Code Switch

By NPR

Society & Culture

What's Code Switch about?

What's CODE SWITCH? It's the fearless conversations about race that you've been waiting for. Hosted by journalists of color, our podcast tackles the subject of race with empathy and humor. We explore how race affects every part of society — from politics and pop culture to history, food and everything in between. This podcast makes all of us part of the conversation — because we're all part of the story. Code Switch was named Apple Podcasts' first-ever Show of the Year in 2020.Want to level up your Code Switch game? Try Code Switch Plus. Your subscription supports the show and unlocks a sponsor-free feed. Learn more at plus.npr.org/codeswitch

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School Colors Episode 2: Ta...

05.11.2022

Once home to two revolutionary experiments in integrated housing, the Southside of District 28 was once seen as a beacon of interracial cooperation.

Code Switch episodes:

05.11.2022 School Colors Episode 2: Tales From The Southside Once home to two revolutionary experiments in integrated housing, the Southside of District 28 was once seen as a beacon of interracial cooperation.
05.04.2022 School Colors Episode 1: "There Is No Plan" In 2019, a school district in Queens N.Y., one of the most diverse places on the planet, is selected to go through the process of creating something unexpected: a diversity plan. Why would the school district need such a plan ...
05.02.2022 Coming Soon: Code Switch presents 'School Colors' Coming soon to the Code Switch feed: School Colors, a limited-run series about how race, class and power shape American cities and schools. Hosts Mark Winston Griffith and Max Freedman take us to Queens, N.Y. – often touted as the ...
04.27.2022 The LA Uprising, a generation later Some call it a riot. Some call it an uprising. Many Korean Americans simply call it "Sai-i-gu" (literally, 4-2-9.) But no matter what you call it, it's clear to many that April 29, 1992 made a fundamental mark on the ...
04.20.2022 Race, queerness, and superpowers in 'Everything, Everywhere, All at Once' How can anything be more important than what's happening right now? That's the question a woman named Evelyn Wang is pondering right before she is thrust into a surreal, sci-fi multiverse, in the movie "Everything Everywhere All At Once." On ...
04.13.2022 A makeup company gets a facelift In the 70s and 80s, Fashion Fair was an iconic cosmetics company designed to create makeup for Black women of all shades. This is the story of that company's meteoric rise, its slow decline, and the two women who think ...
04.06.2022 A New Movement on Standing Rock What do you do when all your options for school kind of suck? That was the question some folks on the Standing Rock Reservation found themselves asking a couple of years ago. Young people were being harassed in public schools, ...
03.30.2022 The dance that made its way from Harlem to Sweden Lindy Hop is a dance that was born in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s — created and performed by African Americans in segregated clubs and dance halls. But today, one of the world's most vibrant Lindy Hop communities is ...
03.23.2022 Why the N-word is so toxic It is probably the most radioactive word in the English language. At the same time, the N-word is kind of everywhere: books, movies, music, comedy (not to mention the mouths of people who use it frequently, whether as a slur ...
03.16.2022 Screams and Silence Asians and Asian Americans have been trying to sound the alarm about a huge uptick in reports of racism directed at their communities. Many have felt like no one was listening.
03.09.2022 What's In A Dad? Gene Demby and comedian Hari Kondabolu are both new fathers, and they're both learning to raise kids who will have very different identities and upbringings than their own. It's left both of them reflecting on some big questions: How will ...
03.02.2022 Mabel Fairbanks: The Ice Breaker Figure skating has always been about flair and drama. But what happens on the ice is nothing compared to what goes on behind the scenes. This week, with the help of our friends at the Blind Landing podcast, we're telling ...
02.23.2022 The rise and fall of 'America's Dad' At the height of his career, Bill Cosby was one of the most famous men in the United States. He was the biggest and highest paid star in the country, and with his image plastered on billboards, advertisements and television, ...
02.16.2022 Can therapy solve racism? In 2020, nearly 20% of Americans turned to therapy. Many of those people were looking for a space to process some of the big, painful events they were living through, including the pandemic, a contentious election cycle, and of course, ...
02.09.2022 Humor, poetry and romance on Code Switch Live Live from your computer screens, it's Code Switch! Guest hosts Ayesha Rascoe and Denice Frohman joined us to talk poetry and humor with special guests Paul Tran and Hari Kondabolu. Then, Ayesha and Denice answered your questions about race and ...
02.07.2022 Bonus Episode: Consider the Lobstermen In Canada, tensions between indigenous fishermen and commercial fishermen have been simmering for decades. On today's bonus episode, from our friends at NPR's Planet Money team, we travel to Nova Scotia to figure out how a group of Mi'kmaw fishermen ...
02.02.2022 The 'double-edged sword' of being a Black first It's Black History Month, which is likely to bring boundless stories of Black Excellence and Black Firsts. So today on the show, we're talking about Constance Baker Motley — a trailblazing civil rights judge who paved the way for many ...
01.30.2022 Bonus: Getting real (like, really real) with Gabrielle Union We hear the phrase "unapologetically Black" thrown around a lot. But what does it actually mean? In this bonus episode from our newest play cousins at NPR's The Limits podcast, actress, businessperson, and author Gabrielle Union talks about what it ...
01.26.2022 Playing Pretendian People lie about being Native American all the time – on college applications, on job applications, in casual conversation. But how do "Pretendians" hurt real Indigenous people and communities? And what does all that mean for people who aren't quite ...
01.23.2022 Bonus: Remembering the iconic, complicated André Leon Talley Since he died this week, André Leon Talley has been described over and over again as "larger than life." But on this episode, brought to us by our friends at NPR's It's Been a Minute podcast, three queer Black men ...
01.19.2022 A whiteness that's only skin deep We use words related to color to describe different racial categories all the time — Black, white, brown. But how much of race and identity actually has to do with the color of your skin? What if what appears to ...
01.12.2022 They came, they saw, they reckoned? It's now been more than a year since the so-called "racial reckoning" that marked the summer of 2020. The country, some said confidently, was having the biggest racial reckoning since the civil rights movement. But since then, the Code Switch ...
01.05.2022 Nikole Hannah-Jones on the power of collective memory What stories do we learn about the history of the United States? Who dreamed up those stories? And what happens when we challenge them? This week on the pod, our play cousins at NPR's Throughline podcast talk to journalist Nikole ...
12.29.2021 Ask Code Switch: What Does Race Have To Do With Beauty? This time of year, folks are being inundated with messages about how to become more beautiful. But beauty is an ever-changing goalpost that has everything do with race, class and power.
12.22.2021 What We Watched in 2021 Y'all, 2021 brought us a lot of TV. Some of it was even good! So this week, we're talking about the shows that had something interesting to say about race, from We Are Lady Parts to Reservation Dogs to City ...
12.20.2021 Bonus Episode: The blessing and curse of the '90s Latin Pop Explosion Our play cousins at NPR's It's Been a Minute podcast reexamine the so-called "Latin explosion" of the late '90s: What it was supposed to be for audiences across the U.S., and what it actually came to represent.
12.15.2021 What Is 'Latin Music' Anyway? The term 'Latin Music' can encompass everything from Celia Cruz to Bad Bunny to Selena Gomez to Los Tigres del Norte. It's rock, pop, hip hop, salsa, bachata, reggaeton, and so much more. So...what exactly is the connective tissue? Language? ...
12.08.2021 A Glimpse At 'How The Other Half Eats' How do race and class affect the way we eat? What makes dollar store junk food different from organic junk food? And when did Whole Foods become such a polarizing grocery store? We're getting into all those questions and more ...
12.01.2021 Imagining A World Without Prisons Or Police When Derecka Purnell was growing up, the police were a regular presence in her life. Years later, the lawyer, activist, and author of the new book, Becoming Abolitionists, realized that her vision of a just society was radically different from ...
11.24.2021 Ask Code Switch: Thought For Food It's Thanksgiving week, so we're bringing you a second helping of one of our favorite episodes, where we answer your questions about race and food. We're getting into the perceived whiteness of vegetarianism, what it means when H-Mart becomes a ...
11.17.2021 'The Characters Are The Light' You already know we love books here on Code Switch — and given that we're smack dab in the middle of Native American Heritage month, we thought we'd introduce you to some of our favorite recent books by Indigenous authors.
11.10.2021 'Being Fly Is An Act Of Community' When 'Soul Train' first aired in 1971, there had never been a show like it. Fifty years later, that's still true. So this week, we're passing the mic to our friends at NPR's It's Been a Minute podcast, who did ...
11.03.2021 Love And Blood Quantum If you're Native American, there's a good chance that you've thought a lot about blood quantum — a highly controversial measurement of the amount of "Indian blood" you have. It can affect your identity, your relationships and whether or not ...
10.27.2021 Ask Code Switch: Parents Just Don't Understand Or do they? This week, we're answering some of your toughest questions about race and your parents. How do you create boundaries with immigrant parents? What dynamics might interracial couples bring to families? And why do so many Black parents ...
10.20.2021 Painting By Numbers The 2020 census data is finally here! At first glance, it paints a surprising portrait of a changing United States: The number of people who identify as white and no other race is smaller; the share of multiracial people has ...
10.13.2021 Skeletons In The Closet In a small suburb of Washington, D.C., a non-descript beige building houses thousands of Native human remains. The remains are currently in the possession of the Smithsonian Institution. But for the past decade, the Seminole Tribe of Florida has been ...
10.06.2021 The Once And Future 'Karen' If you've been paying attention to the news over the past couple years, you know what a so-called 'Karen' is: a white woman who uses her race and gender to wield power over someone more vulnerable. But long before most ...
09.29.2021 The Rise Of The BBL Black women have always faced immense pressure to make their bodies look a certain way. But if done the "wrong way," achieving that idealized figure can lead to just as much scrutiny and critique. So today, we're talking about the ...
09.24.2021 The Dramatic Life Of The American Teenager Kacen Callender started out as a kid in St. Thomas writing fan fiction. Today, they are the author of multiple middle grade and young adult novels full of empathy, learning, and a healthy dose of high school drama.
09.22.2021 Who You Calling 'Hispanic'? But seriously, who? Because while it is Hispanic Heritage Month, the notion of a multiracial, multinational, pan-ethnic identity called "Hispanic" is a relatively recent — and somewhat haphazard invention — in the United States. So on this episode, we're digging ...
09.15.2021 The Making And Remaking Of Afghanistan For two decades, many Americans have seen Afghanistan depicted primarily through the lens of war. But that's not the full story — not even close. Afghanistan has a long, rich, complex history and culture. A lot of it flies in ...
09.08.2021 The Lost Summer Twenty years ago, during the dog days of summer , a fledgling journalist named Shereen Marisol Meraji — maybe you've heard of her? — headed to Durban, South Africa. Her mission: to report on a meeting of thousands of organizers ...
09.01.2021 The Folk Devil Made Me Do It What moral panics reveal about the ongoing freakout over critical race theory in schools.
08.25.2021 'Seeing Ghosts' Across Generations Kat Chow was 13 when her mother died, and with that loss came profound and lasting questions about identity, family and history. In her memoir, Seeing Ghosts, the author and former Code Switch reporter explores how her mother's death has ...
08.18.2021 Who Runs The World? Kids. OK, they're not all kids. But they're all students, they're all amazing, and frankly, we're concerned that they might be coming for our jobs. That's right — the Student Podcast Challenge is back, and this year, the stories are more ...
08.11.2021 Care To Explain Yourself? It's hot out, places are shutting down again, and things might just be feeling a little bit slow. So in the spirit of spicing things up, we wanted to give you all a question to fight about: How much context ...
08.04.2021 Violence That Doesn't Go Viral We talk a lot on this show about people who have been killed by police officers. But there is so much police violence that falls short of being fatal, but forever alters the lives of the people on the business ...
07.28.2021 To Love And Not Forgive In her new memoir, Somebody's Daughter, Ford looks at how her upbringing shaped her understanding of childhood, authority, forgiveness and freedom.
07.21.2021 Words To Set You Free Some of the best books can make you feel free — free from your daily grind, free to imagine a new reality, free to explore different facets of your identity. This month, the Code Switch team is highlighting books that ...
07.14.2021 What Does It Mean To Be Latino? The 'Light-Skinned Privilege' Edition Maria Garcia and Maria Hinojosa are both Mexican American and mestiza — but only one of them still identifies as a POC. How did they come to such different ideas about their race?

Older episodes

Code Switch

What's Code Switch about?

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Code Switch episodes:

School Colors Episode 2: Tales From The Southside

School Colors Episode 1: "There Is No Plan"

Coming Soon: Code Switch presents 'School Colors'

The LA Uprising, a generation later

Race, queerness, and superpowers in 'Everything, Everywhere, All at Once'

A makeup company gets a facelift

A New Movement on Standing Rock

The dance that made its way from Harlem to Sweden

Why the N-word is so toxic

Screams and Silence

What's In A Dad?

Mabel Fairbanks: The Ice Breaker

The rise and fall of 'America's Dad'

Can therapy solve racism?

Humor, poetry and romance on Code Switch Live

Bonus Episode: Consider the Lobstermen

The 'double-edged sword' of being a Black first

Bonus: Getting real (like, really real) with Gabrielle Union

Playing Pretendian

Bonus: Remembering the iconic, complicated André Leon Talley

A whiteness that's only skin deep

They came, they saw, they reckoned?

Nikole Hannah-Jones on the power of collective memory

Ask Code Switch: What Does Race Have To Do With Beauty?

What We Watched in 2021

Bonus Episode: The blessing and curse of the '90s Latin Pop Explosion

What Is 'Latin Music' Anyway?

A Glimpse At 'How The Other Half Eats'

Imagining A World Without Prisons Or Police

Ask Code Switch: Thought For Food

'The Characters Are The Light'

'Being Fly Is An Act Of Community'

Love And Blood Quantum

Ask Code Switch: Parents Just Don't Understand

Painting By Numbers

Skeletons In The Closet

The Once And Future 'Karen'

The Rise Of The BBL

The Dramatic Life Of The American Teenager

Who You Calling 'Hispanic'?

The Making And Remaking Of Afghanistan

The Lost Summer

The Folk Devil Made Me Do It

'Seeing Ghosts' Across Generations

Who Runs The World? Kids.

Care To Explain Yourself?

Violence That Doesn't Go Viral

To Love And Not Forgive

Words To Set You Free

What Does It Mean To Be Latino? The 'Light-Skinned Privilege' Edition

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