The Lost Summer

Code Switch

NPR

Society & Culture

4.6 • 14.5K Ratings

🗓️ 8 September 2021

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

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 and ambassadors gathered at a global conference on racism. The conference filled Shereen with hope and optimism — all of which would soon be wiped away.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Just the quick heads up y'all the following podcast contains explicit language.
0:06.6	I'm Shireen Marisol Maraji. I'm Jean Zembe and this is Coat Switch.
0:11.5	From NPR. And if y'all don't know this yet, it is time for me to tell you that I am stepping away
0:20.2	from co-hosting and senior producing Coat Switch. I've been doing this for five years now,
0:27.9	a little over five years now. And it's not because I don't love Eugene and I don't love what I do
0:34.0	because this has been the honor of my life. And I'm not going away forever people. Coat Switch is
0:41.9	going to be a home for my journalism. I've been obsessed with questions of racial identity and
0:47.4	belonging and language loss since I can remember obsessed. I'm still into now, but all this
0:54.8	still in the North. Well right now, let me let me let me make it more real for you. Right now I'm
0:59.6	talking to you from a closet in Cambridge where I'm doing a journalism fellowship, the Neiman
1:05.3	journalism fellowship. Look at the come up though, you went in a closet in LA now you're a
1:11.1	closet at Harvard. Is that a come up? I don't know, I miss LA. We're here, you know, a bunch of us
1:17.5	thinking big thoughts about the future of the industry, how to make it more equitable. And then
1:22.8	from here, I go back home. I'm headed back to the bay where I started a new job not at San Francisco
1:28.7	State, which was my alma mater. But at UC Berkeley's graduate school of journalism. So fancy.
1:34.4	Where I'm going to be teaching journalism and gene and preparation. I've really been trying to
1:41.3	go back, put myself in the early years of my journalism career back in their shoes, you know,
1:48.2	I was a new reporter once. What do I wish I knew? What were the formative moments of my career?
1:54.9	And I just keep turning over and turning over this one event that I covered that really shaped me
2:03.1	as a journalist. And it made such an impact on me as a human being. So I'm taking Eugene and our
2:16.4	listeners back in time, 20 years ago to the summer of 2001. Midriffs and low-rise bootleg
2:28.9	genes are in, very in. Camus souls as tops, oh my god. An emerging talent named Alicia Keys was
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from NPR, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of NPR and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.