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Escaping The Box

A Conversation With Ira Glass, Host Of This American Life

We once did a show titled “Escaping the Box,” which opened with a story about Sylvia, a Mexican American girl. We completely downplayed her ethnicity. Instead, we said she’s an American who, like a lot of Americans, has immigrant parents. She’s had experiences typical of a first-generation American: Her parents don’t speak the language, so she’s translating for them. She is already more American than they ever could be. They want her to be a traditional girl, like in the old country — to get married and have kids at eighteen. But she wants to go to college. She wants to be an American girl.

Bikini

In 1960 I was one of the few people I knew who owned a bikini. They had been around for a while but were still considered fairly risqué. Mine was pink, was made of cotton, and tied around the neck.

Exchange Students

The sound of him, like all the pain a person could possibly hold, saved up over a lifetime, rose up the face of the cliff and seemed to blow and fade through the tops of the pines and dash through the surrounding hills like a quick-moving storm.

Protection

It took a long time, but, by the following summer, I could get in and out of my car without hyperventilating. I could walk calmly down main streets in the daytime, although I still avoided parking lots and alleys, and rarely went out alone at night.

Names

Indian names, the McCarthy hearings, cigars

Crossing Borders

An Interview With Richard Rodriguez

My grandmother always told me that I was hers, that I was Mexican. That was her role. It was not my teacher’s role to tell me I was Mexican. It was my teacher’s role to tell me I was an American. The notion that you go to a public institution in order to learn private information about yourself is absurd. We used to understand that when students went to universities, they would become cosmopolitan. They were leaving their neighborhoods. Now we have this idea that, not only do you go to first grade to learn your family’s language, but you go to a university to learn about the person you were before you left home. So, rather than becoming multicultural, rather than becoming a person of several languages, rather than becoming confident in your knowledge of the world, you become just the opposite. You end up in college having to apologize for the fact that you no longer speak your native language.

My Block

Frolicking in DDT; learning the constellations, remembering a clubhouse initiation

Altars In The Street

Sleeping alone in our bed one night when my husband, Stan, was away, I was awakened at 5 A.M. by a big wind. I put on my slippers and a robe and went into the kitchen. It was late November, and still dark at that hour of the morning. When I tried the kitchen light, I discovered the power was off. Looking outside, I saw the street lights were out. The wind was gusting so violently between our house and the apartment building next door, I was afraid the fir trees would blow down. I stood at the window, watching them toss and bend alarmingly.

Sunbeams

If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it.

Thomas Carlyle

Environmentalism And The Mystique Of Whiteness

An Interview With Carl Anthony

I agree that, no matter what the noise level, each person is entitled to hear his or her own inner voice. That’s an important first step to hearing the voices of others, as well as the cry of the earth. But the ability to respond intelligently, creatively, and compassionately to the claims of different human communities is undermined by the false sense of privilege that comes from thinking of oneself as “white.” Wanting to hear the voice of the earth, the notion that nature is crying out in pain, has a limited potential for reaching and touching many people who are living much more prosaic lifestyles than those who think about these matters only in an intellectual and philosophical way. People of color often view alarmist predictions about the collapse of the ecosystem as the latest stratagem by the elite to maintain political and economic control.