Code Switch

We've said it multiple times on the show: Latinos are the second largest demographic in the United States. But...what does that actually mean? Are Latinos a race? Ethnicity? Culture? We try (and fail) to answer some of these questions with Dominican American podcaster and entertainer the Kid Mero.

Two friends living in Vermont decided to try a radical experiment: They asked White people in their community to give money directly to their Black neighbors — a DIY, hyper-local "reparations" program, of sorts. Our friends at the Invisibilia podcast took a look at how the community reacted, for better and for worse.

OK, so we weren't really in Philly (it's still a pandemic, after all.) But we did talk all things race and Philadelphia with special guests Erika Alexander and Denice Frohman. On the docket for the night: reparations, basketball, poetry and of course, the word "jawn."

Floyd McKissick, one of the major leaders of the civil rights movement, had an audacious, lifelong dream. He wanted to build a city — from scratch — that would create economic opportunities for Black people and be sustained by the wealth they created. It was called Soul City. And although it's been largely forgotten, he almost pulled it off.

Calls for racial justice are met with a lot of different proposals, but one of the loudest and most enduring is to invest in Black businesses. But can "buying Black" actually do anything to mitigate racism? To find out, we're taking a look at the surprising link between Black capitalism and McDonald's.

We've spent the past year trying to analyze, dissect and intellectualize all the ways that our world has changed. But sometimes the best way to understand our circumstances isn't through data and reports — it's through art and poetry. So this week, we're hearing from some of the country's most critical observers: poets.

Filipinos make up a small fraction of the nurses in the United States, but almost a third of the nurses who have died of COVID-19 in the U.S. have been of Filipino descent. So what exactly is going on? Our friends over at The Atlantic and WNYC tried to understand more about this troubling statistic by telling the story of one woman: Rosary Castro-Olega.

Asian American organizers and influencers have been trying to sound the alarm over a dramatic spike in reports of anti-Asian racism over the last year, and have been frustrated by the lack of media and public attention paid to their worries. Then came last week, when a deadly shooting spree in Georgia realized many of their worst fears and thrust the issue into the national spotlight.

The Blacksonian — er, the National Museum of African American History and Culture — was years and years in the making. It's closed down because of the coronavirus, but we got a virtual tour from the man who devoted his life to giving it life. He's also the first Black leader of the entire Smithsonian Institution. Baller status.

Every two weeks, a language dies with its last speaker. That was almost the fate of the Hawaiian language — until a group of young people decided to create a strong community of Hawaiian speakers — as they were learning to speak it them themselves.