Code Switch

The late Reverend Jesse Jackson was — and still is — a revered civil rights activist, political trailblazer, and pop culture icon. For his critics, he was also villainized, or at the very least, a punchline. As Jackson's home going ceremony continues, we take some time to remember how Jackson shaped American politics with journalist Adam Serwer, who warns us not to flatten Jackson into a cliche or caricature.

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While Puerto Rican independence is in the spotlight after Bad Bunny's Super Bowl halftime show, we're throwing it to our play cousins at La Brega, a show about all things Puerto Rico. We hear from former Young Lords member Iris Morales about how the group took their love for their homeland to educate and organize against U.S. colonialism.

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Jeremy Carl — President Trump's nominee for a senior State Department role -- was called out for his commentary on "white erasure" during his Senate confirmation hearing earlier this month. He defended the idea that "white culture" is in danger of being erased in the U.S. and that white people face more racial discrimination than any other group in country. So on this episode, we're talking to the Princeton historian Nell Irvin Painter about her book, The History of White People, and how definitions of whiteness have morphed over time depending on the interests of the people creating those definitions.

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The U.S. has been deporting people from Cuba in record numbers. That has come as a shock to many Cuban American communities, who had long enjoyed special protections that don't apply to most other immigrant groups. This week on the show we're talking about where this change fits into the trajectory of Cuban immigration to the U.S. We'll hear from Ada Ferrer, a historian at Princeton who shares how her family's divergent paths to the U.S. reverberated through her life. Then, we talk to historian Michael Bustamante of the University of Miami about how U.S.-Cuba immigration policy has evolved since the Cuban Revolution.

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When President Trump shared a racist video on his Truth Social account last week, the blowback was real. But the video is also part of a tradition that has existed in the U.S. since the early 1800s — of using "humor" to spread and crystallize racist ideals. On this episode, we speak with Raul Perez, the author of "The Souls of White Jokes: How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy," who tells us how making fun of Black people was crucial to constructing "whiteness" — and perpetuating white supremacy — in the early days of the U.S.

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