The Takeaway

On Friday, the 2022 Winter Olympics kicked off in Beijing. Amid the fanfare and medals, there’s been silence from Muslim-majority countries about China’s treatment of the Uyghur Muslim community, which officials from the U.S. have called a genocide.

The Takeaway speaks with Yasmeen Serhan, staff writer at The Atlantic, about how different countries have been responding to the oppressive treatment of Uyghurs in China both before and during the Olympics. 

Over the past year, book bans have nearly tripled. School boards and parents unwilling to teach or even understand the importance of Critical Race Theory have expanded their censorship to include books that they consider inappropriate for their children.

In Tennessee, a school board voted to ban ‘Maus,’ Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel about the Holocaust, due to 'profanity' and 'nudity'. Shawntee Burns-Simpson, Associate Director of School Support and Outreach at the New York Public Library joins us to discuss the harm in banning books and how it deprives children by depriving their access to all kinds of books from diverse authors. 

We also spoke with award-winning author and National Ambassador of Young People’s Literature Jason Reynolds about how to navigate books with complicated or difficult subject matters for young people.

Behavioral Scientist Michelle Drouin joins us to discuss her new book Out of Touch: How to Survive an Intimacy Famine.

On January 31, 2022, Mexican journalist Roberto Toledo was shot and killed in the town of Zitácuaro. Toledo is the fourth Mexican journalist murdered in 2022 alone.

While investigative work is being done to determine if Toledo and the other slain journalists were killed in retaliation for their reporting, Mexico has been one of the most dangerous countries for journalists in the Western Hemisphere in recent years, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

The Takeaway spoke with reporter Andalusia Soloff about the risks faced by reporters in Mexico and what can be done to protect them.

At the end of last week, President Biden announced that U.S. special forces had conducted a raid in the countryside near the Syrian-Turkish border that resulted in the death of the current leader of ISIS, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, also known as Hajji Abdullah.

To avoid civilian casualties, Biden said the Administration opted to dispatch U.S. Special Operations Forces rather than use missiles or drones. U.S. officials say that there were no American casualties in the attack, but the ISIS leader detonated an explosive that killed both his family and himself  before special forces could reach him. According to The White Helmets, a Syrian civil defense group, rescuers who were on the ground after U.S. forces left said they found the bodies of at least 13 people, including 6 children and 4 women.

Biden is simultaneously dealing with tensions between Russia and Ukraine, a contentious relationship with China, among other foreign policy issues. A year into Biden’s presidency, The Takeaway looks at his strategy for foreign policy — or Biden’s doctrine — with Robin Wright, a columnist at The New Yorker and a Wilson Center Distinguished Fellow.

Data released in 2022 about the previous year’s economy is giving a clearer picture of what the Covid-era has meant for workers and businesses. Hourly wages increased but not enough for the average worker to keep up with the spike in inflation. And even though workers are not earning enough on average, some economists continue to argue that higher wages will further drive inflation, putting more blame on workers than the overall financial system.

We break down what’s truly driving inflation and how to make the economy work best for lower-wage employees with Anne Price, President of the Insight Center for Community Economic Development and Heather McGhee, author of “The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together.'' 

In late January 2020, former Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar  declared a federal public health emergency as a result of  COVID-19: "The actions we have taken and continue to make complement, complement the work of China and the World Health Organization to contain the outbreak within China."

Since then, it has been renewed eight times, but eventually the declaration will expire. When it does, it may initiate another kind of public health crisis. According to some estimates, 15 million people — including 6 million children — are at risk of losing Medicaid coverage when the public health emergency expires. That is because that's when state officials will sift through their Medicaid rolls and eliminate people who are no longer eligible for coverage under the expanded social safety net.  

For more on this, The Takeaway spoke to Megan Messerly, health care reporter for POLITICO. 

In 2017,  Andrea Jenkins became the first black openly-transgender woman elected to office in the United States. This year, she became the first openly transgender city council president in Minneapolis.

During Donald Trump's presidency, the US government enacted Title 42, a public health authority that allows Border Patrol and ICE to immediately expel or deport migrants over supposed public health concerns. The law has been criticized for allowing racist and abusive treatment of Haitian asylum seekers at the border, highlighting the disparate treatment Black migrants have long faced.

A study by the Black Alliance for Just Immigration and NYU School of Law Immigrant Rights Clinic reports that Black migrants face a higher rate of deportation than any other race.

Under Title 42, thousands of Haitian asylum seekers who were fleeing chaos, violence, and natural disaster have been expelled at the border and forced to remain in Mexico or deported to Haiti through repatriation flights. 

In September 2021, the issue came to a head when images and videos of Border Patrol's mistreatment of Haitian migrants surfaced, and the Biden administration vowed to hold those agents accountable. However, after the Trump administration used the Covid-19 pandemic as a justification to immediately turn away and expel Haitian asylum seekers under Title 42, the Biden administration continues to enforce it.

Today nearly 20,000 Haitian immigrants have been expelled or deported back to Haiti. 

11 Haitian migrants, represented by groups like the Haitian Bridge Alliance, are suing the Biden administration over the racist and abusive treatment they faced at the border in hopes of receiving justice and halting the cruel enforcement of Title 42. 

Guerline Jozef, Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance and recipient of the 2021 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award joined us after returning from the U.S.-Mexico border to discuss the situation Haitian asylum seekers are facing and the disparate treatment of Black migrants.

This week, hundreds of tribes agreed to a tentative opioids lawsuit settlement with Johnson & Johnson and three major drug distributors worth roughly $590 million. Although Johnson & Johnson continues to deny responsibility for its role in the opioid crisis, Native Americans have been disproportionately overrepresented among opioid deaths. If the tribes agree to the settlement agreement, they’ll be able to put the money towards combating the opioid crisis in their own communities. 

The Takeaway speaks with Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr., Cherokee Nation Principal Chief, about the settlement and the impact of the opioid crisis on his tribe. The Cherokee Nation previously announced a $75 million settlement with distributors McKesson, Amerisourcebergen and Cardinal Health in September 2021.