Bridging the Great Divide: Eleyna's Story

Eleyna, who is Jewish, talks about growing up in a small town in California where Native Americans and whites went to school together, but lived "in different worlds," as she puts it. She explains, "I knew from a really young age that racism was a huge issue, and that it was affecting my life and the lives of everyone around me." A retreat she attended as a teen enabled her to engage deeply with young people of diverse backgrounds, and provided her with the vocabulary and foundation for her understanding of racism and other oppressions, issues at the core of her work to this day.

Multiple times she expresses her ever-present desire to bridge the divide that racism creates, which she has been able to do with MaryAnn, an African American friend whom she met in her late teens. Their friendship is close, but conflict related to racial dynamics playing out arises occasionally. Still, they continue to be friends, with Eleyna open to confrontation and invested in unlearning her own oppressive "white patters" of behavior.

Listen to Eleyna's story here.

Like a Pandora's Box: A Conversation with Joy

Joy, who immigrated to the US from Taiwan as a child, shares her thoughts on how her immigration experience shaped her sense of identity, and explores how issues of race impact her relationships with her white friends. She says conversations about race do not come up often and when they do, they are "like a Pandora's box, (because) you don't really know what will happen if you address it."

Listen to my conversation with Joy here: Like A Pandora's Box: A Conversation with Joy

Impressions of America: Tereza's friendship with Elizabeth

Tereza, the producer of this podcast, who immigrated to the US from the Czech Republic in her teens, remembers her friendship with Elizabeth, who was from Ethiopia. She says that their friendship was rich in that they were able to discuss issues of race together. "When I remember our conversations," Tereza recalls, "we used words with each other--tongue-in-cheek--that we would not use with other people. It's kind of embarrassing to think about that now," she confesses, "but that's just how we talked about race (then)."

These very conversations, says Tereza, helped both girls begin to make sense of US society and their place within it as new immigrants.

Click here to listen to Impressions of America.

Snow Was the Glue: Brian's friendship with Ben

Brian, who grew up in Jamaica, talks about a white Jewish American friend, Ben, he made during a snow storm in a predominantly white neighborhood where he did not expect people to be friendly. When asked after the recording whether he harbored any stereotypes about Jewish people prior to becoming friends with Ben, Brian replied that the message he had gotten in the past was that Jews didn't like black people and kept to themselves, not interested in relationships with people from other cultures. The kicker is that his girlfriend now has Jewish ancestry.

Although as a person of color he frequently experiences being stereotyped, he says he has learned over time to not generalize groups of people. He says, "It doesn't matter who you are, where you're from. If you have some decency, some humanity to you, then it will show."

Listen to Snow Was the Glue.