Farai Chideya

Shaunagh talks to Farai Chideya

Farai is the host of the podcast 'Our Body Politic' and she has worked for NPR, CNN, ABC, Newsweek and the Intercept. She was a distinguished writer in residence at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute from 2012-2016 and she  currently serves as a Program Officer focusing on journalism with the Ford Foundation’s Creativity and Free Expression team.

Follow Farai on twitter and listen and subscribe to her podcast Our Body Politic. Our Body Politic is unapologetically centered on reporting on not just how women of color experience the major political events of today, but how they're impacting those very issues.

Episode credits

Hosted and produced by Shaunagh Connaire and edited by Ryan Ferguson.

Episode transcript

Shaunagh Connaire

Welcome to Media Tribe. I'm Shaunagh Connaire and this is the podcast that tells the story behind the story. It's an opportunity for you and I to step into the shoes of the most extraordinary media folk who cover the issues that matter most.

Farai Chideya

I went to meet a klanswoman with her husband and with the grand wizard of their klavern. I asked this white southern friend of mine to go with me and he was like, "Farai, they don't like race mixing."

Shaunagh Connaire

Today I'm chatting to Farai Chideya. Farai is the creator and host of a brilliant podcast, Our Body Politic, and has worked for numerous outlets, including Newsweek, CNN, ABC News, and NPR. She's now covering her seventh US presidential election. Farai, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Farai Chideya

I am so grateful to be with you.

Shaunagh Connaire

It's my pleasure to have you on. I've heard a lot about you and I've also spent the last week researching you rigorously, and it would be wonderful if you could tell our audience about your journey into journalism.

Farai Chideya

So for me, it's really just about storytelling. All the different ways you can tell a story and the love of storytelling, but I played a lot of different roles. I've been a field reporter mainly, I've been a radio host, TV host and reporter, political analyst, book author. But I will say audio is probably my favorite medium, because it's so intimate and you get to hear people's voices and have this connection to them.

Shaunagh Connaire

Well, I think before I let you crack on, Farai, I definitely want to backtrack a little bit because I believe you come from a very prestigious family of journalists.

Farai Chideya

My father, for example, was a communications professional who for a while did telecom, but he was an immigrant to the US from Zimbabwe. And when Zimbabwe became independent, he became the news director of the Zimbabwean Broadcasting Corporation. But he actually quit over Robert Mugabe inserting propaganda into the news. My mother was a journalist in the US in Zambia, where my parents lived before I was born, but as a black woman with small children, she didn't find staying in journalism very easy. And frankly, it's still not very easy for all women with children, let alone black women with children. And so when I look at my parents' careers, I see a lot of integrity, but I also see a lot of pain and loss. And this can be a very unforgiving profession for many different reasons, and also there's a lot of discrimination based on race and gender and on having children if you're a woman.

Farai Chideya

So I went into this with this kind of love of the field, but also an awareness that there would be a lot asked of me that was not fair. And unfortunately, that it's turned out to be true. I've had moments of severe employment discrimination, but I've also had the most magical ... When I think about ... At this point in my life, I've been to 49 of the 50 States. I've not yet been to South Dakota, where oddly enough, I have relatives by marriage. And I've been to about 30 countries, and a lot of that travel happened directly or indirectly because of work. And Americans, particularly people like me who ended up going to a really good college or a highly thought of college, often are more likely to travel abroad than in the United States. And I'm really glad that I've gotten to see the American heartland, which sometimes gets called the fly over states. And the reality is that this country is big and beautiful and complex and also angry and sometimes bitter and painful. And I've gotten to see it all as a reporter. And that makes me ... It hasn't always been easy, but it's been really fruitful.

Shaunagh Connaire

You come to journalism with a very different perspective. I also believe, Farai, you grew up in Central Park West in New York, but then moved to Baltimore. They're two quite different places. Did that kind of influence your reporting and journalism would you say?

Farai Chideya

Absolutely. I think in some ways that was the most seminal moment that I understood how differently people lived. Because when I lived on Central Park West, it was a middle-class neighborhood, now it's upper middle class and wealthy. But it was a middle-class neighborhood, very multi-racial, very free to be you and me, everyone got along, at least where we lived. And I was part of a group of kids who were part of a multiracial babysitting collective, where each mother took all the kids one day a week and then had one day with her own child. And so it was a bit of a paradise. And I know not all New York was like that, but it was like that for me.

Farai Chideya

And then when I moved to Baltimore, I had never really thought about my race in terms of the black/white color line. Race was an attribute that you had like the color of pants you were wearing for the day. It meant more than that, but not so much. And then I got to Baltimore and I was like, Oh, race is power. And you could see it everywhere in Baltimore that race was power. And the power was held by white people, and black people were asked to give up power or to be deferential to whiteness. And in some ways I say that it was like moving from the 1970s back to the 1950s, and Baltimore still has a very severe race problem. You see through things like the Freddie Gray case. Not that America doesn't have a race problem, but Baltimore has a very specific type of race problem.

Farai Chideya

And growing up there, nonetheless, was really also empowering, because I came from a family of working class, black intellectuals. My grandfather never graduated from high school, but he was a book collector and an artist, and worked two jobs, and helped teach me to draw. And there was this idea that no matter how much money you made, you could still be an intellectual. And so I learned a lot of things from eventually really growing up in Baltimore.

Shaunagh Connaire

This actually really leads nicely to my next question in the interview, which is the main question. And I ask all of my guests, Farai, if there's a story or a moment that you're quite proud, of or that's had impact. And I, with your permission, would love to talk to you about how you report on the current culture war. But you've been doing this for years. That's the difference? I think America is just waking up to the fact that this is a huge problem, but this is something you've been covering for years.

Farai Chideya

Yeah. In my 20s I actually spent a period intensely reporting on white supremacists, and including meeting klans people at different times and really having a lot of empathy for them, because I viewed them then and still view them now as people who were clinging to an ideology that doesn't serve them well. And I'm not saying that they're without agency. They've made a choice, but they're clinging to an ideology out of hatred and fear because they feel the world is to be hated and to be feared. And not just black people or Jews, et cetera, but that the whole world is against them. And that's a horrible way to feel. It doesn't excuse their behavior. It certainly doesn't excuse violence.

Farai Chideya

And when I interviewed klans people, I did my research to find out the clan is sort of like your local civic club. It's all different depending on where you are. So some of them kill people, and some of them just basically talk a lot about how they hate blacks and Jews. And so I chose to talk to the people who talked a lot, as opposed to the people who might kill me. But when I think back to how many risks I took with my own safety, it still stands out to me. And then over the years, I began to continue to do that work by telephone, and even by Twitter DM.

Farai Chideya

My most recent meaningful conversations with someone who's a white nationalist were over a year on Twitter DM, with a guy who said he was from Brooklyn, which is where I live, and I have no reason not to believe him. And there's this whole stereotype that racists live in the south, and racists aren't educated, and racists this and that. The reality is, prejudiced people live everywhere, just like not prejudiced people live everywhere. And we can't continue to demean poor white people by calling all of them racist, because not all of them are. And I would point to the work of Sarah Smarsh who really talks about poor and working class white Americans with much more nuance. And she grew up lower income on a farm outside of Wichita, Kansas.

Farai Chideya

So I really believe in seeing people for who they are, and when it comes to things like the ongoing race culture wars, I really put the biggest blame at the feet of people like Steve Bannon, who are the puppeteers. They're making a ton of money. They're being paid for days and they are happy to sit back in their mansions and incite the riots in the streets. They don't want to get their hands dirty, they just want to watch the world burn. And that's really what I'm the most distressed about.

Shaunagh Connaire

Well, I want to pick up your story where you ... I think you went to meet a klanswoman in the 90s, so I believe you would have been in your 20s back then, Farai.

Farai Chideya

I was.

Shaunagh Connaire

Can you tell us about that story? Because I believe there's a real message at the end of it, that the particular couple that you met learned from that.

Farai Chideya

Well yeah, there were a few different things that came out of that. I had been doing a story called Women Who Love to Hate that was a magazine article, and some of them I interviewed by phone, but I went to meet a klanswoman with her husband and with the grand wizard of their klavern, and there had just been a blizzard. This was in Frederick, Maryland, I'm from Maryland. And so there just been a blizzard, and I didn't know if they were willing to do it, but basically it's a snow day, all the schools are off, all the businesses are closed. And I asked this white southern friend of mine to go with me. And he was like, "Farai, they don't like race mixing." he was happy to go with me, but he was just like, "Having a white guy in the car will not protect you."

Farai Chideya

So that was interesting and enlightening, because he had grown up in a place where people were sometimes more obvious about their prejudices. But what I really felt by the end of the interview was that this woman, she was low income, she lived in low-income housing, she didn't want her daughter around black people, and she wanted to live someplace all white. And the thing is, she didn't have a race problem. She had a money problem. There's places all over America where you can go that are all white suburbs and all white enclaves and all white parts of the Upper East side of New York City. And it was just so striking to me that this woman was attached to this idea that somehow she had to blame the Blacks and the Mexicans and whoever for her economic situation.

Farai Chideya

And that's how nothing changes, because it's so hard to form multiracial coalitions in this country. But I still felt a sense of empathy for her because she did want, on some basic level, the best for her child. It was just that it was through this warped lens of race being the only way, racial hatred specifically being the only way, that she could see getting something better. When in fact that's not what was going to make her life better.

Shaunagh Connaire

It's staggering the fact that you even went to meet them in this car park. I believe her partner had a gun that day.

Farai Chideya

Yeah. He either had a gun or a very weirdly shaped banana in his car park overalls. And it was in fact my white friend who pointed it out. He was like, "That guy's got a concealed weapon," and I was like, "Oh, okay."

Shaunagh Connaire

Wow. So you have constantly been putting your safety on the line to tell this story. And it feels like ... We're in 2020 now. It's probably worth pointing out that white supremacist extremism is the number one cause of domestic terrorism here in the US, just in case people don't know that. So this-

Farai Chideya

Right. Which is also a media issue that when people don't know it it's because we have been afraid to say it as professional journalists. And now you see that the governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, has had her life threatened by white supremacists. And only now are people saying, "Oh, maybe we should stop calling them militias and start calling them domestic terrorists." But this is an example of how language has power. Like someone posted on Twitter or something like, "Can you imagine a group of 15 Muslims threatening to kill a sitting US governor and not being called terrorists?"

Shaunagh Connaire

Which brings me to a point, your point, I believe. You've mentioned that Blacks as a group, and Muslims as a group, are often judged by the actions of some. A small minority who have been violent in the past. Whereas somehow we never seem to do the same for whites as a group.

Farai Chideya

Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a big part of it is that when people assume that the worst actions of some Black Americans, and some Muslims both American and internationally, speak for the whole group and that every white person who does something like domestic terrorism is an aberration. When in fact, white extremism is the number one cause of domestic terrorism. And that's a clear example of racial bias in our cognitive filters and in our media filters. And we people in the media are just people. We grow up in houses with people who have their own racial and gender issues. And I think that one of the number one things that I do is I constantly ask myself, "What biases am I bringing into this situation?" Sometimes maybe I'm ... I wouldn't say too open. I don't think you can be too open, but at times I wonder if I cut too much slack to people like white supremacists. I'm like, "Oh well, they're human beings too, and they're suffering." And it doesn't mean that I don't blame them for their violent actions, but I always try to remember ...

Farai Chideya

For example, when people ... I think that the word inhuman is just the most ridiculous thing, because it usually means that it is uniquely human. Genocide is human. When people say, "Oh, the inhumanity of genocide." Genocide is a pretty human trait. It's happened all over the world, many, many times throughout history. And so what I try to do is accept the full range of humanity, which includes beautiful saintly acts of self love, and other love, and care for community. But it also includes things like genocide and racial terrorism.

Farai Chideya

I look myself in the mirror and I say, "What baggage am I bringing to the table when I go to interview someone?" Because I have my own baggage and I try to acknowledge it as a reporter instead of hiding from it or pretending I don't have it.

Shaunagh Connaire

Well, that sounds very sensible. I wonder, Farai, if you feel that the narrative of white nationalism has in some ways maybe intentionally been kept out of mainstream news.

Farai Chideya

I think it has, because ... For example, I can't tell you how many times at mainstream news organizations people talk about, essentially, what's wrong with black people? Why are black people so dysfunctional? And yet there's never a whole bunch of stories about why are white people so dysfunctional? And I'm not saying that there should be, but you can't have one but just the other. It's like, why are white people more likely to be domestic terrorists? Why hasn't that been on the cover of magazines as many times as, why are black people dysfunctional? It's complete cognitive and cultural bias.

Farai Chideya

It's also a form of continuing oppression. And the media has been a tool of both liberation and oppression. If you look at someone like Ida B. Wells, who's really going through a renaissance right now where she was posthumously given the Pulitzer prize, and you see her picture everywhere. There's the Ida B. Wells Society founded by Nicole Hannah Jones, who also got a Pulitzer the same year as Ida B. Wells did. Ida B. Wells was not welcomed by journalism. She was repudiated by journalism. She was telling truths that no mainstream white publication wanted to hear. She was documenting lynchings, doing data journalism that no one wanted to hear.

Farai Chideya

W. E. B. Dubois also did certain forms of data journalism, which most people don't know about him. They think of him as a thinker/sociologist, which he was, but he also did data journalism and would hand draw illustrations of data. So there's a long history of the repudiation of knowledge from sources that made people uncomfortable. And if journalism has a strong future, it's going to be that we actually begin to accept that knowledge comes from a variety of different sources and that what has sometimes been seen as empirical knowledge, is actually quite tainted.

Farai Chideya

So you see the LA Times talking about, "Well, this is our legacy of white supremacy." You see the New York Times printing ... This was probably about a year ago, or maybe even two years ago, an apology for using the term crack babies. And in an analysis, finding out that children who had been born to mothers with crack didn't have these profoundly worse outcomes than many other children. They were already sort of marked at birth as societal rejects. And now there's this whole generation of kids being born to opioid addicts, but the coverage is much more empathetic because the face of opioid addiction ... Not all opioid addicts, but when people think of an opioid addict, it's someone who's white, and that has affected coverage.

Farai Chideya

So it's just about being aware of how our filters as journalists begin to affect the news that people get. And so we can't ... We can't blame the public for being biased, and then think that we're sitting on some fluffy cloud of objectivity. And I love journalism. I've had so many beautiful moments. Things like going to an Indian country and visiting the Tohono O'odham Nation, which is along the US-Mexico border, and taping interviews there about the complexity of having tribal lands on both sides of the border. Or going to Standing Rock. Going to places where I really have to be humble because I just knew so little. And going to other places where I felt like I knew the story and then learning that, "Oh, it wasn't quite what I thought."

Shaunagh Connaire

Well, I think everything you've said there is so spot on, and I genuinely hope there will be a shift within industry now. It has to happen really quite quickly. We both know our newsrooms are way too white. They're way too male dominated. Newsrooms are elitist. Things drastically need to change. We are where we are at now, Farai. It's 2020, we're approaching the election. I think the fact that the current sitting president refuses to denounce white supremacy has caused havoc here, but it also has forced the media in a direction where they have to confront this topic. Do you feel like voters are implicitly endorsing or rejecting white nationalism if they vote for Trump or if they don't vote for Trump?

Farai Chideya

The best analogy that I heard that ... First of all, there was some very good research after the 2016 election that showed that racial resentment was the number one motivator of Trump voters, followed by authoritarianism, followed by economics. So once you start to dis-aggregate things, you do see the role of racial resentment. And that's why there were so many different ... All this harping on the idea of the Mexican rapist, which in turn, came from Sheriff Joe Arpaio successfully using that to be reelected for 26 years in Arizona. And I covered him, but he kind of perfected that particular type of anti-Mexican border rhetoric. So it wasn't new, and people who thought that it wouldn't work were not good students of history.

Farai Chideya

I also get super annoyed when journalists don't actually pay attention to our own history. But I think one of the best analogies compared it to cable bundling. When I pay my cable bill, it's not like I can say, "Well, I don't want CNN. I'm not paying for CNN." You're paying for whatever's in the basic cable bundle. You may not watch all of it, you may not like all of it, but you're paying for it. And in the same way, anyone who votes for someone who's openly xenophobic is voting for xenophobia. Even if that's not air quotes, "Why you're voting for them." You are voting for that bundle. And so politics are complicated.

Farai Chideya

And in the radio show that I'm doing now, Our Body Politic, which is about women of color in politics, we interviewed a conservative woman of color who was a military veteran and a Trump supporter. And it's clear that she is able to distance herself psychologically from the xenophobia, and she feels that the other things that president Trump brings to the table are more important. I don't get the sense that she endorses his racial views, but she feels like she can dis-aggregate them, but I'm just not sure it's possible too.

Shaunagh Connaire

That's wild. It's hard to comprehend. Farai, I'm going to go onto our last question because I know you're dashing off to record one of your brilliant podcasts. By the way, everybody should subscribe to Our Body Politic. It's fantastic.

Farai Chideya

Oh thank you.

Shaunagh Connaire

Last question, Farai. A little bit of a lighter note, potentially, depending on your answer, but is there a moment in your career that's been rather crazy?

Farai Chideya

I've had a lot of crazy moments. But some of the fun crazy ones were, I first went to work at Newsweek back in the days when it was a big powerful magazine. And then I wanted to do something totally different, so I worked at MTV News. And among my adventures there were like getting to sit on Grandmaster Flash's lap while we were doing the VMAs, and trying to get a very intoxicated with blunt smoke Biggie Smalls to come on camera. Chasing stoned rappers around the green room to try to get them to go on camera is a whole skill, and I don't think I mastered it, but it was definitely fun. So I feel like my brief amount of time as an entertainment industry reporter, it was so long ago, it was like nearly 30 years ago, but there's still ... Madonna played our holiday party when we were at MTV News.

Shaunagh Connaire

Are you serious?

Farai Chideya

Abso-frigging-lutely

Shaunagh Connaire

Oh my god. Well, it's just hilarious that you went from Madonna to klans people. That it is quite a severe pivot, Farai. Fair play to you.

Farai Chideya

I definitely feel like, for me, the craziest stories are just the ones that are about real people. This is not a happy crazy story, but it's an important crazy story, where during the last election I was interviewing a Trump voter in Eastern Ohio and he verbally sexually harassed me. And I didn't put it in my main story because I said, "You know what? People already have all of their preconceived notions about Trump voters. And this is not the story where I need to be talking about this guy's misogyny, because it will poison the rest of the story." But I did write about it separately.

Farai Chideya

And I can't remember who said this, but there was a journalist who said, "The number one power that journalists have is not what to put in, but what to leave out." And I felt in that case, it was really important to be true to my story by representing, because the story was not about one guy, it was about Trump voters in eastern Ohio. And in the Trump voter story, it was important for me not to put in an incident that was all about me and make that story all about me. But later it was also important for me to talk about it and talk about how humiliating and frustrating it is as a female reporter to be sexually harassed when you're trying to do your job and to feel like you have to take one for the team in order to a fair journalist. So that's the kind of thing where that's not fun, but I do feel like I used my best judgment both by leaving it out of one article and writing it into another.

Shaunagh Connaire

Well, you have spent three decades putting the story before your own story, but now on your podcast, you're putting women of color at the forefront of the story, which is fantastic. Everybody, as I said, should go and subscribe to Our Body Politic on wherever you get your podcasts. Farai, you're an absolute star. Thanks a million for coming on the podcast.

Farai Chideya

I enjoyed this so much, and I just wish you the best. And I'm going to sign up and tell everyone about your show.

Shaunagh Connaire

If you liked what you heard on this episode of Media Tribe, tune in next week, as I'll be dropping new shows every week with all sorts of legendary folk from the industry. And if you could leave me a review and rating, that would be really appreciated. Also, get in touch on social media. @Shaunagh on Twitter, or @ShaunaghConnaire on Instagram. And feel free to suggest new guests. That's it. Until next week, see you then.

Shaunagh Connaire

This episode is edited by Ryan Ferguson.