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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Spiritual leaders are praying for calm, but preparing for everything, as they wait for a grand jury decision in the shooting of Michael Brown.
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Dear White People follows the stories of four black students at a prestigious, majority white college, where racial tensions are threatening to bring chaos to the campus.
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Men have expressed confusion about how to behave out in the dating world now that gender roles have shifted significantly. Do you open the door, pay for the date, pull out the chair?
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For All Things Considered's series on men in America, NPR's Shereen Marisol Meraji asked some guys about the objects that make them feel manly. We want to hear from you, too.
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One subject mentioned by protestors and non protesting residents of Ferguson, Mo., was voting. The turn out for registered African American voters in the last municipal elections was 6 percent.
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One elementary school is less than a mile away from the protest zone where there have been nightly clashes with police. So for some kids, the first day of school might be more stressful than usual.
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A summer camp program takes boys and girls, ages 8-15, to spend time with their incarcerated dads. The kids camp out nearby and go to the prison during the day to do art projects with their fathers.
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The film tells the story of how an Italian-owned pizzeria becomes a flashpoint for racial unrest in one of New York City's poorest neighborhoods, the heavily black and Puerto Rican Bedford-Stuyvesant.
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A Los Angeles doctor is training barbers to check their customers for high blood pressure. He's targeting the social hubs for black men because of the health risks associated with hypertension.
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The Army's 65th Infantry Regiment was a segregated military unit, begun in 1899 and composed of Puerto Ricans. President Barack Obama is signing a bill to honor the unit with one of the highest civilian honors, the Congressional Gold Medal.