Browse our archive by

Filter by

There are 13 results for "Race"

Act Two: History is Not a Toy

There’s a museum in Baltimore that was created to memorialize the Black experience in America. It’s called The National Great Blacks in Wax Museum.

Prologue

Last month, after white nationalists and members of the alt-right and offshoot groups descended on Charlottesville, Virginia, and marched with torches, the staff of our show realized something: The guy who organized the rally was a member of a right wing men's group that our producer Zoe Chace had been following for months, long before the rally was planned. And she’d learned that the group had an unlikely spiritual advisor: a liberal, black relationship consultant and comedian named Dante Nero.

Prologue

Host Ira Glass talks to Mariya Karimjee about a college application essay question. Essay B asks students to imagine a person they might meet in college—someone from a very different background.

Act One: How to Win Friends and Influence White People

Back in the late 1960s, a wealthy tobacco heiress saw that integration was happening all around the country—except at prep schools in the South. So she set out to find the best Black students in neighborhood public schools—in hopes of teaching the white prep-school students to be less bigoted. Mosi Secret tells the story of how the first two Black students to integrate Virginia Episcopal School succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations.

Act Four: Childhood’s End

Producer Neil Drumming looks into two videos he found on YouTube—one that takes place in Atlantic City, another in Brooklyn—that deal with the trouble kids face walking home from school.

Prologue

Ira and producer Neil Drumming visit a comic book store in Philadelphia to try and help Ira understand Afrofuturism.

Act Three: The Black Sea

This American Life commissioned an original song, “The Deep,” from the hip-hop group clppng., featuring actor and Hamilton performer Daveed Diggs. The song is based on the underwater mythology of the 90s Detroit electro band Drexciya.