Travis Khachato...: You are listening to Sagecast, the Pomona College Podcast, where we talk with faculty and alumni who are making a difference in the classroom and in the world. I'm Travis Khachatoorian. Marilyn Thomsen: And I'm Marilyn Thomsen. This season, we're focusing on Sagehens who are tackling the difficult. Today, we're talking with Leah Donnella, who's an editor at NPR, working with the Code Switch team that looks at the impact of race all through society, from politics to pop culture to food. Travis Khachato...: She graduated from Pomona College in 2013, and I got to say we had a great time talking with her at the KSPC studio. Here's our conversation with Leah Donnella. Leah, welcome to the show. Leah Donnella: Thanks for having me. Travis Khachato...: So it's been 10 years since you graduated Pomona College- Leah Donnella: Yes. Travis Khachato...: ... and you went on to report impactful stories for NPR, but I want to take a step back. And I'm curious, when did you first discover your interest in radio journalism? Leah Donnella: Oh, gosh. I got into journalism kind of by accident and radio, especially by accident. After graduating from college, I moved to Philadelphia where I grew... around where I grew up, and I applied to a lot of different internships in Philly. And the one that I got was working at WHYY, which is their public radio station. And my job was to teach high school students about journalism, which was kind of funny because I didn't really know anything about journalism. I was learning very much on the job. Marilyn Thomsen: Did you ever meet Terry Gross? Leah Donnella: I did. I got to watch her taping. Travis Khachato...: Wow. Leah Donnella: And that was really cool. It was also just amazing hearing the kind of legends and stories around her and how she really does read every book for the people that she interviews, and she's like the real deal, which is very, very cool. Travis Khachato...: So she works at that station- Leah Donnella: Yeah. Travis Khachato...: ... in Philadelphia. Leah Donnella: Mm-hmm. Travis Khachato...: Oh, okay. Leah Donnella: Mm-hmm. Marilyn Thomsen: Did you learn anything from watching? Leah Donnella: Even when she was interviewing someone in a different place, or she always looked like she was talking directly to the person, and you could see her close her eyes when someone was answering a question and just really take in what they were saying. You could just see physically how engaged she was all the time, which was really... I think you can hear it when you're listening to her do interviews. But seeing it was kind of striking in that way. It was just very, very obvious. Marilyn Thomsen: So you actually helped high school students do interviews. Tell us about that. Leah Donnella: That was fun because, I think, it was fun to hear from 14-year-olds and 15-year-olds what they thought the news was and where it came from. So one of the things we did was we tried to record little mini-documentaries and news segments, and one day, I remember a few of them saying, "Oh, there's nothing really going on. Maybe we should go start a fire." Marilyn Thomsen: Whoa. Leah Donnella: Because they were like that's... to them, they were like, that's how the news works. If nothing is happening, you got to make something... you have to fill the air time some way, which we had a conversation about ethics and reporting and all of that and how you can't just start an event. But it was kind of an eye-opening way of understanding how the news seems to people that it's not necessarily clear that reporting should be about real events that are really happening. Sometimes, it just does seem as though you're finding a fire, right. You're finding whatever kind of horrible or extreme situation is happening, and your- Marilyn Thomsen: If it bleeds, it leads. Leah Donnella: Exactly. Yeah. And so they very much had absorbed that message. Travis Khachato...: So this Philadelphia station was kind of really where you started to learn how to report, what style of reporting you wanted to do. Leah Donnella: It was where I learned, I think, what journalism is, what it can be, what the point of it is. And I think seeing it, again, through the eyes of teenagers was really cool because they were having these discussions about journalism without really coming in with preconceptions about what it should be or what it already is. They had never taken a class before. This was all brand new to them. So a lot of things like ethical discussions about who should you interview or what's fair to say, what questions are fair, whose perspectives do you need to make a story full and robust. They were coming in with real fresh ideas and strong opinions, and I think it was a good chance for me to also come into the field with fresh eyes too. Marilyn Thomsen: So where did you go next? Leah Donnella: So, after that, I went to the team that I am currently on. So I went to NPR to work as an intern for the Code Switch team, which tells stories about race and identity and culture, which was kind of a natural fit I think because that team is also kind of trying to reimagine some of the norms and standards that were kind of taken as a given in journalism about objectivity and distance and how you should tell a story. So it was a soft landing in some ways. It was a hard landing in some ways because I did not know what I was doing. There were a lot of basic things that I hadn't learned yet, but it was [inaudible 00:05:29]. Marilyn Thomsen: And you're an editor? Leah Donnella: Yes. Marilyn Thomsen: How did you learn how to do that? Leah Donnella: So I think I started editing before I knew that that's what I was doing. And part of it was... I think one of the qualities that's helpful in an editor is when you just can't let things go. And so we would on that team get in discussions about different things, and someone would make a mostly good point. And I was always the one in the meetings being like, "Yeah, but what about this thing? What about this exception? Or what about what if this thing were different? Or that word is close, but I feel like it's not quite right," which is a very annoying habit, interpersonally, but is useful, I think, in helping people really get to the most precise argument that they're trying to get to or really figure out what is this story? What are we trying to do with it? What are we trying to say? And I think telling race stories in particular, because it's such a sensitive and controversial topic in a lot of ways, the language is really, really important. And even just the difference between a hyphen or not hyphen in certain cases or capitalizing words or not capitalizing them or using a close word and the right word can make such a difference and can have a different reaction. So yeah, I think I was naturally sort of drawn to asking those questions, and then people were like, "Well, you're doing this already. You might as well be editing officially." Travis Khachato...: So editing is different in terms of if you're talking print or audio or TV. Can you explain a little bit about what it means from a radio perspective? Leah Donnella: Yeah, so I think there are sort of three stages of it for my role. The first is figuring out what an idea is because, I think, there are so many different ways you can tell any given story, and you can focus on different people or different contexts. And for a lot of the work we do, it's like, "Are we starting in this thing happened yesterday, or are we starting in, this thing happened 400 years ago, and that led to this thing." So I think, yeah, part one is figuring out what is the story we're trying to tell and why does it matter? Because we're very much kind of driven by the philosophy that you can't just present information. You have to give people the context and the history and the research that they need to help understand what to do with it and how to process it. So there's that part, the early story shaping. And then there's the part in the middle where it's like, "All right, we've done all this reporting, we have all this work. Is this actually telling the story we thought it would? And then how do we put it together to make it land in the most effective way?" And then there's just the craft part of it where someone will submit a script or a draft of something, and you go through it. In different stages there's the read something once for the whole thing, like the message, and then read it for the lines, and then read it for the words, and then read it for the commas and going through them with each stage and just trying to get things as clean and precise and effective as possible. Marilyn Thomsen: How did your Pomona major contribute to your career? Leah Donnella: Oh my gosh, so many ways. So I was in Africana studies major, and I genuinely think that's the best major you could have. And really I feel like I kind of lucked into it, but I think those classes, it's interdisciplinary. So I was in English classes, politics classes, sociology, music, art, all kinds of different things. But one of the throughlines in all of the classes was kind of looking at how identity and power shape things that happen in the world. That's a really broad way of saying it. But I think one of the other parts of the conversations were always about how nothing is a given, nothing is... There are a lot of things that get presented in the world as facts or as set in stone or very definite. And those classes were all about unpacking those things and saying, "Whose perspective is this actually coming from? Who is this benefiting?" And so, yeah, I think everything that was taught in those classes has been a huge, huge tool for journalism because it's being able to look at something with different eyes and being like, "What are the different elements of this? And how might someone in a different position see this story differently or experience this story differently, or be affected by this story differently?" So yeah. Marilyn Thomsen: Tell us about some of the stories that you've reported that are really memorable for you. The topics are so broad-ranging. Leah Donnella: Oh, gosh. Yeah. I think some of the stories that I love the most have been ones that feel like they are very immediate for people, like hit people's lives really directly. So I remember years ago, we got a question from someone about how to decolonize their beauty routine. And I loved that question, and I loved getting to report it and tell stories through that question because it's such an... someone's beauty routine is such an everyday part of their life, and you walk out the door every day, and you're thinking about what you're wearing, what you look like, how people are going to interact with you based on that thing. Marilyn Thomsen: Mm-hmm. Leah Donnella: And so it's like you can do things to feel good and feel comfortable in your own skin, whatever that means, but you're also trying to imagine every person you encounter and how they're going to interact with you and what they're going to think. So you wind up... I don't know, it was a cool way to think about how you wind up developing this sort of sense of, I don't know if empathy is the right word, but you have to get into other people's heads when you're trying to imagine how you want to look because you're like, "What are they going to think?" So yeah, it just wound up being a really layered and complicated kind of answer to a question that I think affects everyone. Everyone thinks about... Whether they conceptualize it as beauty or not, everyone thinks about how other people are going to respond to their appearance and has to make judgment calls about how they're going to present and what that means about where they can go and who they can talk to and all those things. So, yeah. Travis Khachato...: Well, that's why I think Code Switch is such a meaningful and interesting project. I mean, you're really covering stories and news and from perspectives that are typically glossed over or not even talked about on the mainstream media. And I was hoping maybe you could kind of go back a little bit and talk about what Code Switch is and who it's for, and what you guys are doing there. Leah Donnella: Yeah. So very basically, Code Switch is a program about race, identity, and culture. And I think the premise is essentially that race affects every aspect of our lives, our politics, the way people interact with each other, the way our self-esteem develops, the way our social relationships develop. But it's also something that people are often really afraid of talking about or can fall into just really stereotypical ideas about what it means to belong to a certain race or to interact with people from a certain background or whatever. So the mission is kind of to unpack some of those difficult conversations, and bring people in, and make people feel invested and they have stakes. Everyone has stakes in this conversation because it can be very high stakes. I think the show is meant for a few different audiences. So we want people who are traditionally underrepresented in the news and media to feel like their voices are more represented and reflected. But we also want everyone who listens to feel both reflected and challenged. So I don't think anyone... I think we're failing if people listen to the show and they just feel like, "Oh yeah, that's like... that's me." I want them to think that's me and maybe I should be thinking about my life differently or how I'm implicated in this discussion differently. Travis Khachato...: Well, when you talk about decolonizing beauty routines, I mean that's something that I've never heard of or thought about. I mean, do you feel like you're on the front of something different that's happening in the media? Leah Donnella: On good days, yeah. I think there's a tension sometimes because I think when you're focused on race, it's very easy and important, but very easy to kind of get trapped by whatever tragedy of the day is happening or scandal of the day. And there is never a shortage of something awful happening that was racially motivated or some political scandal or any number of things that it's like, "Okay, this happened. We have to talk about it." And that, again, I think is important, but it also feels very reactive because once something like that has already happened, it feels like we're almost too late. What is there to say about when someone makes a racist remark? Or when someone commits an act of racist violence, what is there to say at that point? And so, on good days, it feels like we can be more agenda-setting and kind of think more holistically. And on bad days, it's like, "No, we have to revisit this same conversation over and over again about why these things happen and what feeds them," which is... can be grueling. Travis Khachato...: Mm-hmm. Marilyn Thomsen: And then you meet some really interesting people. I learned that you had gone to Hawaii and met with people that were working on making sure that the Hawaiian language was still part of culture there. Leah Donnella: Yeah. That was fascinating and so cool because that movement to preserve the Hawaiian language was really interesting history. I mean, one of the things that I did not know five years ago probably is that with some amazing frequency, the last speaker of a language dies, I don't know, every three weeks. I would not... Marilyn Thomsen: Oh, my. Really? Leah Donnella: I'm not sure about- Marilyn Thomsen: Wow. Leah Donnella: ... the numbers, but it's rapid, and there's... the number of languages that are spoken in the world is shrinking very rapidly. And that was the case with Hawaiian for quite some time, that the number of speakers was every year just becoming shrinking. And so this group of people who were part of a generation where their parents or their grandparents maybe spoke Hawaiian, but they didn't. And part of that was because of colonization and because they had been very encouraged to speak English and only to speak English so that they could be... The thought was that they would be more successful in schools. They would be able to assimilate more into broader American culture. And so this language started dying, and this generation of people did something I think incredible is that they learned Hawaiian as adults and then made the decision that they were going to only speak Hawaiian in their households and they were only... they were going to teach their children Hawaiian as a first language, which as someone who has many times tried to learn different languages and struggles a lot with that- Marilyn Thomsen: It's challenging. Leah Donnella: ... it's challenging. And to make the decision, "I'm going to stop speaking my native language, my first language, and I'm going to only speak this language that I learned as an adult and only teach it to my kids, and they cannot communicate with me in another language," I mean, that's just kind of... Marilyn Thomsen: That's dedication. Leah Donnella: It's dedication. And it's like commitment to something bigger than yourself in a way that feels... I don't know. It just felt so powerful to me to make that decision and to be able to stick with it. And now there are these incredible schools that teach primarily in Hawaiian and this whole generation of kids who speak Hawaiian and have their own slang that didn't exist in Hawaiian 10 years ago because they're inventing it. They're like, as any generation of kids, has their own slang and their own languages. So it's really cool. It's really amazing. Marilyn Thomsen: You recently spent, was it six months, as an above the Fray Fellow- Leah Donnella: That's right. Marilyn Thomsen: ... doing something really interesting. Tell us about that. Leah Donnella: So I was reporting in Tennessee, and I was interviewing people who are Black immigrants, which just to give them a bit of background. So there was a study that came out recently that said, "Now 10% of Black Americans were born in another country," which is a huge shift if you think back even to the 1980s, that was closer to 2% of Black Americans, and now it's 10%. 10% of Black Americans are immigrants, another 10% are the children of immigrants. So that's- Marilyn Thomsen: It's a lot. Leah Donnella: ... a big change, big demographic change. And that's projected to be changing even more in the next 30 years. Marilyn Thomsen: Primarily immigrating from what parts of the world. Leah Donnella: So this is a change too, because again, if you look back, let's say, like 50 years, most Black immigrants were from the Caribbean, and that's still the case, but an increasing number are coming from countries in Africa, and that's now the fastest growing change in Black immigrants. And most Black immigrants who come to the US, regionally speaking, are now living in the South. And Tennessee is one of the states with the fastest growing populations. Marilyn Thomsen: Oh. One of the things that you wrote about in your work coming out of your fellowship was the immigrant experience in getting a driver's license. Leah Donnella: Oh yeah. Marilyn Thomsen: How did you find that as a story? Leah Donnella: From talking to people, because I was doing these long interviews with people about all kinds of things, did not occur to me to ask about driving. Tennessee is a very... a place that people drive. There's a lot of things that are spread out, and it's a very car-centric state, and so many people were talking about things that were hard when they first got to the US, and it came up over and over again how hard it is to get a driver's license if you don't speak English or Spanish. And there are other states regionally nearby that offer a bunch of different languages that you can take the learner's permit test in or the driver's license test in, but Tennessee has a relatively limited number of languages. If you can't get a driver's license, you can't go to work. You can't go to school. In so many cases, you are basically stuck where you are. So it just kind of came up naturally in the course of many conversations. Travis Khachato...: Are there topics that you're hoping to look into in the future or future projects that you're pitching that you're like, "Okay, I've covered this, but I want to expand upon it on this?" Leah Donnella: I think one of my fascinations right now is AI and how race and AI intersect because AI has had different names, and technology has always been a part of how we live our lives and algorithms and different things. I have already been intersecting with race and human bias in all kinds of ways for many years, but I think now that that's becoming even more of a prominent conversation I'm really interested in both how we're seeing AI kind of reflect the different racial, both biases and also just kind of categories that we already have created, but also how people can intentionally think about programming things ahead of time to try and protect against those biases. Or if there are ways to kind of program anti-racism into technologies that are being created, I think it has to happen from the beginning of programming something, right. You can't do it on the backend, or it's less effective if you're doing it on the backend once you've seen the problems that have already been replicated or created. But I think that's going to be an increasingly huge area of research and study, and I'm really interested in what's going to come from that. Travis Khachato...: Yeah, I have an interesting anecdote actually about that subject. Leah Donnella: Please. Travis Khachato...: Because I'm a photographer, and it has the autofocus, where it locks onto people's faces, and it has a hard time locking onto Black people's faces. It'll always move over to the white person. And I don't know if that's just my camera being racist or if it's just inside of the program. So that's an interesting topic that AI and the structures of technology are being built right now. Marilyn Thomsen: Yeah. Wow. Five or 10 years from now, can you think of a story that's going to stick in your mind, someone that you've met, something that you've reported that you just won't forget? Leah Donnella: There was a couple that I met in Memphis, and they were refugees. One of them was from Tanzania, the other was from [inaudible 00:23:54]. And I was talking to them, and they were pretty self-conscious about speaking English, and there wasn't a lot that they were willing to talk about. But one of the questions that this woman brought up and asked, she was like, "I'm so grateful to be in the US. I'm happy to be in a place that's safe and all these opportunities," and kind of the story that a lot of people tell of gratitude, wonderful. And then she was like, "I have a question for you. I don't understand. In a country that is as rich as the United States, why is there so much homelessness? Why can't you find a solution for this?" She was saying that she cries every day just seeing the situations people are in, and she doesn't understand it. And I think that was one of those just reminders I think that it's easy to get accustomed to the way things are, and it's easy to not even see things or just normalize them. And hearing that experience of someone who was coming in and she had been coming from a refugee camp where there were a lot of issues and a lot of difficult things that she was dealing with, and she was like, "What are you guys doing? How are you letting this happen?" And I think about that a lot, and I think about why am I not crying when I see that? What are all the things that we've become kind of immune to? I don't know. Marilyn Thomsen: Does that impact how you see the mission of a journalist today? Leah Donnella: Yeah. Because I think one of the missions of journalism is to call attention to things that are unacceptable, that are being accepted, and I think that's a really obvious one. I think there are lots of ways that people have of convincing themselves that things can't change or that it would be politically or socially too complex to deal with an issue. And I think one of the jobs of journalists is to say, "Don't look away from this. Don't accept this. These things are happening, and we have to grapple with them. We have to demand something happen." I mean, I think one of... probably any journalist is inspired by Ida B. Wells, who made her whole career around documenting lynchings that had happened in the country and drawing attention to that. I think it's the kind of thing that once it's done, and once people have written about it and talked about it and done that reporting, it's easy to say, "Oh, things were always going to change. This was always going to play out that way." But of course not. Of course, that didn't have to happen. And she was doing very dangerous, very life-threatening work to draw attention to that. So yeah. Travis Khachato...: Just the weight of the topics that you just talk about during your journalistic career, I'm curious, has that made you more of a pessimist or an optimist for the future? Leah Donnella: I think I go back and forth. I think, in a big-picture way, I am probably a pessimist. But then I think talking to... I really cannot think of a time that I've had a conversation with someone like a one-on-one long actual conversation or interview with someone where I didn't feel somehow inspired or moved or challenged or something by what they said. Marilyn Thomsen: Tell us about one of the people you found inspiring. Leah Donnella: Gosh, there are so many people. I think there was a woman I spoke to. This was in Knoxville, Tennessee, and she basically had to flee her country as a teenager. She was fleeing gang violence. She was from Honduras, a Black woman, and she was telling me a very, very long detailed story about kind of some of the things she'd lived through and survived. But somehow, throughout that whole story, we were also laughing and joking, and she was just... I don't know if this phrase makes sense, but she just seemed so dense with life and with the desire to be alive and to be taking it in and find joy and interest. And she was so... she had all this stuff that she wanted to research. She wanted to... She had read about this plantation in, I think, Louisiana, and she was like, "I want to visit that because I want to learn about what people experienced there." And she had her kids with her, and her kids were just so laughing and happy, and I think... Marilyn Thomsen: Like she was fully alive. Leah Donnella: Fully alive and fully not closing her eyes to anything. She was naming some really, again, horrific things that she had lived through and experienced. And there was no kind of avoiding that or no kind of writing it off. It was just integrated into this richer experience. And I think everyone has that. Everyone has really hard things that they've lived through and really wonderful things that they experience every day, but I think it can feel hard to accept both of those things at the same time. And so hearing her and seeing her kind of do that was, yeah, I don't know. It was meaningful. Marilyn Thomsen: When you left Pomona, could you have imagined the path your life has taken? Leah Donnella: No. I think no is the easy answer. But I will say I think Pomona was a place where it fostered having that kind of conversation with people, and I think it's, you're what, 18, 19 and going through a lot. And I think that being at Pomona was both more wonderful and eye-opening and more difficult than I ever could have expected, more emotionally wrought and socially difficult than I could have expected. But I think, because of those things, it was just like you got really deep with people and got to talk about things in a way that, probably now, I would feel ashamed of being so open or being so like I am vulnerable about certain things. But it was a space where that could happen in a lot of ways. Travis Khachato...: We're in the start of a new school year. I've been talking with quite a few new first-year students, and I was actually surprised quite a bit of them were actually expressing interest in pursuing journalism. What would you tell somebody who's interested at Pomona in pursuing your line of work? Leah Donnella: I think the best advice I would be able to give is learn about things that aren't journalism. Because the actual learning how to do journalism, learning how to work a camera or the technical aspects of it, you can learn. Those things are hard and skillful, but you can learn them. But this is such a great time to also just learn about such a random assortment of things and take classes that are going to introduce you to things that you might never think about. Again, I mean, I remember so many classes I was in where I was like, this is about 14th-century French women musicians. It was cool class, but it was not at all something that I thought was going to shape my career. But there are still things that I learned in that class that I'm like, "That's more meaningful to me as a journalist to have been thinking about things in that way than any thing about how to structure an article or how to make a podcast." Travis Khachato...: Well, Leah, thank you so much for coming on the Sagecast. You've lived quite an interesting life so far. So I know I speak for both of us when we say we're- Marilyn Thomsen: Absolutely. Travis Khachato...: ... going to be watching- Marilyn Thomsen: ... absolutely. Travis Khachato...: ... what you produce next. So thank you so much. Leah Donnella: [inaudible 00:32:41] thank you for having me. Marilyn Thomsen: [inaudible 00:32:42] so much. This is great. Appreciate it. Leah Donnella: Thank you. Marilyn Thomsen: And that's a wrap. We've been talking with Leah Donnella Pomona class of 2013, now part of the NPR Code Switch team. Travis Khachato...: You're listening to Sagecast, the podcast of Pomona College. Thanks to our audio engineer, Erica Tyron, and KSBC for hosting this conversation. Join us next time.