Gregory Warner here to tell you about NPR's new international podcast, it's called Rough Translation.

Each week we're going to take you to a different country to hear a story that reflects back on something that we are talking about here in the United States.

Maybe get a perspective shift. Travel with us. Rough translation is on NPR1 or wherever you get your podcast.

Hey y'all, Sam Sanders here. It's been a minute. So we were going to give you an episode today taking you inside the offices of the onion, that amazing satirical news publication.

I actually spent a day with the editorial team in Chicago recently, but you know news happened over the weekend and priority shifted.

And it just didn't feel like a good time to talk about laughing at current events. So we chose to hold the onion episode for another day.

And instead Brent and I spent Monday recording conversations about Charlottesville and what happened there this weekend.

By now you've heard a lot of stories of people who were there on the streets when the violence broke out.

And you may have read a lot of great writing from black voices like Jim Elbowy who's going to be on NPR's code switch podcast Wednesday with our friend Jean Dimby and his crew.

Check that out for sure. You know, but here's the thing. It often feels like there is this pressure on black America or Jewish people or LGBTQ people or other marginalized groups to really lead these conversations after weekends like this one.

So today I want to flip the script. I want to talk about white people and two white people because so many of those young white men and Charlottesville over the weekend.

They came there from white communities and they went back home to white communities and they have white families and white friends and white loved ones.

So I want to talk today about where white people go from here. So this episode all the voices you hear besides mine, they are white.

Now I'm not saying that we have any big answers here in this episode, but sometimes just talking these things out out loud in conversation. That's helpful.

We'll talk to NPR's Sarah McCammon who you may recall from the NPR politics podcast last year. She was in Charlottesville the day after the violence there and she also covered the Trump campaign for many, many months last year.

We'll also take a few listener calls because again, it's just good to talk this stuff out sometimes. And if you'll indulge me, I will share my thoughts at the end of this episode about how white people can start to have better conversations about all this stuff with the people in their lives.

But first up, I had some questions I wanted to put to a professor at the University of Virginia. It's the site of that torch march on Friday night. Her name is Grace Hale. She's white. She told me that she's used to talking about these issues from an academic perspective.

Shex zeroed a book a few years ago called Making Whiteness. But the fact that this all went down for Grace Hale in her hometown, it made it really emotional for her partly because she was out of town for the weekend. And I asked her how she's dealing with that.

You know, frantically trying to get news from home on the phone and texting everyone and watching everything, but also just being really frightened for many of the wonderful young people and people of color that I know in town that I know, you know, have been at these events and just really fearing for their safety.

What kind of things are people in town saying when you text them?

They're saying it's grim. They're saying it's horrible. They're saying why are the police not protecting people? Why are these people with massive guns allowed to march through the center of our town?

I have two daughters that are in high school and they have people from their high school were hit by the car. They're okay. They're going to recover. But people that they know were actually injured in that attack.

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