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Piece Description
More and more these days Jeff finds himself thinking about race and being forced to answer the question "What are you?" "When I was younger - you know my father's black, my mother's white - that's the way it was supposed to be: father meant black person, mother meant white person. Race had no bearing on anything. To me, two Asian people could just have a black kid. It made perfect sense when I was younger."
Transcript
Jeff Rogers in Boston: "Halfrican"
TEENAGE DIARIES
Produced by: Joe Richman
All Things Considered (NPR)
11/13/98
Robert Seigel, Host: This is NPR's All Things Considered, I'm Robert Seigel. As part of our ongoing series, Teenage Diaries, Producer Joe Richman has been giving tape recorders to teenagers to document their lives. Today we meet Jeff Rodgers. Jeff is sixteen, and lives with his family in Boston. More and more these days he finds himself thinking about race and being forced to answer the question "What are you?" This is his radio diary.
(knock, knock, knock, knock)
(door opens)
Jeff's Mother: Good morning, Jeffrey, it's time to get up. Let's go.
Jeff: (clears throat) yeah, I'm coming. (groans)
Jeff: What's going on, this is Jeff. It's 6:20. Gotta get up and go to school. Usually every morning, listen to some music. (music starts) ahhhhhhhh! Cuz I got...
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Transom Editors
Posted on January 14, 2004 at 06:27 AM | Permalink
Review of Jeff in Boston: Halfrican
Okay, this is fourth time I've tried to write a review for this piece. I liked it so much that I thought I'd wait to disengage from it a bit so that I could intellectualize my gut reaction to this piece---but that's not going to happen anytime soon.
Jeff is funny and thoughtful and he tells his story without a smidgen of self -consciousness. This piece is edited in such a way that there is this wonderful sense of immediacy. There's this sense that Jeff is exploring his thoughts on race, his identity, his family, for the very first time and you are lucky enough to listen in on his thought process.
This is the kind of story that you could hear on almost any show : This American Life, Weekend Edition, The Next Big Thing, Day to Day, etc...It's a perfect story for African American History Month but it would be appropriate wherever a PD has an 8 minute spot.-CM