And a Happy Juneteenth to all who celebrate! You’ll find me in a park today firing up a grill and doing the Electric Slide to some Frankie Beverly and Maze – holding the joy of the day alongside a deep awareness of our complicated relationship with nature and public spaces.
Ten years ago, in Code Switch’s second ever episode, we looked into why stepping outside while Black or brown can be a politically charged move. And a decade later, it turns out it’s still just as fraught. So last week, I took another look at what being outdoors as Black people looks like right now.
The episode started off when I got captivated by a video of a musician named Daniyel who was determined to be a frolicker after an executive told him that that’s just not what Black people do – especially in Oregon. But Daniyel is not the only person trying to reclaim something for themselves in the majesty of Oregon’s great outdoors.
I also spoke with Pamela Slaughter, who created the organization People of Color Outdoors (or POCO) to give people of color in Oregon the tools, the confidence, and the physical safety for folks to embrace nature in a place that wasn’t built for them. For POCO, gathering under the open sky no longer becomes a simple act of leisure, but a conscious act of healing.
And we take the conversation of public space up a notch on this week’s episode, where we dig into the Juneteenth opening of President Obama’s new Presidential Center on the South Side of Chicago. Gene talks to two South Side reporters about the neighborhood having to juxtapose the celebration of this historic monument to a Black political legacy, with the reality of the neighborhood fighting to survive the economic scars the Center leaves in its wake.
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ON THE POD
Jackie Lay/NPR
With the phrase “joy is resistance” flooding social media, what exactly does it mean? This Juneteenth, we're asking what joy actually is, when it can be a tool for social change, and why the slogan has become so popular -- even when joy itself feels more tenuous.
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