I’m soooo excited about the launch of Code Switch! You might have heard segments of Code Switch on your favorite NPR show, but soon it will be a podcast. The Code Switch team is made up of journalists of color fascinated by the overlapping themes of race, ethnicity and culture, how they play out in our lives and communities, and how all of this is shifting.
What does Code Switch mean? According to the team’s website, “In linguistics, ‘code-switching’ means mixing languages or patterns of speech in conversation. But as our writer Gene Demby explains: “We’re looking at code-switching a little more broadly. Many of us subtly, reflexively change the way we express ourselves all the time. We’re hop-scotching between different cultural and linguistic spaces and different parts of our own identities — sometimes within a single interaction.
We decided to call this team Code Switch because much of what we’ll be exploring are the different spaces we each inhabit and the tensions of trying to navigate between them. In one sense, code-switching is about dialogue that spans cultures. It evokes the conversation we want to have here.”
As someone who’s lived her entire life code switching, I feel as if I’ve found a group of friends online who “get” me without me having to explain myself. If you’re one of the only (fill in the blanks) women in your office, African-Americans in your neighborhood, Latinas in your book club, in a mixed-race relationship you’ll relate to the stories covered and shared in Code Switch.
