The (other) soundtrack to my youth

A tribute to what I listened to when I didn't get to choose the station

My children are growing up in a largely radio-free household. We listen to a bunch of music (your Swifts and Rodrigos, naturally, as well as far more Eurovision Song Contest entries than would be expected from a family in Wisconsin) and the occasional podcast. But more often than not, my wife and I do most of our listening on headphones while attending to non-child-focused chores. Perhaps it would be different if we drove more, but when we are in the car together we usually pass a phone to our eleven-year-old and let him DJ from the back seat.

Now, there are plenty of bigger things to feel guilty about, both as a citizen of the world and as a parent. I’m not losing sleep over what forms of auditory media I switch on while in my kids’ presence. It’s just one of those million little nostalgia-hued details that I occasionally notice over the course of a parenting-filled day, the signposts that remind me that my kids’ world is different from my own. Mine: More unplanned time at friends’ houses; more flashlight tag; less interesting food in the grocery store. Theirs: greater Spanish fluency; tinier and more plentiful screens; disconcertingly warmer winter weather. I’m not googling, but I’m sure there’s already a viral Internet list that summarizes all those individual noticings into tidy little bullet points. “Only 90s kids will understand…” etc., etc.

I’m being imprecise. I didn’t grow up with the radio on. I grew up with a specific and very particular variety of radio on. You will not be surprised by the identity of the station whose diegetic omnipresence marked my growing up years. Everything about me— my sweaty do-gooderism, my over-wordiness, my inability to change my own oil—evinces what kind of stock I come from. My people are tote bag people, damnit. Cue the brass..

DUN DUN DUN DUH/ DUN DUH DUN DUH (plink, plink, plink, plink, plink, plink…).

I’m talking NPR, of course. “…National Public Radio,” as so many Mid-Atlantic-accented voices have intoned to me over the years. But I’m still not being precise enough. Having just written a memoir about myself and Whiteness, if there’s one thing in this world that I can say with full certainty, it’s how I would classify myself in the broader taxonomy of White people. I am not just a child of White NPR Parents, but the child of White Mountain West NPR Affiliate Parents.

There’s an argument to be made that this is an overly fussy distinction. I’m sure that Saturday morning “Car Talk” episodes sounded the same to back-seat, seven-year-old ears in Boston and Birmingham as they did in Billings and Boise. “Don’t drive like my brother,” har har har har har. The whole point of a national public radio network is to knit together a potentially disparate country.

An aside on that attempt to knit us together. Public media in the United States is a fascinating artifact, a metaphor for our broader relationship to centrally funded goods and services. The Public Broadcasting Act was passed in 1967, one last gasp of Lyndon Johnson’s Good Society agenda. The radio part was a bit of an after-thought. The major impetus of the bill was public television, especially children’s public television. You’re likely already familiar with the radical intentionality behind the creation of Sesame Street. It’s a good story, and an even better reminder. We are never the first to try to build a more loving America.

Like many Great Society programs, NPR’s dilemma isn’t that it was a bad idea, but that it was an incredible idea that never received the full investment it needed to fulfill its potential. As it turns out, institutional racism, fealty to capital and the insatiable demands of militarized empire all get in the way of building a truly vibrant social democracy. In NPR’s specific case, it’s hard to sustain a national public media ecosystem when you have to cobble together a budget from underwriting and listener contributions. It’s no surprise that a donation-dependent media institution in a country with a racial wealth gap would wind up with a listenership that was notably Whiter, wealthier and more college-educated than the nation as a whole. That’s not to say that there aren’t plenty of Black and Brown NPR households, nor plenty of working class NPR households. But trends are trends, and there’s a context behind why my particular upbringing was likely to be more DUN DUN DUH DUH-heavy than so many others.

Speaking of that upbringing, yes, NPR’s national programming does sound the same coming through Eastern, Southern, Northern and Western speakers. But it’s also not surprising that my wife (from Pocatello, Idaho), and myself (from a lot of places, but especially Clancy and Missoula, Montana) first bonded over our shared experience of Western NPR omnipresence. There were, for example, a few key programming differences. On our stations, the end of All Things Considered marked the beginning of National Native News. The news reports from our local affiliates focused far more on wolves in Yellowstone and fires on the mountains than those in other parts of the country. And had my wife grown up not simply listening to a Western NPR affiliate but Montana Public Radio specifically, there would have been more to bond over (if you too were a Pea Green Boat child, you and I basically share a blood oath).

That’s not all, though. There was also the matter of just how much NPR our parents listened to, especially in the car. When you grow up in the kind of place where you have to regularly drive five hours to a soccer tournament in Meridian or three hours to Great Falls for the only repair shop in the state that can reliably fix Vanagons, your childhood is just going to feature a heavier volume of Susan Stamberg and Garrison Keillor on the tinny car stereo. Or, at least it will in fits and starts, until you cross the Continental Divide and the signal fades and your parents have to fiddle with the dial for a while before it re-emerges on the other side of the pass.

But our deeper shared bond had nothing to do with what we heard on the airwaves, but what it meant to be raised by the kind of Western White liberals who would choose to listen to that much NPR. In a pre-gentrification Mountain West, where the dominant strain of Whiteness was some combination of cowboy-libertarian or Zion-building true believer, liberalism didn’t just happen. If you wanted a progressive institution in your town (a food co-op, a Unitarian church, a school system willing to teach Indigenous history) you had to build it yourself. And so of course our parents listened to hours of Iran Contra hearings and Weekend Edition interviews with New York-based authors. It was one more way to connect the home they loved to far off parts of the country that often forgot we existed.

That memoir I wrote? It’s probing and self-critical, which means that it has already been described (positively) as a critique of the performativeness of White liberalism. And there’s a lot of truth to that. Goodness knows that there’s plenty to critique, both generally and in the specific milieu of 80s and 90s Western White liberalism that I was raised. Were the hippie-ish Westerners blasting Morning Edition from their VWs and Subarus just another round of colonizers, obsessed with shaping a place that did not belong to them in their image? Were they too individualistic, too focused on Whole Earth Catalog lifestyle politics than cross-class organizing? Did they inadvertently plant the seeds for the current Patagonia and pourover-ification of so many Western enclaves? Were their dreams not radical enough?

We’re all worthy of critique, particularly those of us who’ve been placed artificially on the top of societal hierarchies. But I think if that’s the only story we tell of our upbringings, us children of White liberalism, we unintentionally sand over some beautiful building blocks. My parents didn’t listen to NPR and then smugly brag to their children about how much better we were than the roughnecks out in Petroleum County. They volunteered for political campaigns and supported Indigenous activists and planted gardens and served on thankless municipal committees. My in-laws in Pocatello taught school and did in fact found that little Unitarian Church and then, when it existed, used it as a base for all sorts of useful little organizing projects. I know for a fact that many of those responsible for the most impactful progressive gathering in the history of post-colonization Montana— the 1972 Constitutional Convention— criss-crossed the state with early Montana Public Radio broadcasts blaring from their speakers.

I wish so many things for our country. I wish that we had a full, robust social safety net and not just a smattering of underfunded piecemeal programs. I wish now more than ever that nationalized public media was something we all cherished and benefited from together. I wish that we had more shared institutions and fewer class-and-race-coded lifestyle brands. But that’s all the more reason to be grateful for the multiple generations of patient builders in our midst, people who could have focused just on their own family unit but who instead seeded community institutions that still thrive today. Those builders have always lived in every corner of the country. They are Black and Brown and Indigenous and Asian and White and wealthy and poor. They are not all driving Interstates 90 and 15 in Subaru Outbacks filled with KUWR, KVXO, KUFM and KISU tote bags. But some are. Most specifically, the ones that helped teach me that I live in an interconnected world. And for them, I am particularly grateful.

It doesn’t actually matter that I don’t force my kids to hear All Things Considered every night. But the fact that I will remember all those years listening to my parents connect the world to Montana and Montana to the world means that my children must also be paying close attention. They are learning lessons, one way or another, about whether their parents care primarily about what happens within the four walls of our house or for the broader community around us. And the wonderful, challenging, sacred truth about that is that I can’t teach that lesson in a single lecture. They’ll learn it from a lifetime of noticing us and the choices made or avoided, community meetings attended or skipped, solidarity practiced or resources hoarded. Whether the radio is on or not, there will be a transmission to be received.

Here’s the section where I talk about The Right Kind of White, a book that is out in A WEEK!

You all, how much have I asked you to help this big-hearted invitation of a book take take root in the world? Quite a bit. And no, this won’t be the last time I do so. But you know what? Every time I make this request, I hear from more and more of you in so many corners of the world. It really does feel like we’re weaving a web of connection and care, so thank you. It is a gift to get to ask for help from this community (just as it’s a gift to help you out with what you need, which I’m always down to hear).

You can help The Right Kind of White (and me)…

• By pre-ordering it, of course!

• By pre-ordering the audio version of it (which I narrated)!

• By filling out this little survey after pre-ordering so that I can send you a thank you gift!

• [For those of you who’ve already read it] by reviewing on Goodreads or (when it’s out) on Amazon [is it a good thing that both of these sites have so much algorithimical power over a book’s success? Probably not! But that’s where we are]!

• By requesting it from your local library!

• By coming to an event (more coming soon)!:

  • In Milwaukee! Friday, March 22nd, 6:30 PM at Boswell Books [Free but RSVP here].

  • In Missoula, MT! Home of Montana Public Radio (you know, from this essay!) Tuesday, March 26th, 7:00 PM at Shakespeare and Company.

  • In LaCrosse, WI! Thursday April 11th, 6:30 PM at Pearl Street Books.

  • In Omaha, NE! [With newly minted New York Times Bestseller Lyz Lenz!] Wednesday April 17th, 5:30 PM at Pageturners Lounge.

  • In Minneapolis, MN! [TBD but likely May 23rd… stay tuned].

  • In other places (stay tuned Lynchburg, VA, Washington D.C., Portland, OR and many more).

• By filling out this survey [(if you’re part of an organization or group that would like to host a workshop with me (and do a book event as part of it)].

• By choosing the Right Kind of White for Oprah’s book club [note: I am learning this action is only applicable if you, personally, are Oprah Winfrey]!

• By sharing this newsletter with others and/or becoming a subscriber!

• By telling me about a gift that has recently come your way (just send me an email! I’d love to both celebrate and hear about whether it was hard to just recognize that gift).