Episode 20: The “Tightrope” author and longtime Oregonian talks about using his platform to draw people’s attention to our nation’s inequities
On this episode of the Street Roots Podcast, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof joins host DeVon Pouncey and guest co-host Gary Barker to discuss how his rural Oregon roots influence his journalism.
“I think that the power of journalism is not so much changing people's minds about issues that they’ve thought about, but rather it's sometimes making them think about issues that they’d rather not,” Kristof said. “One thing I can do as a journalist is write articles that kind of force readers to pay attention to these difficult, awkward issues and make them uncomfortable — make my readers spill their coffee in the morning — and hopefully, in some cases, that is going to be a step toward better policy.”
Kristof, who grew up outside Yamhill, also discussed his latest book, “Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope,” which he co-wrote with his wife, Sheryl WuDunn.
“I was traveling around for The New York Times covering humanitarian crises around the globe — Yemen and Sudan and Bangladesh and so on. And then I come back to Yamhill, and I saw a humanitarian crisis unfolding there,” he said. “More than a quarter of the kids on my old school bus have died from drugs, alcohol and suicide — what are called deaths of despair.”
“Tightrope” humanizes this crisis, he said, and looks at the policies that got our society here.
Asked about similarities between urban and rural America, Kristof said that social issues that afflicted communities of color in urban areas eventually caught up with rural white communities.
“In the 1990s, in white Yamhill, I think there were a lot of white people who looked around at struggles in African American communities, and they said, ‘You know, the problem is those people, their culture. It's deadbeat dads. It's no personal responsibility. It’s bad choices.’ And meanwhile, there was a great Harvard sociologist who said no, it's about jobs. And he was exactly right because once those jobs left lily-white Yamhill, when they left white Kentucky, when they left white Maine, the same patterns unfolded.”
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The Street Roots Podcast reflects the opinions of host DeVon Pouncey and his guests.
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