're overworked ...
Watching 'Renaissance' and what we hear in Beyoncé's silence
11 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We're bringing you an extra treat this week from our play cousins over at It's Been A Minute: In the credits for 'Renaissance: A Film By Beyoncé' the...
The world can be painful. But love is possible, too
06 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Kai Cheng Thom is no stranger to misanthropy. There have been stretches of her life where she's felt burdened by anger, isolation, and resentment towa...
Can you travel the world — ethically?
29 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Traveling is supposed to open your mind and expand your horizons — but what if it doesn't? In her new book Airplane Mode, author Shahnaz Habib sugge...
A Tale of Two Tribal Nations
22 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The word "reservation" implies "reserved" – as in, this land is reserved for Native Americans. But most reservation land actually isn't owned by tri...
Who Has The "Right To A Story?"
15 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
On this week's Code Switch, we hear from two Palestinian American poets who talk about what it's like to be Palestinian American in the U.S. Fady Joud...
How does a computer discriminate?
08 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
OK, not exactly a computer — more like, the wild array of technologies that inform what we consume on our computers and phones. Because on this epis...
All The Only Ones: The Missing Piece Of The Puzzle
03 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We're bringing you something special from our play cousins over at Embedded: the first episode of a three part series about the often neglected histor...
Looking For My People In The Black Punk Scene
01 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
More than a decade since B.A. Parker last dabbled in the Black punk scene, she heads to a punk a show, and remembers a question from James Spooner: "W...
Giving up on identity with Ada Limón
25 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Ada Limón is many things: the U.S. Poet Laureate, a recently named MacArthur "Genius," a Latina, a summer person becoming a fall person. But undernea...
The agony and ecstasy of parenting with Hari Kondabolu
18 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Being a new parent is exhausting at the best of times. There are diapers to change, bottles to fill, screaming sobs to quiet down. But beyond all the ...
What does it mean to be good?
11 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In her memoir Rivermouth, author Alejandra Oliva recounts her experiences working as a translator and interpreter for people seeking asylum in the U.S...
Student activists are fighting big coal, and winning
04 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
South Baltimore has some of the most polluted air in the country. Local teenagers are fighting polluters back, and slowly building toward climate just...
Probation and parole — the under-researched arms of mass incarceration
27 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In the past decade, the problem of mass incarceration has gotten increased attention and thought. But in his new book, Mass Supervision, Vincent Schir...
'I Can Die For This Country, But I Can't Learn'
20 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In June, the Supreme Court banned affirmative action at colleges and universities across the country, with one glaring exception: military academies. ...
Remembering and unremembering, from Kigali to Nashville
13 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
For centuries, the idea of the "American Dream" has been a powerful narrative for many immigrant communities. But for just as long, many African Ameri...
Fall football — or the fall of football?
06 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This week, the NFL is gearing up for the start of its 104th season. But as this new chapter begins, we're looking at some of the league's old problems...
Bad Bunny, Reggaeton, and Resistance
30 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Bad Bunny, the genre- and gender norm-defying Puerto Rican rapper, is one of the biggest music stars on the planet. He has also provided a global mega...
What Makes A Good Race Joke?
23 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
When a comedian of color makes a joke, is it always about race, even if it's not about race? Code Switch talks to comedians Aparna Nancherla, Brian Ba...
Family, fortune, and the fight for Osage headrights
16 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
When Richard J. Lonsinger's birth mother passed away in 2010, he wasn't included in the distribution of her estate. Feeling hurt and excluded, he aske...
How Hip-Hop Fights The Power — And Also Serves It
09 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
For hip-hop's not-official-but-kind-of-official 50th birthday, we dig into its many contradictions. From the legend of the South Bronx block party whe...
Rolling the dice on race in Dungeons & Dragons
02 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Dungeons & Dragons is one of the most popular tabletop role-playing games of all time. But it has also helped cement some ideas about how we create an...
Code Switch's beach reads — no beach required
26 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
There are race books, and there are beach reads, and never the twain shall meet. You know that old truism, right? Well, this is Code Switch (the show ...
This Conspiracy Soup Contains Bugs — And Racism
19 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Gene Demby and NPR's Huo Jingnan dive into a conspiracy theory about how "global elites" are forcing people to eat bugs. And no huge surprise — the ...
Is "home" still home after 30 years away?
12 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Brian de los Santos always thought of Mexico as his "home" — despite not having been able to return to his country of birth for three decades. But w...
What Happens After A Racist Massacre In Your Neighborhood?
05 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This week, we're sharing the first episode of "Buffalo Extreme," a three-part series from our play cousins at NPR's Embedded. The series follows a Bla...
Honoring My Enslaved Ancestors, Part Two
28 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In the second of two episodes, Code Switch co-host B.A. Parker is figuring out what kind of descendant she wants to be. Parker and her mom decide to g...
Honoring My Enslaved Ancestors, Part One
21 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Code Switch co-host B.A. Parker digs into what it means to maintain the legacy of her ancestors. In part one of two episodes, Parker goes to a symposi...
Going to a white church in a Black body
14 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 on this week's...
Spilling the "T" with comedian D'Lo
07 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
On this week's Code Switch, producer Kumari Devarajan finds her demographic clone in actor and comedian D'Lo. Kumari found that when you share so much...
Exclusion, resilience and the Chinese American experience on 'Mott Street'
31 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Ava Chin's family has been in the U.S. for generations — but Ava was disheartened to learn that so much of what they had experienced was totally abs...
Across the ocean: a Japanese American story of war and homecoming
24 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
One of the most pivotal moments in Japanese American history was when the U.S. government uprooted more than 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry and f...
The implications of the case against ICWA
17 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Supreme Court is about to decide on a case arguing that the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) discriminates against white foster parents. Journalist...
Naomi Jackson talks 'losing and finding my mind'
10 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
"Three springs ago, I lost the better part of my mind," Naomi Jackson wrote in an essay for Harper's Magazine. On this episode, Jackson reads from th...
K-Pop's Surprising B(l)ackstory
03 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
K-pop disrupted pop culture in South Korea in the early 1990s, and later found fans around the world. Vivian Yoon was one of those fans, growing up th...
The Fallout of a Callout
26 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In 2017, comedian Hari Kondabolu called out Hollywood's portrayals of South Asians with his documentary The Problem With Apu. The film was also a crit...
Self-Care Laid Bare
19 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
"You can't meditate yourself out of a 40-hour work week with no childcare and no paid sick days," says Dr. Pooja Lakshmin. But when you're overworked ...
W2s and WTFs
12 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
You finally get through the confusing, stressful work of doing your taxes only to hear back from the IRS: you're being audited. And it turns out that ...
Women in hip-hop push back against the male gaze
05 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The male gaze objectifies, consumes and shames people for not fitting into a mold. This week, we're looking at how that affects women in hip-hop. Our ...
The Tricky Obligations of Utang Na Loob
29 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Utang na loob is the Filipino concept of an eternal debt to others, be it family or friends, who do a favor for you. In this episode from 2022, we bre...
The Women Behind the Montgomery Bus Boycott
22 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We've all heard about Rosa Parks and her crucial role in the Montgomery bus boycott. But Parks was just one of the many women who organized for years ...
Whose Nightmares Are We Telling? How Horror Has Evolved for People of Color
15 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Host B.A. Parker talks to Jasmin Savoy Brown, of the recently-released Scream 6, about playing a queer Black girl who lives. And film critics Richard ...
The Women Who Influence How America Eats
08 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
For decades, the ingredients, dishes and chefs that are popularized have been filtered through the narrow lens of a food and publishing world dominate...
This Racism Is Killing Me Inside
01 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This week, we revisit an episode from 2018 that looks into how discrimination not only degrades your health, but can cost you your life. We hear the s...
Black History's Family Tree
22 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Brett Woodson Bailey grew up knowing he was the descendant of "the father of Black history," Carter G. Woodson. He also grew up with the support and g...
The Merengue War
15 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
From the dance floors of weddings and bar mitzvahs to the Billboard Hot 100, chances are, you've enjoyed some merengue music – think about the 1998 ...
Reckoning With The NFL's Rooney Rule
08 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The large majority of NFL players are people of color. The coaches on the sidelines? Not so much. In this episode, we're looking at the NFL's famous d...
Celebrating Lunar New Year In A Time Of Grief
01 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this week's episode, we dive into the traditions and stories that shape Lunar New Year, and why violence and tragedy in the U.S. on the eve of the ...
The Original Rainbow Coalition
25 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode we turn to late 1960s Chicago, when three unlikely groups came together to form a coalition based on interracial solidarity. It's hard...
Bad Bunny, Reggaeton, and Resistance
18 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Bad Bunny, the genre- and gender norm-defying Puerto Rican rapper, is one of the biggest music stars on the planet. He has also provided a global mega...
Meet Lori Lizarraga—Our Newest Co-host
11 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
From the world of local TV news, meet Code Switch's newest co-host, Lori Lizarraga! Before she was born, her mother had the nickname "Lori" ready for ...
Revisiting 'How The Other Half Eats'
04 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
How do race and class affect the way we eat? What does it mean to "eat like a white person?" And if food inequality isn't about "food deserts," what i...
How cumbia has shaped music across Latin America
28 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Whether you're from Ushuaia or East Los Angeles, you've likely heard cumbia blaring from a stereo. From our play friends at NPR's Alt.Latino, Jasmine ...
Unlocking family history in 'Before Me'
21 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
It wasn't until Lisa Phu had her own child that she started unlocking her mother's history. In her new 5-part series called Before Me, Lisa asks her m...
What We Watched in 2022
14 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
There are a lot of TV shows to watch out there - so the Code Switch team isn't trying to bring you a list of the "best." Instead, we're chatting about...
Why some Republicans want to narrow who counts as Black
07 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Republican officials in Louisiana want to change how Black people are counted in voting maps. If their plan is successful, it could shrink the power o...
Notes from America: 'Blackness (Un)interrupted'
30 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
So many of our perceptions of race have to do with color. How does that change if you've lived in both Black and white skin? Our Executive Producer V...
A lost bird, a found treasure
23 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Bear Carrillo grew up knowing only a few details about his birth parents: when he was born they were university students, the first from their tribes ...
Live from Chicago: What makes a city home?
16 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This episode is excerpted from the Code Switch Live show at the Studebaker Theater in Chicago, featuring special guests José Olivarez, Sultan Salahud...
Throughline: How Korean culture went global
09 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
From BTS to Squid Game to high-end beauty standards, South Korea reigns as a global exporter of pop culture and entertainment. How does a country go f...
Code Switch fam! Say hello to It's Been a Minute's new host, Brittany Luse!
02 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Code Switch's host B.A. Parker, introduces us to our play cousin It's Been a Minute's new voice, Brittany Luse! In Brittany's first two episodes she t...
Fear In An Age Of Real Life Horror, Revisited
26 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
It's that time of year again: celebrations of the macabre hit a little too close to home and brush up against our country's very dark past. We talk ab...
Skeletons in the closet, revisited
19 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
More than 10,000 Native human remains are currently sitting in a storage facility in a Maryland suburb. This week, how one small tribe is fighting to ...