BOSTON — The door closes behind me and I slip $1 into one slot and 50 cents into another. I’m on the #28 bus heading to Dudley Square. Many residents of Boston’s Black and Latino neighborhoods who use mass transit each day pass through that historic depot. The station, among the city’s oldest, is located at the heart of those communities, and all area buses — like the road to Damascus — lead there.
 
The problem with elevated rail
 
Beginning in 1901, Dudley was the main stop for direct train access in Boston. Like Chicago’s famous "L," the Orange Line traveled above the city on an elevated rail line until it was torn down in 1987 and moved to the Southwest Corridor. It’s what happened after that that has made so many people in Boston’s minority neighborhoods question the fairness of mass transit policy.

Those questions are the subject of a recent documentary titled Equal or Better: The Story of the Silver Line, by Kris Carter. The film maintains that a promise was made to replace the old Orange Line with equal or better transportation options. But the service that replaced the elevated T was a bus, the Silver Line, which can take more than half an hour to get downtown. The elevated rail got you there in 10 minutes.
 
However … “elevated rail in a city cuts the city in half," said systems expert John Sterman of MIT’s Sloan School of Management. “This was the problem with the old elevated rail in Boston and the old elevated highway for cars, and we have a much better environment now that that elevated railway is gone.” Sterman is a member of MIT’s newly created transportation initiative, which was formed to explore innovative ways of improving public transportation.
 
“Even though it’s cheaper to throw up some steel and put the train up overhead, there’s a lot of social costs to that,” Sterman said. The old elevated rail line also literally cast a permanent shadow over houses and business along Washington Street.
 
Arriving at Dudley at rush hour, Camera Core said though she’s not all that nostalgic about the old elevated train, it was easier and more reliable getting back and forth from downtown than buses. “It’s just always late,” she said as her bus finally pulled into the station.
 
Alejandra St. Guillen leads the Massachusetts Latino Civic Education Organization from offices just blocks from Dudley. She asked, “Why can’t we go underground in the places that are really crowded and come up for each stop, which would facilitate the traffic and really allow for direct access in town instead of having to take two buses or take the bus and the Silver Line, which is really just another bus?”
 
Getting to the workplace, whether urban or suburban
 
Marilyn Swartz Lloyd heads up MASCO, the Medical Academic Scientific Community Organization. She said Latino and Black activists in Boston have long pointed out a disconnect between minority neighborhoods and historic transportation policy, and that with cutbacks in service it is more important than ever to ask questions.
 
“How do you get people to work in their neighborhoods to the larger areas like the Financial District and the Longwood area, so that they have jobs and so that it takes them as short a period of time as people who are going on the direct spokes on the wheel?" she said. "You have to have more transportation that ties the spokes together and I think that it's particularly true in the Longwood area, where the highest population of our workers are from Dorchester and Roxbury.”
 
As many as 104,000 workers, students, patients and vendors pour into Longwood each day. According to MASCO, about 20 percent of employees who work in the medical district would be affected by cutbacks, including the elimination of two bus routes.
 
But it’s not just downtown Boston and inner-city job centers like Longwood that are dealing with how to get their workers to their desks, stations or machines.
 
Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson wrote the seminal book When Work Disappears. He said there is a mismatch between many new jobs — which are in the suburbs — and the people who need them most.
 
“80 percent of the entry-level jobs are located in the suburbs," he said. "And, therefore, a lot of people really depend on transportation to get to the jobs. The lack of feasible transportation, however, exacerbates this mismatch because the lack of transportation options not only increases reliance on automobiles, it also makes it difficult, very difficult, for those without cars — particularly inner-city residents — to get to suburban jobs.”
 
That’s a catch-22. You might say, “Well, there is commuter rail.” But most MBTA rail service was set up to get suburbanites into and out of the city and not the other way around.
 
Searching for solutions
 
“The Brookings Institution actually did a big study last year and they specifically looked at how well the transit system served jobs," said Stephanie Pollack of the Kitty and Michael Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern University. "And we weren’t .the best and we weren’t the worse. We were in the middle of the pack.”
 
Even so, it’s going to take some major planning to alter the way we think about transportation and jobs, especially as it affects the poor and minorities, she said. “So we need to both make the transit system better serve the places where jobs are and where people are who need those jobs, and we need to change land use policy so that we make sure that when we’re locating new jobs in the region we put them in places that folks can get to on transit.”
 
Swartz Lloyd and others are calling on companies — public and private — to step up efforts to provide transportation to and from transit stations for workers and job seekers without the means to get to those jobs. “I think just like the private systems are working to pick people up from train stations and at subway stops, there may be some way that we can all interconnect as well,” she said.
 
It’s estimated that companies to subsidize the cost of transportation for their workers are spending as much as $40 million. Waiting for a bus, commuter Sean Walker said that’s the only way he could afford the rising costs of getting back and forth from his home near Ashmont Station to his job: “I got a pass for both the bus and the train, so it’s about 60 bucks.”
 
But he’s still dealing with the lingering problem of time. He works near Symphony Hall and lives near Ashmont Station in Dorchester. “It takes me overall an hour," he lamented. "In some areas if you don’t catch [a bus], another won’t come for half an hour to 45 minutes. “
 
Alternatives to the bus
 
African Americans, Latinos, Cape Verdeans and Haitians are heavily dependent on bus service. MBTA ridership is estimated at around 400,000 per weekday, with the heaviest passenger concentrations in Roxbury, Mattapan and Dorchester.
 
Boston city councilor Charles Yancey is lauding a joint MBTA and community plan to provide minority commuters more direct rail access, getting them from Mattapan to downtown in 20 minutes rather than 60. “It’s called the Fairmount Line, which runs right through the heart of the communities of color from the Newmarket down to Mattapan Square,“ he said.
 
The crown jewel of that plan is a new station that will be located off Blue Hill Avenue near the Cummings Bridge. The station will include a modern platform with wind screens and a message board announcing train arrivals.
 
“I also believe that we should improve the connections with Dudley Square and ultimately in the future we should have a Green Line–type of LRV type of operation running from Dudley Street all the way downtown," Yancey said.
 
Still, for those who rely on buses to get home, to school, to work or in search of employment, the amount of time it takes to get there leaves many frustrated. Some on that day passing through Dudley Station thought back to the time when the elevated trains pulled up to the platform and headed downtown. It was not the best system, but it was faster.
 

At 7:00 p.m. on "Greater Boston": Danroy Henry Sr. reacts to the new information.

BOSTON — More previously classified documents have been published relative to the police killing of an Easton, Mass. college student in October 2010 in a New York suburb. The first batch provides a mixed, indeed contradictory picture of what happened. 

From the beginning, the Pleasantville and Mt. Pleasant, N.Y., police departments claimed Danroy "DJ" Henry Jr., 20, tried to run down officer Aaron Hess in a strip mall parking lot. The witness statements were compiled by the police and the evidence was presented to a New York grand jury last year, which chose not to indict Hess and officer Ronald Beckley. Lawyers for the Henry family have questioned the diligence in which the Westchester County defense attorney's office presented this case to the grand jury.

This, again, is how the case began: Police were called to the bar after a fight broke out between a bouncer and a patron on Oct. 17, 2010. By all accounts, the disturbance had nothing to do with Henry and his four friends. The owner of the bar called for everyone to get out. Henry, the designated driver, went to the parking lot to retrieve his car and pulled into a fire lane in front of the bar. 

From there, the accounts splinter.

The official police interview with Brandon Cox is part of the documents released this week. According to the police transcript, a police officer tapped on the window; as Henry drove out of the fire lane, an officer jumped out in front of the car, drew his gun and fired. Read the interview.

In a document made public this week, a policeman who responded to the scene and who said he grew up with Hess, signed a witness statement that reads, "I then saw Officer Aaron Hess step out in the road and put his left hand up and his right hand on his gun as the Altima was coming towards him. I also heard Officer Cox yell at least three times for the car to stop. I then heard the Altima accelerating as it approached Officer Hess. There's no way the driver did not see Officer Hess."

But in the police interview, Cox said the car's windows were fogged up by condensation. Yet another deposition, by a witness named Robert Coulombe, said that Henry's "driving posed no imminent danger."

> > Read Coulombe's version of events.

In a press briefing with reporters on Monday, Michael Sussman, the attorney for the family, disputed the characterization of who struck whom, saying that Hess jumped out in front of the car. In addition, one statement by Beckley seemed to say that he considered the primary threat to be the shooter, not the driver.

The documents include a video showing Henry, handcuffed and seriously injured, lying face down on the street. According to the attorney's caption, “although told by the EMT initially that DJ had expired, a police officer eventually checks DJ, and realizes that he is seriously wounded and still alive. Treatment begins only at that point."

Adding to the confusion was police chatter, captured in audio released Monday, that mischaracterized the police emergency. It was Henry who lay dying on the ground from gun shot wounds. The officer down was Hess resulting from coming in contact with the car. 

Lawyers for the Henry family say they will post more documents, including 911 calls, over the next few days. Read the documents.

BOSTON — Eyes and ears are on video tapes and 911 calls this week: sights and sounds that may add understanding to how a college student from Easton, Mass., was shot dead by a Westchester County, N.Y., police officer. Check out the documents.

At 11:15 a.m. on Monday, previously unavailable documents related to the shooting of DJ Henry were made available to the public. The Pace University student, who graduated from Oliver Ames High School, was shot and killed in front of a popular college hangout in Thornwood, N.Y., in October 2010 by Pleasantville, N.Y., police officer Aaron Hess. Hess said that Henry tried to run him over and he fired his weapon in self-defense. Hess and a fellow policeman were cleared by a New York grand jury. 
 
The Henry family sued in federal court to have the documents that had been suppressed in the case made public. The investigative file was compiled by the Mt. Pleasant and Pleasantville police and contains hundreds of individual items, including 911 calls, video and witness statements. A federal judge in White Plains last week ruled that a confidentially order should be lifted.

The 911 audio purports to demonstrate Hess discussing his own physical condition and stating that he is OK. However, the video embedded above, according to the attorney for the family, Michael Sussman, shows medical crews tending to Hess but not Henry, who was pulled from his car onto the street after he was shot. Other documents, according to Sussman, include evidence that a dash camera from a police cruiser was purposely disabled, as well as witness affidavits alleging that Hess drew his gun prior to impact with the vehicle driven by Henry. The file further contains confirmation of deadly force training and standard operating procedures for Mt. Pleasant and Pleasantville police departments that strongly prohibit firing at a moving vehicle.

Sussman said at a Mar. 12 press conference that the attorneys would continue to release materials. He declined, however, to give many opinions on those materials: "I am not going to try this case in the media. I am giving you information which is relevant to questions many of you have asked since October of 2010 — rates of speed of the car, was [Hess'] gun out when he came into the street and numerous, numerous other questions. I am not going to interpret the information except in a court.”

Robert Johnson, a lawyer involved in one of eight civil cases related to the Henry shooting, said in an interview with WGBH News that this case has national and constitutional significance. He believed that the 13^th amendment would weigh heavily in the federal civil rights trail, which Sussman says is quite a ways off. The Henry family was scheduled to meet with Justice Department lawyers on Monday.

> > Read WGBH's complete coverage of the DJ Henry case and the issues it raises about race and policing.

 
BOSTON — A federal judge ruled Thursday afternoon that the family of Danroy "DJ" Henry has the right to see surveillance tapes taken on the night of Henry's death. Since October 2010, WGBH has been reporting on the shooting death of the Easton, Massachusetts student. Henry's father said information may be available as early as Friday.

On Oct. 17, 2010, Henry was killed in a hail of bullets fired by police officer Aaron Hess and another officer in Thornwood, N.Y., a village in the town of Mt. Pleasant. Hess said he believed his life was in danger. In the aftermath of the incident, the Westchester Country district attorney's office collected videotapes from various businesses throughout the mall where the shooting took place. The DA’s office, citing the prerogatives of the investigation, declined to share the content with the family or its lawyers even after a grand jury did not criminally indict the two officers involved. 

What is on the videotapes has been a constant question. 

A spokesman for the Westchester County DA’s office said months ago that there is nothing incriminating on the tapes. So why did the office fight to hold on to them? Those questions may now be answered with a ruling on Thursday by a federal judge that the videotapes must now be handed over to the family.

At the hearing, Henry attorney Michael Sussman argued for access during the process of discovery in the civil suit launched by the Henry family. The confidentiality order had prohibited all sides in the civil rights lawsuits from distributing key documents and videos related to the shooting. 

In addition to the videotapes, the lifting of the order means that the family will also have access to 911 calls, police radio transmissions and more than 100 witness statements pertinent to the shooting. Sussman said evidence could be available for public review as soon as Friday. He also said that the evidence would show that “the shooting lacked any possible justification.”

The Henry family is seeking $120 million in damages and more detailed answers from the police department about the circumstances that led to the death of their son. Theirs is one of eight lawsuits filed in this case. On Monday, the family will meet with U.S. Justice Department lawyers to discuss the progress of the federal investigation into the case.
 
 

 
BOSTON — As Barack Obama runs for a second term, academics have gathered at Tufts for their third conference assessing his presidency.
 
History professor Peniel Joseph said that Obama has become an international symbol of African American achievement even though "if anything, he's been reluctant to dip his toe into race matters." 
 
Still, Joseph wondered whether the symbol can pull together a strong enough coalition to keep the presidency this year, asking, "Is 'hope and change' dead on arrival in 2012?"
 
The conference marks the creation of a new multidisciplinary center at the university that will study questions of race and politics year-round. "Race and democracy are really two of the most pressing issues for the 21st century globally," Joseph said, playing a role in everything from the Arab Spring to the success in Boston of city councilor Ayanna Pressley.
 
In addition, Tufts is launching an Africana studies major — something many universities created in the 1970s. "Top, elite institutions … they all offer degrees in Africana Studies so in a way we were behind the curve," Joseph said.
 
WGBH News' Phillip Martin is a panelist at the conference Saturday morning, discussing civic engagement and media in the Obama age.

> > LISTEN: Race, democracy and a new center at Tufts on "The Emily Rooney Show."

Imani Rice, 16, found a job at the Dorchester Bay Youth Force, but many of her peers are still looking. (Cristina Quinn/WGBH)

 
BRAINTREE, Mass. — It's school vacation week, and at South Shore Plaza in Braintree, teens are everywhere. But contrary to what you might think, they're not all just hanging out. Some are looking for a job — with no success.

“I’ve been trying for like two years. I got one interview, that was it. No one will take a teenager,” one teen said.

Another said, "I've been applying at Shaw's, PriceRite, Burger King, McDonalds, but I’m not getting any reply from them. I’ve been going like every single day to check up and all that."

And a third: “I’ve been looking for a few months now. Basically anywhere, like anywhere that’s hiring, I go in. I talk to the managers. But still no job.”

Teens between the ages of 16 and 19 are in a jobs depression. Add race to the mix, and it’s nothing short of an epidemic. And it has long-term ramifications: Lack of work experience in the teen years reduces future employability and earnings.

Upstairs in the food court, Ashley Registre of Randolph sat at a table with her friend Amber. Registre was filling out a job application for a retail clothing store in the mall. It's not her first job application. She listed them off: "Hollister, Abercrombie, Aéropostale, PS Aéropostale, Baby Gap, Children’s Place. Dunkin' Donuts, McDonalds, Stop & Shop … there’s more."

The scope of the problem

Registre is one of many black teenagers looking for work. While the national teen unemployment rate overall is at 24 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the jobless rate for black teens is at 42 percent. Economist Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University, said even that figure may be coming up short.

"A lot of the household surveys that are done when the child isn’t working are with the mother rather than with the child. And what we find when we compare those answers is that there’s a lot more kids that want to work than their moms will admit," Sum said. "So the unemployment rate, as bad as it is, is substantially underestimated, particularly for low-income minority kids." 

> > READ: The center's report on summer jobs for teens in 2011 (pdf)

Income plays a major role in the results. The statistics show that if parents make good money, their teenage kids have a better shot at working part-time. But if teens are part of families making less than $20,000, finding a job is an agonizing long shot.

Only 6 to 7 percent of low-income black and Hispanic high school students work, Sum said. "And if you’re a high-income white high school student, 33 out of 100 work." Why is that? "Part of it is because low-income youths are often living in neighborhoods where there’s not a good job network."

Hiring who you know

Networking is the magic word here, and when it comes to finding a job, sometimes it all comes down to who you know. Maybe you got your first part-time job through your parents, a family friend or a neighbor. But when a teen doesn’t have those connections, he or she is left with the three markets that historically employ teens: food service, retail, and the arts entertainment industry (e.g., movie theaters).

Back at the mall, Ashley and Amber wondered aloud if they haven't been getting hired because they’re black.

"Most of my white friends or mixed friends, they all have jobs, and us—we don’t have jobs. Every store I’ve been in, I hardly ever see a black person," said Amber, who asked that we not use her last name. She didn't think it was because of racism. "I mean, I know there’s racism out there. But I think it’s more like they have the look for it to represent our store. And their personality could be awful, but they have 'the look.'"

It may not be overt racism when it comes to the hiring practices of businesses, but Sum said people are more inclined to hire people with whom they’re most familiar. So if the hiring manager at a clothing store or supermarket doesn’t know you or your neighborhood, it’s possible that that person may hire someone from his town or someone whom he identifies with more.

"When you get people in personnel and HR who know the community, what you find is they are much more likely to recruit and hire kids from the community," he said. "When they lack that connection to the community, what you find is they tend not to recruit from the inner city. So it’s not direct, but it has the effect of excluding you from consideration."

When a teenager doesn’t have a network to begin with and is excluded for reasons that lie in the subconscious of a potential employer, what’s left? Where does that teen go?

A coalition for jobs

Imani Rice is a junior at John D. O’Bryant High School in Roxbury. For the past year, she’s been spending her afternoons working at Dorchester Bay Youth Force in Upham’s Corner. The Youth Force is a leading member of the statewide Youth Jobs Coalition, which helps teens find jobs. "Right now, we’re targeting the private sector. We’re targeting places like hospitals, banks, private industries," she said.

At 16 years old, Rice is more poised than most kids her age. She credited her job as a community organizer for her self-confidence.

"Last year, when I wasn’t doing anything, I was, like, more lazy. This job helped me with my presentation skills. It just made me a better leader. So now I use the skills I learned here in my school. I went from like — let’s not even talk about that" — she said, laughing — "but I went from bad to honor roll. And I'm maintaining honor roll."

The Youth Jobs Coalition serves as a broker for teens who have no network when seeking out a job. Staff members reach out to businesses that don’t typically hire high school kids.

Boston Neighborhood Network, Feb. 24, 2012: Teens Rally for Summer Job Support

Progress, eight jobs at a time

The coalition recently convinced a Dorchester hospital to take on teenagers. Rice and other kids from the Youth Force presented their case to Carney Hospital president Bill Walczak as to why he should hire teens this summer.

"We asked him if he’d commit to eight jobs, and he did, which is really great," Rice said, snapping her fingers. "It’s a win."

Walczak also thinks it’s a win.

"The health care system is 18 percent of the jobs in Boston. We need to grow the next generation of employees. And the way to do that is to introduce them as early as possible to opportunities, so they can learn how to be good workers," he said.

As for keeping the teen employees after the summer, Walczak was open to the idea. However, he said, "We’ll have to see what happens within the health care system. As you know, there are lots of cuts that are going down, especially for safety-net institutions like the Carney Hospital, so we have to evaluate what we can do."

In the meantime, Rice said: Keep looking.

"Just keep an extra eye out," she said. "There are flyers out there that you may not pay attention to. Ask a friend, ask a teacher, ask a guidance counselor. Even ask a librarian. Because there are great programs out there like this one that will help you."

Rice herself might be proof of the possibilities.  As she said, "Don’t settle for the retail and the Stop & Shop and the movie theater jobs when you can have a great job like this one!"

In Boston, Latinos comprise 17.5 percent of the population — a major potential voting bloc. Garcia said that even Latinos who don't vote tend to be very civically active.
 
"The fact that we don't vote doesn't mean that we're not going to have an influence in people that actually vote. So, the more that we talk about it, the more that we get involved, I think the numbers of Latino people that can vote is going to increase," she said.
 
Nationwide, 9.7 million Hispanic voters voted in the 2008 presidential election (source). That number is expected to grow significantly in years ahead, and contribute to a significant shift in political influence.
 
> > Extra: The National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials projects 12.2 million Latino voters this November.

CHARLESTOWN, Mass. — From the fifth-floor window of Henry Mahegan’s 10^th-grade classroom at Charlestown High, you can see the American flag flapping in the wind.

“This is called 'at half-mast,'” he explains to his students. “My question to you is: What does it mean when a flag is raised only halfway up the flagpole and what does it take to be honored in such a way?"
 
Mahegan, in his first full year of teaching history and civics, waits for an answer. The students use terms like “honor” and “respect.”
 
“That’s exactly it,” Mahegan says. Then he asks if anyone has heard of Kevin White.
 
“I heard about him in the newspaper,” says one girl, who is eager to speak.
 
White, whose presence dominated Boston politics for nearly three decades, registers in the minds of most of these 15- and 16-year-olds, but barely. So Mahegan presses on, projecting photos on a screen of buses lined up near Charlestown High School — the old building; the current structure was built in 1978, after three years of Boston's court-ordered school desegregation. The students say they've heard about what happened then.

Outside of the high school and several miles away, Ed Skeffington is recalling his experience 40 years ago. He was one of the white students waiting for black students to arrive by bus from Roxbury and Mattapan in September 1975. He used to roam the halls of the old Charlestown High, his neighborhood school. He lived two blocks away.
 
“I was never a violent protester. I was accused of that. I mean, lived right on the corner of Green and Bunker Hill Street when we were under martial law and I'd be right on my stairs," he says now. Police would tell him to move, and he would say he lived there.

Charlestown teacher Henry Mahegan. (Phillip Martin/WGBH)

"A lot of blacks didn't want to get on the bus and come over to Charlestown. And I know for a fact a lot of whites didn't want to go over there, and not because they were black and white, just because it was a different neighborhood."

In 1975, Skeffington had just completed the 10^th grade. “I didn’t know I was going to get bused until late August," he says. "So I left school, dropped out. Lost an education because of — probably Judge Garrity, is the main thing I would say.”
 
Skeffington was supposed to have been bused to Roxbury. And he holds federal judge Arthur Garrity responsible. Garrity passed away in 1999. As for the role of White, Skeffington says: "He was a puppet. It all come down to what Judge Garrity said. It was happening because Judge Garrity wanted it to happen. Mayor White, he had no control over it.”
 
Today, Skeffington in mid-life drives a truck for a meatpacking and poultry company. He’s a hard worker by all accounts but he often imagines what life would be like had he not dropped out of school in that first year of court-ordered desegregation.
 
“I probably would have finished high school, I’m pretty sure. I could've been, who knows, I could've been to college, I could've been an athlete in college. I could hit the ball better than anyone in the school probably,” he says.
 
Instead, he joined the Marines and got his GED.

Cathy Hennessey is Skeffington’s little sister. She was in elementary school at the time and school busing for her was altogether different: “I never had to get on the bus because I was allowed to go to my neighborhood school,” she says.
 
Hennessey was one of eight siblings growing up in various apartments and housing projects in Charlestown, which in 1975 became a symbol of white working-class resistance to desegregation.
 
“For one year, I went to school with other kids that came in from other parts of the city, and we became a group and the best of friends throughout years," she says. "And I’ve kept in contact with a lot of these people in my older years. But coming outside — it was two different worlds, inside the school and outside the school.”
 
And on this particular day inside Charlestown High School, dozens of students of various hues and tones pour into the hallways at the sound of the bell. Most come from across town. Only 10 percent of the high school’s nearly 800 students live in Charlestown.

 
Back in Mahegan’s class he picks up where he left off in teaching about the lessons of White, Garrity and the impact of court-ordered desegregation in Boston. Mahegan describes various incidents that accompanied busing in Charlestown in 1975 and beyond: the shooting of a black football player on the field, which left him paralyzed; attacks on black tourists at the Bunker Hill Monument; the dramatic dropout rate among white students like Skeffington.
 
One student asks: “Why did this happen?”
 
Forty years later, students — African Americans and Haitians, Chinese and Vietnamese, Irish Americans and Italian, Dominicans and Central Americans — find the details of the violence in and outside of Charlestown High almost unbelievable.
 
Mahegan has listened intently to the questions and the readings from his multiracial classroom. If anything, he finds that they are both curious about and bewildered by the era of court-ordered busing in this small, now-gentrified neighborhood. In the videos he showed the class, you could see buses coming right up the street outside the school. "And you can see the people out there throwing rocks at the buses. This didn’t happen in California. This didn’t happen in France. This happened right here on this street, on that football field. But for some kids, Charlestown is just where you go to school,” he says.   
 
That, for many students, is the lesson.

Comedian Baratunde Thurston was raised by a black activist mother in the projects in Washington, D.C. He attended a largely white private high school, went on to earn a philosophy degree at Harvard and cofound a politics website before moving to the satirical news website, The Onion and most recently striking out to start his own entrepreneurial venture that uses humor to connect communities.

Most importantly, along the way Thurston accrued more than 32 years of experience of “being black.” These years of wisdom inspired him to write a book that’s both a childhood reminiscence and a tongue-in-cheek guidebook. How to Be Black tackles satirical conundrums, from what it means to be someone’s “black friend” and “how to be the next black president,” to the right way to celebrate Black History Month. Thurston mines his own history for a fresh take on identity, race, and politics.

When Callie spoke with Baratunde in February 2012, listeners had a lot to say. Here's some of their reactions