The Takeaway has won an award from the Radio Television Digital News Association for reporting on evolving ideas about race and ethnicity in America.
Our show focuses on issues of race and ethnicity as a regular part of our weekly conversations. Here are some highlights from our conversations in 2010 about how changing ideas of race and ethnicity in the United States are understood, lived and perceived.
These segments range from a discussion on how we define “whiteness” today to a conversation with a 75-year old and his daughter about how the US-Mexico border has changed over their lifetime. We also hear listener stories about their lived histories of the Great Migration and talked about how Americans are grappling with more fluid identity than the simple categories of “black” and “white.”
On Wednesday, we talked about a study published in the Social Psychology Quarterly that found bi-racial Americans of black and white descent are identifying themselves more and more simply as black. We received an overwhelming amount of responses from listeners and we share them, along with a conversation with Jared Ball, who has written a piece in BLAC Magazine discussing this very issue.
Why don't we talk more about the Great Migration, a time that saw six million African Americans leave the South in search of work and freedom? Our own Celeste Headlee is, herself, a product of this slow, leaderless shift that occurred over the course of six decades. She shares her family's story.
The massive migration of black Americans from the South to the North in the early part of last century changed the social and cultural landscape of America forever. Six million African Americans eventually left the South around 1920. Before then, 90 percent of all African Americans lived in the south. By 1970, nearly half lived elsewhere in the country.
We're asking our African American listeners: Does your family have a story about the Great Migration? If so, we'd love to hear it: When did your family come north? Why did they leave the South? Tell us your story...
Between the 1910s and 1920s an unprecedented social change occurred in the United States when six million black Americans left the South and headed North and West in what came to be known as the Great Migration. Yesterday, we asked listeners to share their stories of the Great Migration. Della Beaver shares her family's story of why her parents moved from South Carolina to Chester, Pennsylvania, and what it was like to travel back to the South to visit their relatives.
Jesus Ochoa, 75, was born in El Paso, Texas, where he has lived nearly all his life. As a young boy, he recalls stuffing his pockets with a $5 bill, picking up his friends and heading just a few miles south to Juarez, Mexico. Every Saturday, he visited the neighboring city to get a haircut, get his shoes shined and eat mariscos (seafood). When he graduated from high school, Juarez was where he and his classmates went to celebrate - something he calls a "rite of passage" for kids in his school.
What does it mean to be categorized as "white" in this day and age? The census arrives in the mail this week and if you've gotten yours, you've seen these boxes to check off, indicating race: White, Black, Hispanic-White, Samoan, Filipino. But these categories are not static, and have changed over time as our cultural views of race have changed.
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The show is a co-production of WNYC Radio and Public Radio International, in collaboration with The BBC World Service, New York Times Radio and WGBH Boston.
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