Roots Renewed

For the first time, I'm the one being interviewed. My friend of almost thirty years, Dr. Jason Johnson, political analyst, journalist, and professor, sat me down to ask the questions instead of the other way around.

We talk about how we actually met decades before this show existed, why some people need permission to reconnect with their own heritage, my own honesty about shame and language, and why this work matters more than ever ...

Tami has heard the question her whole life. Black woman, Spanish last name, no Spanish. People decided that meant she wasn't really Dominican. In this solo episode, she tells her full heritage story for the first time.

This episode traces her disconnection back to her grandmother's choice to leave New York, to what Howard University gave her, and to how she built a cultural connection for her daughter around a heritage that isn't or...

At 13 years old, Aselefech Evans told someone in DC that she was Oromo. They told her not to say that. She did not understand why then. It took 30 years -- and a lot of pain -- to understand the political suppression behind that instruction and to finally claim the identity that had been buried.

Aselefech Evans is an Oromo psychotherapist, Ethiopian adoptee, and co-editor of Lions Roaring Far From Home—the first anthology by E...

Natalie Preddie always knew she was Jamaican. She cooked the food, learned the anthem as a little girl, said Jamaica Jamaica Jamaica when nobody else in her family was paying attention. And she still carried guilt that she had not done enough. That she had let the side down.

This conversation goes places most conversations do not. Natalie is a Canadian travel journalist and creator of Beyond the Resort — a series about Caribbe...

Greg Maurice moved from Haiti to Brooklyn at 13. Black Americans told him he was not black. Haitians back home called him a Yankee. He was not enough for either side. So he kept choosing Haiti anyway — in the language, the food, the history — while building one of the most successful careers in independent film distribution in the country.

In this episode, Greg talks about what it costs to hold onto your identity when bo...

Hilary Giovale was 40 years old when she opened a book at her parents' house and found the names of people her family had enslaved, each one with a dollar amount next to their name. That night changed everything.

She spent eight years writing about what she found, gives every dollar her book makes to reparations work, and has been reclaiming her own European heritage through Gaelic songs, Celtic ceremonies, and an ancestor altar sh...

Melat Terefe grew up watching her grandmother wear tattoos that told stories of beauty, protection, and strength. When her grandmother passed away, Melat turned those exact patterns into the foundation of her Ethiopian fashion brand, DolMel.

In this conversation, Melat shares how she is fighting to preserve Ethiopia's handwoven textile traditions against the rise of cheap fast fashion, and what her work means to Ethiopians in the di...

Hugo Maynard grew up in the worst part of St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands, built a pharmaceutical company, won an Olympic medal, and acquired everything the world told him to want. Then he sat in his Bentley and felt nothing. His reconnection to his West Indian roots did not start on a plane back to the islands. It started with brutal honesty with himself. From that truth, his family's story — a father on a piece of plywo...

Kim Lawson took a DNA test after her mother passed — hoping to find family. What she found was a Nigerian family, a Ghanaian queen mother who looked exactly like her, royal roots on both sides of her family, and a Ghanaian citizenship she earned by going to Ghana three times in five months. Her family thought she had lost her mind. The passport proved otherwise.

This episode covers the DNA test that started everything, the mom...

His mother gave him her rice-and-beans recipe. She never gave him the measurements. He has tried to get it right ever since.

Roberto Hannibal grew up in New Jersey while spending his summers in Puerto Rico and St. Thomas. Last year, he left a full-time career in public health to become a full-time creative — including a cooking show called Flavors We Inherit, where friends teach him recipes passed down in their families while ...

Tamara Buzyna Adams always knew her grandmother's diaries were there. Five volumes. Over 100 years old. Written in Russian by an 11-year-old girl living on a steamship in the Black Sea during the Russian Civil War.

Nobody ever opened them. Nobody asked. Then COVID hit, her mother made a decision, and Tamara spent the next five years finding out what was inside.

What she found changed everything. She tracked down descendants of people...

Marla Teyolia grew up four miles from the Mexican border, the only one in her family born in the United States. In her 20s, she was meditating behind a locked bedroom door so her mother would not see her. Thirty years later, she runs a coaching firm, works with executives at some of the world's most powerful institutions, and still communes with her ancestors every morning. She never had to choose between those worlds. She just had...

Part 1 was the reckoning. Part 2 is what you do with it.

Natalie Berthe found out her family were active participants in the administration of the Belgian Congo. In Part 2 she talks about reconciling love for her family with the truth of what they did, what her responsibility looks like going forward, and why she is not looking away. Including her heritage fragment, one step for anyone whose heritage includes harm, and why this is n...

She was born in the United States. Her parents are Panamanian. She goes back every year. She cooks the food, plays the music, and speaks the language in her house. She has done everything right.

And then her four-year-old told her to speak regular.

Her family came to Panama to build the canal. They planted there and never left. Jessica Fisher Golden has never once doubted that she is Panamanian.

In this conversation she and host Tami...

She spent her life calling out racism and fighting for justice. Then she found out her family were the colonizers she had been fighting against her entire life.

Natalie Berthe is Belgian and Italian, born in the United States with Belgian citizenship. She always knew her family had ties to the Belgian Congo. She did not know what that actually meant until recently.

In Part 1 of this two-part conversation, Natalie sits with the reckon...

Chlarissa Harrison can only trace her family back to her grandparents. Slavery erased what came before. And yet she moves through life as if her ancestors are present every day.

In this episode, she talks about grief as the doorway into heritage reconnection, what her grandmother's hoodoo practices actually mean and where they came from, the ancestor tree dream that gave her a glimpse of faces she had never seen, and why their comfo...

She was adopted at birth and spent decades not knowing where she was from. At 21, a one-page letter told her she was Ecuadorian. Then a DNA test connected her to a nephew her husband had known for ten years.

In this episode, Ariana Quinones talks about claiming Puerto Rican when she had no other country, walking into a town in Ecuador where everyone looked like her, the tattoo she got before she understood what she was claiming, and...

Some people talk about reconnecting the African diaspora. Today's guest has spent thirty years actually doing it.

Dr. Omowale Crenshaw grew up in San Francisco with deep Louisiana Creole roots. He went to Howard University where the world opened up for him. His name, Omowale, meaning the son who has returned after a long journey, came from his father's Yoruba roots and the Black consciousness movement that shaped his family.

In this ...