Projects

On Changing Ideas of Race and Ethnicity

The Takeaway has won an award from the Radio Television Digital News Association for reporting on evolving ideas about race and ethnicity in America. 

Our show focuses on issues of race and ethnicity as a regular part of our weekly conversations. Here are some highlights from our conversations in 2010 about how changing ideas of race and ethnicity in the United States are understood, lived and perceived. 

These segments range from a discussion on how we define “whiteness” today to a conversation with a 75-year old and his daughter about how the US-Mexico border has changed over their lifetime.  We also hear listener stories about their lived histories of the Great Migration and talked about how Americans are grappling with more fluid identity than the simple categories of “black” and “white.”

  • Your Take: Self-Identity as a Mixed Race American

    Dec 16, 2010
    On Wednesday, we talked about a study published in the Social Psychology Quarterly that found bi-racial Americans of black and white descent are identifying themselves more and more s...
  • The Personal Toll of the Great Migration

    Sep 16, 2010
    Why don't we talk more about the Great Migration, a time that saw six million African Americans leave the South in search of work and freedom? Our own Celeste Headlee is, herself, a p...
  • An Oral History of the Great Migration

    Sep 15, 2010
    The massive migration of black Americans from the South to the North in the early part of last century changed the social and cultural landscape of America forever.  Six million Afric...
  • One Listener's Story from the Great Migration

    Sep 15, 2010
    Between the 1910s and 1920s an unprecedented social change occurred in the United States when six million black Americans left the South and headed North and West in what came to be k...
  • A Paler Shade: Defining "Whiteness"

    Mar 18, 2010
    What does it mean to be categorized as "white" in this day and age? The census arrives in the mail this week and if you've gotten yours, you've seen these boxes to check off, indicat...