Code Switch

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 Black cheer squad, their moms and their coaches in the year after the racist massacre at the Jefferson Street Tops in Buffalo, New York, just blocks from their gym. NPR hands the mic to the girls and women in that community as they navigate the complicated path to recovery in the year after.

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 go back to the plantation where their ancestors were enslaved, because despite the circumstances of slavery, this is where their family began.

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 symposium for descendants of slavery and meets people who, like her, are caretakers of "culturally significant historical places."

Note: A technical error with a previous version of this episode resulted in an audio mix that may have been difficult to listen to. Please check out the new mix!

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 symposium for descendants of slavery and meets people who, like her, are caretakers of "culturally significant historical places."

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 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.

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 in common with a stranger who is putting their business on front street for the world to see, it can feel like they're sharing your secrets, too.

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 absent from American history books. So she embarked on a journey to learn more about her ancestors, and in doing so, to work toward correcting the historical record for all Americans.

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 forced them into incarceration camps. But there is another, less-known story about the tens of thousands of Japanese Americans who were living in Japan during World War II — and whose lives uprooted in a very different way.

The Supreme Court is about to decide on a case arguing that the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) discriminates against white foster parents. Journalist Rebecca Nagle explains how this decision could reverse centuries of U.S. law protecting the rights of Indigenous nations. "Native kids have been the tip of the spear in attacks on tribal sovereignty for generations."

"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 that essay about her experience with mental illness, including how she has had to decipher which of her fears stem from her illness and which are backed by the history of racism.