Chicago's White Supremacy w/ Odette Yousef

(S4, EP 5) Chicago WBEZ reporter Odette Yousef joined me as a guest for this episode.  Odette recently hosted Season 3 of Motive Podcast (available on all streaming services) which takes a look at the history of the underground white supremacist movement in Chicago during the 1980s.  Odette reflected on her experiences interviewing a former white supremacist, and what she learned about the movement and how this is parallel to the current white supremacy movements of the past decade.  Odette talked about her experiences covering news on the Asian-American communities in Chicago as a reporter, and how critical journalism is to building trust with communities in a time when journalists are under attack during the Trump administration.  

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Bio:

Odette Yousef is a WBEZ reporter on the Race, Class and Communities team. Since joining the station in 2010, Odette has covered a range of stories including the disparate impact of Illinois’s tax collection policies on low-income communities, what the loss of manufacturing jobs has done to West Side communities, homelessness, local and state efforts around immigration policy, and DREAMers. She has also worked on Season 3 of WBEZ’s Motive podcast series.  Odette has won local, state and national journalism awards. Her coverage includes enterprise and data reporting, and she can also sometimes be heard filling in as local anchor for Morning Edition, All Things Considered and weekend shows. Prior to joining WBEZ, Odette was a reporter at WABE FM in Atlanta.  Odette received a B.A. in Economics and East Asian Studies from Harvard University.  For more information, please visit www.wbez.org

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Season 4 is sponsored by Red Scarf Revolution (RSR).  RSR aims to bring awareness to the tragedies, atrocities and cultural destruction the Cambodian people endured from 1975 to 1979 under the communist Khmer Rouge regime and how that period impacts us today.  With that awareness, Red Scarf Revolution advocates the silenced art, music, culture,  and language, with designs that incite the resiliency of the Cambodian people.  Visit their website at  www.redscarfrevolution.com to check out their merch line and to learn more about their work, or follow their Instagram at red_scarf_revolution or on their Facebook.