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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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.
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Latino families sued four Orange County school districts over school segregation. The case, Mendez v. Westminster, ended school segregation in California seven years before Brown v. Board. -
Participants in these social networks pool their money to give each other informal, no-interest loans. They're called cundinas or tandas, and politicians are taking notice. -
People often question why some pronounce the word "ask" as "ax." We axed several linguists, and it turns out that "ax" has long been an accepted form of the word, used by English speakers for more than a thousand years.
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Bluefield State College in Bluefield, W.Va., is 90 percent white. Its alumni association is all black, and it still gets federal money as a historically black institution. -
Today's undocumented activists are using strategies borrowed from the civil rights movement and calling their struggle "The Civil Rights Movement of the 21st Century." -
According to a new report by Nielsen, Hispanic women are a key growth engine in the American marketplace. But marketers face unique challenges in reaching this demographic. -
The past week has seen many reactions to the testimony of a 19-year-old witness in the George Zimmerman trial. And the responses are anything but black and white. -
People often talk about African-Americans and other minorities being subject to "food deserts" — areas where fresh, healthy, affordable food is hard to come by. The findings of an NPR poll suggest that we should be thinking about "popcorn deserts," too.
