
Shereen Marisol Meraji
Shereen Marisol Meraji tries to find the humor and humanity in reporting on race for the NPR Code Switch team.
Her stories center on the real people affected by the issues, not just experts and academics studying them. Those stories include a look at why a historically black college in West Virginia is 90 percent white, to a profile of the most powerful and most difficult-to-target consumer group in America: Latinas.
Prior to her time with Code Switch, Meraji worked for the national business and economics radio program Marketplace, from American Public Media. There, she covered stories about the growing wealth gap and poverty in the United States.
Meraji's first job in college involved radio journalism and she hasn't been able to shake her passion for story telling since. The best career advice Meraji ever received was from veteran radio journalist Alex Chadwick, who said, "When you see a herd of reporters chasing the same story, run in the opposite direction." She's invested in multiple pairs of running shoes and is wearing them out reporting for Code Switch.
A graduate of San Francisco State with a BA in Raza Studies, Meraji is a native Californian with family roots in Puerto Rico and Iran.
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On the Code Switch podcast this week, a look at concerns and issues facing people of color in the 2020 Census, and a look back at the reasons why "Hispanics" became a word in the first place.
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We talked to Angela Saini, author of the new book Superior: The Return of Race Science, about how race isn't real (but you know ... still is) and how race science crept its way into the 21st century.
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Black students at San Francisco State College walked out in a protest that led to the rise of ethnic studies departments at colleges and universities around the country.
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People with eating disorders are too often portrayed as white, skinny young women. One group is trying to spread the word that eating disorders affect people of every race, gender and body size.
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President Trump continues his quest to curb illegal immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border. One expert says there have always been ebbs and flows to how welcoming the U.S. is to immigrants.
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The pope will canonize 18th-century Spanish priest Junipero Serra in the U.S. later this month. But descendants of the Mission Indians in California say Serra destroyed their traditional way of life.
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Families have played a huge role in helping new immigrants succeed, argues UCLA Professor Hiroshi Motomura. Changing the rules would dramatically change the face of immigration.
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A poll asked: When you were growing up, were you encouraged to apply to college, discouraged from applying or was this never discussed?
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As Hispanic Heritage Month gets under way, it's worth noting that the idea of people from the Latin American diaspora referring to themselves as 'Hispanic' or 'Latino' or 'Latinx' is a fairly new one.
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What does it look like when one Latino is racist towards another? And what can one tiny interaction say about the way communities relate? How one viral video reveals fissures in the Latino community.