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Thetis White’s class is diverse—filled with students from different races and backgrounds, who are all taught by a Black man. That’s not uncommon at Monroe Elementary in Brooklyn Park, a diverse suburb of Minneapolis, but it is rare in Minnesota as a whole, where fewer than one percent of teachers are Black men. Experts say the low number of teachers of color contributes to wide educational disparities in Minnesota. The state has historically ranked near the top in test scores and graduation rates. But those numbers mask wide differences between white and, in particular, Black students.This year, about 52 percent of white students met state standards for math, compared to 18 percent of Black students. And, on reading, 60 percent of white students were proficient, double the percentage of Black students.
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Buying a home is a rite of passage, a life-changing step—but in the Twin Cities especially, this crucial key to accumulating and passing down wealth is much harder to come by if you are Black. Just 25 percent of Black residents of Minneapolis and St. Paul own their homes. That’s far below the national average, especially considering the Twin Cities are widely regarded as one of the country’s most affordable metros. As far as white residents here, though, 75 percent are homeowners. This episode of Under-Told: Verbatim includes interviews with new homeowners Tim and Melva Luckett, aspiring homeowner Lilricka Barber, Minnesota Housing Commissioner Jennifer Ho and historian Kirsten Delegard, who leads the Mapping Prejudice Project.
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Especially in the United States, many think of racism as a black and white issue—but less talked about is colorism, the preference for lighter skin within communities of color. Safiya Mohamed is a Somali American journalism student at the University of St. Thomas, where our Under-Told Stories Project offices are based. Our PBS NewsHour report on the global desire for lighter skin and the potentially toxic steps some will take to get it covered the impact of Amira Adawe’s activism on the cosmetics industry through her organization, Beautywell—but this episode of Under-Told Verbatim explores the impact of Beautywell’s Young Women’s Wellness and Leadership Initiative, in which Safiya Mohamed participated.
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Minnesotans, now more than ever, are waking up to the realities of racial inequity in their communities. In St. Paul, activists with ReConnect Rondo have a new suggestion: they want to build a land bridge over Interstate 94 to rejoin the old Rondo neighborhood, which was destroyed decades ago by the construction of the freeway. In this episode, our intern Emily Haugen interviewed those leading the charge, plus city and state officials working to right past wrongs.
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It’s April 2021—the COVID-19 pandemic has been omnipresent for more than a year, and vaccines from Moderna, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson are rolling out across the United States. Throughout the pandemic, we’ve reported on essential workers, focusing especially on some of the most overlooked employees - in the U.S. some 50,000 meatpackers have had COVID-19 and about 250 lost their lives. This episode features an interview with University of Minnesota epidemiologist Michael Osterholm about the vaccine rollout for meatpacking workers in rural areas like Worthington, Minnesota.
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Lisa Clemons is a former Minneapolis police officer who founded a non-profit called A Mother’s Love—a brigade of people in bright pink t-shirts trying to bring back the metaphorical village they say it takes to raise a child. Clemons dreamed of being a cop since she was young, but left the department 20 years ago for a broader advocacy. Our correspondent, Fred de Sam Lazaro, spent a cold November day with her as Clemons and her team passed out COVID kits of masks and toiletries, purchased hams or turkeys and organized an upcoming Christmas toy drive.
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Charging Buffalo is the first butchering facility on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota - the economic development alone is welcome in one of the poorest communities in the United States, but a place that treats the sacred animal with honor and respect means something more. Bamm Brewer is a member of the Oglala Lakota tribe. He runs the meat house, plus his own ranch and buffalo herd. Our correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro spoke to him in October about Lakota life, land rights and bringing back the buffalo.
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In the Bangkok restaurant Cabbages and Condoms, rubbers are everywhere: on sculptures, lanterns, even a condom Santa Claus at Christmastime. The place has become an icon for what’s widely regarded as one of the world’s most successful family planning programs. Bringing a little humor to a taboo-laden topic is the trademark of Mechai Viravaidya—or as he’s known in his native Thailand: the Condom King. No surprise, then, that in Thailand condoms are commonly called Mechais. He started out working to stabilize a growing population and reduce poverty through family planning—a key factor in Thailand's growth into a middle income nation. When HIV/AIDS hit, a similar condom-based campaign became useful once more—one that’s widely credited with a dramatic drop in the number of HIV infections, from about 140,000 a year in 1990, to about 30,000 cases a year a decade later. Our correspondent, Fred de Sam Lazaro, has interviewed Mechai many times—most recently in April 2020 by video call to see how the school Mechai founded is faring during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this episode of Under-Told: Verbatim, we’ve collected some of our favorite chats with Mechai over the years so you can hear how he’s worked with bureaucrats, religious leaders, the media and directly with communities as an activist, while founding schools and businesses to sustain his mission.
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After police killed George Floyd on May 25, Minneapolis and St. Paul saw weeks of protests that spread across the world. Never before has such a clear demand emerged from the demonstrations: defund the police. The Minneapolis City council unanimously advanced a proposal at the end of June to create a new Department of Community Safety and Violence Prevention—their next goal was to amend the city charter, which mandates a police department with a certain number of officers. The council hoped to put that question before voters, but the Minneapolis Charter Commission, court appointed and not elected, had the ultimate say and voted effectively to keep the issue off the November ballot. That decision sat well with mayor Jacob Frey, who’s opposed the defunding campaign. Amid the debate, Minneapolis has seen a spike in violent crime and a record number of complaints against the department since the city erupted in protests after Floyd’s killing. Throughout the summer, we’ve followed the defund the police debate. To find out what a police-free future might look like, our correspondent, Fred de Sam Lazaro, has talked with city leaders and community members, like Tyrone Hartwell of the Minnesota Freedom Fighters and Lisa Clemons of A Mother's Love.
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Our team actually lives in St. Paul and Minneapolis...which, on a fateful day in late May, became the epicenter of a protest movement that’s swept the world since: the death of George Floyd. We’ve been on the frontlines of this story for the PBS NewsHour. Alongside NewsHour producers Mike Fritz and Sam Lane, we produced an in-depth piece on inequality in the Twin Cities, how ‘Minnesota Nice’ only applies if you’re white. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can watch the full story at undertoldstories.org. In this episode, we have a chance to expand conversations our correspondent, Fred de Sam Lazaro, had with community members after police killed Floyd and protestors burned the Minneapolis Police Department’s Third Precinct.
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Molly Melching arrived in Senegal in the 70s as a student for what was supposed to be just six months, but instead spent the majority of her life working through the organization she founded, Tostan—which means “breakthrough” in the Wolof language, to convince more than 8,000 communities across eight West African countries to abandon female genital cutting, or FGC. The success she’s found is rare—Each year, the World Health Organization says, up to 3 million girls in Africa are subjected to genital mutilation, and up to 200 million women live with its consequences. We talked to her in 2011 about FGC and again in 2020 about COVID-19 in rural Senegalese communities.
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George McGraw and his organization, Dig Deep, used to bring water access to communities in Africa. A few years ago, he turned his attention to the United States—he now works in the Navajo Nation. The native reservation spans twenty seven thousand square miles across parts of Arizona, Utah and New Mexico, where 40 percent of the homes lack running water or sanitation. Many are in such remote areas that they will never be able to connect to a water line.
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Somaliland, a region of Somalia that lay in ruin from years of war, suffers some of the world’s highest rates of infant and maternal mortality. But 15 years ago, Edna Adan fulfilled a lifelong dream by building a nonprofit hospital and nursing school to address the health needs of women. In this episode, we hear Edna, the former first lady of Somalia, describe her path toward achieving that dream and the myriad obstacles she faced, and still faces, in reducing infant and maternal mortality.
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The Monk Doctor: 72, shaved bald and draped in flowing maroon robes, Barry Kerzin gently presses his stethoscope to the neck of an elderly Tibetan man. He’s just as gentle with this patient as he is with a much more famous one: his holiness the Dalai Lama. The Tibetan spiritual leader now calls Kerzin, a tall, white California native, his messenger to the medical world – a journey that took a classically trained Western doctor halfway across the globe to become a buddhist monk.
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In 1994, Nelson Mandela’s election marked the end of apartheid and the beginning of democracy in South Africa. But the scars of racial segregation haven’t healed yet. Infrastructure designed for 5 million white South Africans has failed to support the majority black population of over 56 million power outages and water shortages are a part of daily life. Zola Nene was 10 years old when apartheid ended. Today her cookbooks and television appearances have made her a famous and beloved celebrity chef. Our director Fred de Sam Lazaro, talked to Zola in a Cape Town coffee shop about cooking in a post apartheid kitchen.
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Rebecca Letven is the Cambodia country director for the UK based Mines Advisory Group, or MAG, a non-governmental organization that works to clear explosives and return land to communities. These deadly remnants of the Cambodian civil war were planted in the late 1960s and early 70s by both the genocidal Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian Vietnamese forces. They also include thousands of unexploded bombs dropped by the United States as part of the Vietnam war. Most of the minefields are in rural areas, where close to 80% of Cambodians live and depend on the land for farming or other natural resources.
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While training as a chef, Sean Sherman learned French, Italian and other western styles of cooking, but he had no way of knowing what his ancestors ate. So he decided to find out himself. His cookbook, “The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen,” won a James Beard award in 2018. Today, he and his partner Dana Thompson run “The Sioux Chef,” a project to revive indigenous traditions in the kitchen and encourage cheaper and healthier eating for everyone.
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Jimmy Carter was President of the United States from 1977 to 1981, but he dove into humanitarian work as soon as his term was over. He’s worked to eradicate neglected tropical diseases and mediate age-old conflicts around the world including Sudan and South Sudan--two nations carved out of one after a bitter war that Carter helped end. In this episode, Jimmy Carter reflects on his foreign aid methodology and the global and personal impact of the Carter Center.
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In 2005 there were about 150 orphanages in Cambodia, but that number grew to more than 400 in 2019. But an estimated 80 percent of kids in Cambodia's orphanages aren't actually orphans. Sebastien Marot’s Friends International social enterprise is working with the larger campaign to remove children from orphan care. In a courtyard near a busy Phnom Penh street, he explained the business of orphanage tourism, the harmful impact it can have on the children and how international volunteers—often part of the problem—can be part of the solution.
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In 2005 there were about 150 orphanages in Cambodia, but that number grew to more than 400 in 2019. But an estimated 80 percent of kids in Cambodia's orphanages aren't actually orphans. Evangelical Pastor Ted Olbrich runs one of the largest providers of orphan care in Cambodia. Foursquare Children of Promise is an explicitly Christian organization in a largely Buddhist country. He’s pushed back on the coalition of agencies - like UNICEF and the Cambodian government - that want to close orphanages and prioritize reuniting families.
