Karen Grigsby Bates
Karen Grigsby Bates is the Senior Correspondent for Code Switch, a podcast that reports on race and ethnicity. A veteran NPR reporter, Bates covered race for the network for several years before becoming a founding member of the Code Switch team. She is especially interested in stories about the hidden history of race in America—and in the intersection of race and culture. She oversees much of Code Switch's coverage of books by and about people of color, as well as issues of race in the publishing industry. Bates is the co-author of a best-selling etiquette book (Basic Black: Home Training for Modern Times) and two mystery novels; she is also a contributor to several anthologies of essays. She lives in Los Angeles and reports from NPR West.
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In his new memoir, Rodney King explains why he gave his famous "Can we get along?" speech when riots erupted after police officers were acquitted in his beating. His lawyers had drafted a far angrier script for him. He also reflects on his life since the trial: "Things have changed for me," he says. -
While African Americans constitute only 13 percent of the population, they account for more than 40 percent of missing persons. Find Our Missing on black cable network TV One wants to be the catalyst for tips that might solve a disappearance.
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In Power Concedes Nothing, civil rights attorney Connie Rice describes brokering peace between the Los Angeles Police Department and minority populations. -
In a nation where child obesity rates are soaring, some parents are turning to a boarding school that focuses on both weight loss and academics. The goal: to rewire students' eating and exercise habits to ensure they live long and healthy lives. The kids find it a challenge — but totally worth it. -
In The Barbarian Nurseries, Hector Tobar explores the inconsistencies in the country's dependence on illegal immigrants even as some Americans persist in keeping them at arm's length.
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The heroine of Denise Hamilton's latest novel is a crisis management expert charged with cooling down the media maelstrom after an old friend is involved in a high-profile crime.
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Fifteen years after she led the prosecution against O.J. Simpson in one of the most public trials of the century, Marcia Clark returns to the courtroom. But this time, it's to make her fiction debut as the writer of a new legal thriller novel, Guilt by Association.. -
The South and West may become the Rust Belts of the 21st century, according to a new study from the Mortgage Bankers Association. It says the economies in these regions — in places like California and Florida — may never fully recover from the burst of the housing bubble. -
Between 1915 and 1975, millions of African-Americans left their homes in the South for the relative freedoms of the North. Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns is an exhaustively researched and deeply emotional portrait of the Great Migration. -
The protagonist of Naomi Hirahara's novels isn't a seasoned police detective or a private investigator — he's a gruff, 72-year-old gardener who lives in the hills above Pasadena, Calif. The Mas Arai character was inspired by Hirahara's father and guides readers into the hidden corners of L.A.'s Japanese-American communities.
