758: Talking While Black

This American Life

Society & Culture, News, Politics, Arts

4.6 • 88.8K Ratings

🗓️ 16 February 2025

⏱️ 63 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

President Trump is eradicating DEI from the federal government, and private companies are following his example. We return to a show we did two years ago about the turning point that led to this moment. Our Executive Producer Emanuele Berry guest-hosts and shares stories about Black people who found themselves caught in the middle of this cultural fight when the country shifted decisively away from diversity, equity, inclusion, critical race theory, and affirmative action.

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Prologue: As a new high school principal, Dr. Whitfield felt moved by the national renouncement of racism he saw all around him in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. It prompted him to write a thoughtful email to parents and teachers in his district. He got lots of praise for it. Less than a year later, that same email would threaten his job. (12 minutes)
Act One: During her sophomore year in high school, Nevaeh was targeted in a secret text message chain by a handful of her peers. She’d come to learn the text chat was a mock slave trade where her photo and photos of other Black classmates were uploaded, talked about as property, and bid on. Emanuele Berry talks to Nevaeh about what these messages mean to her now as well as how she’s navigated her town’s reaction and her close friendships with kids who mostly aren’t Black. (20 minutes)
Act Two: After the murder of George Floyd, sales of books by Black authors skyrocketed. Now, there are efforts to ban many of the same books. Producer Chana Joffe-Walt talks to author Jerry Craft, who is caught up in this backlash with his graphic novel New Kid. (21 minutes)

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Transcript

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0:00.0	From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Emmanuel Barry in for Ira Glass.
0:07.7	In the last year, DEI programs have been blamed for an astonishingly varied set of disasters.
0:13.5	The Los Angeles wildfires, the Baltimore Bridge collapse, Boeing jets falling apart,
0:18.5	the Secret Service failures leading to the assassination attempt on Donald Trump,
0:23.4	and memorably the mid-air collision between a helicopter and a passenger plane in Washington, D.C. last month.
0:30.2	All of that, obviously, was the fault of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
0:35.7	In other words, marginalized people having jobs means bad things happen.
0:41.2	I'm a black person. I'm doing my job right now.
0:44.1	And so, of course, today's episode may very well fall apart because I'm hosting.
0:49.3	Let me read you a list. Disney, GM, Google, Toyota, McDonald's, and Walmart.
0:57.0	All of them have rolled back DEI efforts.
1:00.0	These companies are really just following President Trump's lead.
1:03.0	He signed an executive order on January 20th, ending all federal DEI initiatives.
1:10.0	To comply, research agencies have scrubbed words from their work like
1:13.4	women, disability, bias, black, and gender, as well as socioeconomic and systemic. Three years ago,
1:22.3	we did an episode about the pushback to critical race theory, which is really just DEI in a different font.
1:29.0	And we thought we'd play it again today because it tried to describe a turning point.
1:33.9	The beginning of the backlash that's playing out with such force in the first few weeks of Donald Trump's return to office.
1:40.7	Not just diversity programs being wiped out of existence, but being blamed absurdly for anything bad that happens in America.
1:49.0	The story that started the episode began before the backlash in the summer of 2020.
1:54.4	That was kind of, you know, peak, woke America, if you remember.
1:58.5	The murder of George Floyd had forced the country into another racial awakening.
	...

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