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Hiatus (Photo credit: Wikipedia) ITYC Radio is making a slow return after being dark for almost six months.  A lot has happened during that time including my returning to the workforce and discovering what it's like to seek employment in the age of social media. You can hear all about where I was and what I was doing over the last six months right here on the ITYC Radio player or on  iTunes, Libsyn, and Stitcher for tablet and smartphone users. 

Sherley and Clove Here it is! ITYC's interview with the delightfully Canadian duo behind Chonilla.com-Clove and Sherley. Powering through technical difficulties, we talked about the genesis of the show, the trouble with most podcasts about interracial relationships, the myth of the magical white man, "when keeping it real goes wrong" and the sometimes hilariously subtle differences between Canada and the U.S.  You can listen to the interview right here on the ITYC Radio player or on  iTunes, Libsyn, and Stitcher for tablet and smartphone users. As an added bonus, you can watch video of the entire, un-edited interview o

Tanji Dewberry Author Tanji Dewberry's son was diagnosed with ADHD in 2011 after a long and agonizing process during which she took medical leave from her high-powered Wall Street job as Vice President of Investor Relations to see her son through a myriad of medical tests and doctor visits. By the end of 2011 Dewberry had begun the process of creating Oh Fiddlesticks, a children's book inspired by her son and her family's experiences with ADHD. While the book was a form of theraputic release for her, Dewberry also hoped that Oh Fiddlesticks would help other parents and children living with ADHD.  In our interview she shares her thoughts about why debates over the "over diagnosis" of ADHD in young boys of color is misguided as well as her belief in provi

Noliwe M. Rooks Here it is! Part two of our Telling Black Hair Stories series! In this installment we talk to author and associate professor in Africana Studies and Feminist, Gender, Sexuality Studies at Cornell University, Noliwe M. Rooks about her book "Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture and African American Women." We talk about the legacy of Madame C.J. Walker that you never learn about during Black History Month and why black hair politics don't just begin or end with hair that's been "fried, dyed and laid to the side." As an added bonus, Professor Rooks also shares a bit of background about her latest book "White Money Black Power: The Surprising History of African American Studies and the Crisis of Race and Higher Education."

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu ITYC had the great pleasure of talking with multicultural psychologist and author Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu about his latest book When Half is Whole: Multiethnic Asian Identities. Through deeply personal, raw storytelling, When Half Is Whole explores the complex journey of identity formation in a world where social and economic realities of race affect every facet of human life both here in the United States and abroad in countries like Japan. We talked to Professor Shigematsu about his work, his personal identity story, and his live performance piece "Celtic Samurai." Please do check out his website and blog for more information about the book When Half is Whole and his other publications. 

This ITYC interview with writer Lori Tharps is the first installment in our miniseries about black hair.  Author of three books, Kinky Gazpacho, Substitute Me and Hair Story, many people will also know Tharps from her fantastic blog My American Melting Pot. She describes herself as "hair obsessed" and we dig into topics ranging from the recent public "hair controversies" involving Gaby Douglas and Willow Smith to her view of the impact of Chris Rock's "Good Hair" on popular discourse surrounding black women and our hair. Before we dive into all that, Tharps gives a brief overview of Hair Story, which she co-wrote with Ayana Byrd, which provides context for our fun and wide ranging discussion about the politics of black hair.

Courtesy N. Bowens Here it is! The first ITYC Radio interview of 2013. I was so happy to welcome Natasha Bowens of Brown Girl Farming back to the show. Since our 2012 Earth Day interview, Natasha made some incredible headway on her Color of Food photo documentary and she came back to tell us all about it and about the prospect of an actual Color of Food book!  She fills us in about the book and about her travels to small farms in Indian Country and in Gullah/Geechee country. You can listen to the interview right here on the ITYC Radio player, iTunes, Libsyn, and on Stitcher for tablet and smartphone users. ITYC Radio always wants to hear from you! Join the conversation or start one in our Disqus&n

American W.E.B. (Photo credit: Saint Iscariot) So here's an audio journal with my reflections on last Sunday night's CNN Who's Black in America special. Ultimately, my view of this special and the entire series as a whole is that conversations about race cannot happen without first directly addressing, defining, and recognizing whiteness. If whiteness/white supremacy are not central to your examination of racial identity and racial identity formation, then the conversation will inevitably lay the issues and outcomes of racial inequality at the feet of nonwhite people. I think this is what happened on Sunday night and I think that's what happened with the series as a whole. The space of commercial cable news in many ways is no friend to nuance or complexity and that the commercial motivations of these outlets somehow impact their willingness to "say white."  I talk about this and more in the audio journal which you can listen to right here in the blog's audio player, on iTunes, Libsyn, and on Stitcher for tablet and smartphone users.  

Image courtesy of Kidz City  Full disclosure, this is not a standard conference recap. I don't go into detail about the specific panels that I attended or any of the plenary sessions (I may do that in another journal), instead I offer a broader reflection of what I took away from the overall experience of attending the conference.  At the center of that experience, was coming to fuller understanding that access to affordable, safe, childcare for poor and working families is absolutely a human right. Additionally, I came to understand childcare as a form of activism. Having access to childcare at the conference allowed me to attend Facing Race-without it I would have stayed home. If activists and other folks attending conferences like Facing Race have childcare needs that aren't addressed and care is unavailable, how can social/racial justice issues related to families be addressed? That question was answered by many activists and the

Excuse my fury in this week's audio journal as I tackle the eye-rollingly awful Esquire piece The Postracial Elite. Though I almost feel like I'm feeding the trolls by acknowledging this story, because it is clearly a naked cry to be the meme of the week, I could not contain my supreme irritation with a writer who actually uses the word mongrel. It sent me over the edge.If you've read the piece, let me know if infuriated you as much as it infuriated me.  Feel free to leave your comments here. If the piece didn't anger you, please share your thoughts here in the comments as well. You can listen to this audio journal and to ITYC Radio on iTunes, Libsyn and now on Stitcher. Don't forget to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+! Related articles

Excuse my fury in this week's audio journal as I tackle the eye-rollingly awful Esquire piece The Postracial Elite. Though I almost feel like I'm feeding the trolls by acknowledging this story, because it is clearly a naked cry to be the meme of the week, I could not contain my supreme irritation with a writer who actually uses the word mongrel. It sent me over the edge.If you've read the piece, let me know if infuriated you as much as it infuriated me.  Feel free to leave your comments here. If the piece didn't anger you, please share your thoughts here in the comments as well. You can listen to this audio journal and to ITYC Radio on iTunes, Libsyn and now on Stitcher. Don't forget to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+! Related articles

Excuse my fury in this week's audio journal as I tackle the eye-rollingly awful Esquire piece The Postracial Elite. Though I almost feel like I'm feeding the trolls by acknowledging this story, because it is clearly a naked cry to be the meme of the week, I could not contain my supreme irritation with a writer who actually uses the word mongrel. It sent me over the edge.If you've read the piece, let me know if infuriated you as much as it infuriated me.  Feel free to leave your comments here. If the piece didn't anger you, please share your thoughts here in the comments as well. You can listen to this audio journal and to ITYC Radio on iTunes, Libsyn and now on Stitcher. Don't forget to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+! Related articles

Scot Nakagawa Last Wednesday, ITYC had the honor of speaking with social and racial justice activist Scot Nakagawa about his lifetime commitment to activism and antiracism. While most people became familiar Scot's work through his blog Racefiles, more specifically his widely circulated "Blackness is the Fulcrum" post, he has been working with community groups and grassroots activists since the late seventies. Scot shared the moving, personal story of how growing up a brown, gay person of color in Hawaii laid the foundation for his early politics-politics he says are necessarily rooted in the fight against antiblack racism.  

Childhood  innocence-itself raced white, itself characterized by the ability to retain racial meanings but hide them under the claims of holy obliviousness-secured the unmarked status of whiteness, and the power derived from that status, in the nineteenth and into the early twentieth centuries. Childhood innocence provided the perfect alibi: not only the ability to remember while appearing to forget, but even more powerfully, the production of racial memory through the performance of forgetting. What childhood innocence helped Americans to assert by forgetting, to think about by performing obliviousness, was not only whiteness but also racial difference constructed against whiteness.-Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights Robin Bernstein, Associate Professor of African and African American Studies and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University

Erica Chito Childs Last Thursday, I attended an event at the Brooklyn Historical Society for their "Crossing Boarders, Bridging Generations" series called What Are You? The panel tackled the this perpetual question often aimed at people who are perceived to be ethnically ambiguous.Presenting their own encounters/experiences with the "what are you?" question were Angela Tucker, creator of the webseries Black Folk Don't; Heidi Durrow, author of the New York Times Bestseller The Girl Who Fell from the Sky and co-host of Mixed Chicks Chat; Jen Chau, founder of Swirl, Inc.; Erica Chito Childs, author of Fade to Black and White: Interracial Images in Popular Culture and Ken Tanabe, founder of Loving Day.

Dr. Crystal S. Anderson Dr. Crystal S. Anderson is an Associate Professor of English and an Academic Diversity Fellow at Elon University who specializes in the study of Afro-Asian cultural production. Her current research finds her exploring Hallyu culture which encompasses the global explosion of Korean popular cultural forms including film, television and music. Dr. Anderson's work on Hallyu speaks directly to issues of cross-cultural pollination, hybridity, race, multi-raciality and globalization.  You can find her on her personal blog High Yellow and her Hallyu research blog Kpop Kollective. She's also one of the editors of Hello Kpop, another great resource for those interested in learning more about the music of Hallyu.

Cover via Amazon Nestled among last Friday's 5 was a piece called Dear Black Women Giving Me Hair Advice about My African Daughter: Please Stop.  This story instantly affected me so I decided to take a moment to reflect upon exactly what troubled me about the article. After some thought, I put together this audio journal with my observations. The entire journal clocks in at about thirty-minutes, but in the future they will be shorter-about fifteen to twenty minutes max. The intro and outro music you hear in the audio journal is a track by Morsa called "Expectation" from the Free Music Archive. In the journal I reference: Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America by Ayana Byrd and Lori Tharps of 

Dr. Worokya Duncan ITYC Radio had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Worokya Duncan of Duncan Educational Consultants last month, live and in-person! Our conversation ranged from the state of our public educational system to the bans on ethnic studies in states like Texas and Arizona. In the post script to the interview, I mention two NPR segments as they related to our discussion with Dr. Duncan.  One segment entitled, India's Blackout in Context aired on The Brian Lehrer Show yesterday. The other segment, aired just today on Morning Edition, revealed the findings of a survey of how families are managing(or not) skyrocketing college tuition costs.

Courtesy of C. Brewster and A Voluntary Life ITYC Radio recently had the pleasure of interviewing writer,wife, mother and journalist Carisa Brewster from the blog A Cup of Curiosity.   We talked about her life in Oregon, the nuances of less than friendly reactions to interracial relationships, natural hair, talking about race with mixed kids and being a brown mama nerd. Thanks to Carisa for taking the time to chat with us!  Related articles

ITYC Radio had the pleasure of interviewing Shannon Bennett of Mulattotude last week and we're happy to finally share our interview with you.  We talked to Shannon about motherhood, being a mixed adoptee, and the lessons about race and identity she's learned from her two sons. We also had a great discussion about Shannon's work in academia at an HBCU and the challenges of being a woman of color in academia.