Episode 5: White Like Me
( Matt York (Associated Press) )
Female Speaker: I always knew 90% of the media were in Clinton's pocket but now of course with WikiLeaks and doing wider research on all that it's quite obvious.
Rush Limbaugh: Everything has to be about race with these people. We were supposed to be post-racial with the election of Obama.
Male Speaker: Media and politicians has a lot of power. When you have kids, they listen and listen to the radio or watch the TV, sometimes they want to take to their own hands. In the case of my brother, that happens.
Rush Limbaugh: No matter where you turn you can't escape this fact. If you are a conservative Republican straight and white you are yesterday. You are so yesterday, you are so irrelevant, you are so unnecessary.
Male Speaker: I grew up a racist and one of the hard things about growing up a racist is first confronting the fact that you are. Then dealing with the people that you love who made you a racist. To me, that's the hardest thing and people don't talk about that.
[crowd cheering]
Barack Obama: God bless the United States of-
Male Speaker: Anxiety.
Female Speaker: Anxiety.
Female Speaker: Anxiety.
Female Speaker: Anxiety.
Male Speaker: Anxiety.
Female Speaker: Anxiety.
Male Speaker: Anxiety.
Female Speaker: Anxiety.
Female Speaker: Anxiety.
Kai Wright: I'm Kai Wright and this is the United States of Anxiety, a podcast from WNYC Studios and The Nation Magazine. This week I want to first introduce you to a charming young man named Phil Tamburino.
Phil Tamburino: I retired six years ago. I'm 66 and my wife just retired last June. She's a newbie. It took her about 30 seconds to get used to it.
[laughter]
Kai: If the American dream is dead, somebody needs to tell Phil because this guy is living the life. After four happy decades as a teacher on Long Island, he stepped aside of his own accord and is now laid up in his gorgeous home on five acres in Huntington Station. He gave me and our producer Joe Capriglione a tour one afternoon this summer.
Phil: Got a lot of memories built into this place in every tree. Every tree and every bush and every flower you see, every plant, either I planted or my parents planted.
Kai: From this paradise, he presides over a life that's full of family and friends that he's had for decades.
Phil: This is my best friend Ted, also from Corona.
Ted: Hi.
Joe: How you doing Ted, Joseph.
Phil: And Barbara Pfundy.
Barbara Pfundy: From the Bronx.
Phil: From the Bronx.
Barbara: I'm the Jewish one married into the [crosstalk].
Ted: Oh, yes, that'll happen.
Joe: Joseph.
Barbara: Hi.
Phil: Joe and Kai.
Kai: Ted and Phil grew up together in Corona, Queens in the 50s and 60s back when the neighborhood was exclusively Italian-American.
Ted: I grew up in a four-family house. My grandparents were in one apartment. We were in another apartment and a good friend of the family was in the other apartment. My aunts and uncles lived not too far away. Every Sunday my grandmother would cook dinner and there'd be 20 people in the house.
Kai: That was their whole life. Italians doing Italian stuff inside the borders of Corona. Phil says they knew nothing of the world beyond that until he left the neighborhood for high school.
Phil: I left the cocoon and there I met predominantly Irish Catholics from Long Island. I'll never forget this as long as I live, one of my friends very seriously, I thought he was kidding at first, said to me, "Is it true that Italians throw their garbage out the window?" He was dead serious. No, no that was my reaction. I started laughing. That was his family's story about Italians. Italians threw their garbage out the window.
Kai: Because the thing is at the time Italians they were still the new immigrants along with Poles and Hungarians and others from Southern and Eastern Europe, they were still considered inferior to more Northern white people.
Phil: We never thought of ourselves as not white but people treated us that way.
Kai: How did this change? How did Phil's family go from being seen as dirty ghetto dwellers to his enviable life today? We will get to that later in the episode but first, what's all this got to do with the election? From the day Donald Trump announced his candidacy by calling Mexican immigrants rapists, from that moment, race or more specifically racism has been at the center of this election.
In some ways that's just normal. Race is always part of American politics but typically the attention is focused on people of color and usually on what's wrong with us, what problem we have that needs to be solved, but now we're in an interesting moment in America. As historian Nell Irvin Painter said in a previous episode, it's one of those rare times when whiteness is the subject of debate.
Nell Irvin Painter: In the discussions that are going on now about identity that includes the racial identity of white people and this is something I think is new, discussions of white privilege, for instance, they take a lot of white people quite by surprise.
Kai: So far in this podcast we've been fussing around at the edges of that discussion but this week we're going to come right at it. The first question we've got to ask is basic. What's whiteness?
Nell: It's always been really hard to pin down legal definitions of whiteness. Usually, it has to do with not being Black or how much Black can be in white so white is kind of this vague floating concept but certainly, whiteness can be constricted and be enlarged as people feel the need.
Kai: It has been. Over and over again throughout our history what it means to be white has morphed and changed legally, culturally, and politically. Maybe especially politically because the political manipulation of racial identity has been a crucial part of our electoral politics from jump.
Joshua Freeman: The United States was one of the first countries in the world that had something close to universal white male suffrage.
Kai: This is Joshua Freeman a history professor at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. In the early 19th century, one state after another got rid of rules that limited voting to property owners and Freeman says this created a challenge for political parties that had until then been these exclusive patrician organizations.
Joshua: You have a new problem. How do you mobilize these people? How do elites and political leaders relate to this new political nation which is being created for the first time?
Kai: The answer you entertain them. You throw big ruckus parties at which people can break social rules and generally feel free. At a moment when industrialization was rapidly taking away actual free time.
Joshua: There is a long tradition in American life of elections as entertainment, as a kind of almost festival or carnival-like activity. When you go back to the 19th century, Election Day itself was a day full of parades, entertainment, drinking, brawling, showing off. It was a lot fun if you like that kind of thing.
[laughter]
Kai: If you like to get in the street and be rowdy, come vote.
Joshua: Absolutely.
Kai: But these parties were also about creating a certain kind of political identity for voters. One organized around race.
Joshua: This is the same period where in many places including New York Black voting is getting restricted. You're having simultaneously the expansion of white voting to virtually all adult white men and the restriction of Black voting. Maybe this puts in the very DNA of this kind of carnivalesque electioneering a racial element.
Kai: These events were made a mainstay of American politics for generations and their racial DNA remained a part of it as well.
Joshua: I think the most recent precedent that I could think of was the George Wallace campaign in 1968 when his rallies were big events and tense events. There were often protestors and hecklers involved. They would start with a country and western band that would play Dixie. This is true by the way in the north as well as in the south, it wasn't just in the south.
Kai: Up here in New York?
Joshua: Oh, yes. In Boston, in New York, they would play Dixie and then Wallace would get up there and people would boo. He would like this because he played brilliantly off of hecklers and pointed to them and denounced them. "Those people with the sandals over there. If they sat down-
Kai: Wow.
Joshua: in front of my car I would run them over."
Kai: You could be narrating a Trump rally.
Joshua: Very similar.
Kai: He loves the hecklers.
Joshua: Very similar.
Joshua: By the way in a slightly more strange way Richard Nixon did the same thing in 1968. His advance people made sure that there were protestors inside these big rallies.
Kai: Really?
Joshua: Oh, yes, because they wanted to play off of it.
Kai: There's very little that's new about Donald Trump's much disgust rallies. They follow a script for events that have long been a staple of American politics anytime someone has wanted to rally voters around a white political identity. What's new though is the context for these rallies. A time when as Painter says, "The existing definition of whiteness is up for debate."
Nell: How do you define white? Well, you can look at people's skin color but that doesn't work because there are a lot of people who are brown but who are white. The attributes of whiteness in the 20th century, power, wealth, beauty, these are more shared now so there are people who are brown, people who are Black who are powerful, who are wealthy, and who are beautiful. Actually with the rise of the drug crisis in the middle of rural America, whiteness of a certain class is being rendered ugly.
Kai: What does all this mean in real life? The polls say 35% of Donald Trump's current voters are white men without a college degree, by far Trump's best demographic. The politics website FiveThirtyEight has even created an electoral map based on that polling, and it shows what would happen if only white men voted in the upcoming election, Trump wins in a landslide. We sent WNYC reporter Jim O'Grady to Suffolk County with a guide, a writer and photographer who has chronicled Trump country for years, even before it had a name.
Jim O'Grady: Chris Arnade is a former bond trader with a PhD in particle physics. He used to be a quant, a guy who uses higher math to get an edge on the market. You heard about quant if you watch the movie, The Big Short.
Chris Arnade: That's my quant.
Male Speaker 7: Your what?
Chris: My quantitative, my math specialists. Look at him.
Jim: Arnade says he couldn't look at himself in good conscience when the economy crashed in 2008.
Chris: B's zero, double B's, zero, triple B's, zero. Then that happens.
Male Speaker 7: What is that?
Chris: That's America's housing market.
Jim: Arnade quit his job and moved with his family from their condo in Brooklyn Heights to New Paltz near some woods with coyotes. He's Catholic. He's been trying to atone by going to the places in America that his Wall Street math helped wreck. What he's found can be boiled down to a phrase.
Chris: There's a sense of economic anxiety and a sense of having been kicked in the balls.
Jim: kicked in the balls. In 2015, he landed a writing assignment from the Atlantic magazine to drive around the country.
Chris: Just talking to Americans about the American dream.
Jim: He put 20,000 miles on his Honda Odyssey.
Chris: Binghamton, New York, Kingsport, Tennessee.
Jim: He keeps a mattress in the back so he can car camp in Walmart parking lots. It's a thing. You can Google it.
Chris: Floyd County, Kentucky, Buffalo, New York, Selma, Alabama.
Jim: Arnade figured out it's a good idea to put a leather-bound book next to the driver's seat that says, "Holy Bible." It has a calming effect on policemen and strangers, especially in the south. He stashes his prized possession, his interview notes between the pages of the book because no one ever messes with it.
Chris: I think that direction is better because that--
Jim: He and I are taking a road trip to the planer side of Suffolk, the towns you bypass on your way out to the Hamptons.
Chris: Now you're getting Jimmy's diner. You're getting--
Jim: Places like Mastic and Shirley and Center Moriches.
Male Speaker 7: Pizza, karate tanning, drywall.
Chris: This looks a little more my territory.
Jim: His territory is the large and overlooked middle zones between dynamic downtowns and tourist destinations, places crippled by the recession and pummeled by the changing economy as he found on his reporting trip.
Chris: The first person I talked to was in a small upstate New York town that once had industry but now the only jobs there now were guiding tourists who came to do trout fishing. They would stock the river. The guy I asked him about the American dream and his response was, "The American dream is broken. It's gone."
Jim: Upstate New York once had factories owned by bedrock firms like IBM and Kodak, Corning and Carrier, a company that this year alone laid off hundreds of workers.
Chris: He said, "This town used to make things, now all we do is we cater to tourists who come here to fish our rivers with fish that we don't even have. We put the fish in the river for them to catch."
Jim: Arnade says over and over he's run into a side effect that comes with the switch from blue-collar jobs that take muscle to service jobs that don't, emasculation.
Chris: There's this guy in Prestonsburg, Kentucky, who I'll never forget. I was there for a week and I spent most of my time in the Walmart Plaza. It's a small town so he saw me all the time. He knew what I was doing. I asked him about his job and he kept saying it's a paycheck. That was it. "I don't like it, but it's a paycheck." That's the attitude. This isn't me [chuckles]. I'm more than this. His grandfather, his father was a coal miner and he stocked shelves at a supermarket and he wasn't proud of it, to be honest [chuckles].
Jim: We're on the Long Island expressway not far from Bethpage home to Northrop Grumman. This is the company that built World War II Hellcat fighter planes and the first lunar module. In the 1980s, Grumman employed as many as 80,000 people, 99% of those jobs are gone. 850 cut as recently as two years ago. Grumman no longer builds airplanes on Long Island.
[music]
Jim: An argument is raging right now about whether the deep sense of grievance among Trump voters is legitimate, economic hardship, or illegitimate, racism, xenophobia, misogyny. Arnade says all of that mixed together plus something else, the feeling among a lot of the white working-class that they've become targets of mockery, the goofballs in the back row of the classroom.
Chris: One of the pernicious-- is that a word, pernicious?
Jim: It is.
Chris: One of the pernicious-- That means bad, right?
Jim: Do you want to spell it?
Chris: [chuckles] The idea is there's a meritocracy that consequently if you don't make it, it's your fault. You just didn't study hard enough or you're stupid. That's a phrase that a lot of people I find extremely offensive is when they categorize a group of voters as being dumb or stupid.
Jim: Earlier this year, when big-name political writers like Jonathan Chait were calling Trump voters "complete idiots" Arnade published an essay in The Guardian under the headline “Why Trump Voters Are Not Complete Idiots.” We pull off Montauk highway to stop at one of the area's ubiquitous roadside hotdog stands. This one has a large sign with the image of the flag and the caption, "Proud to be an American." Up walks Connie.
Connie Napolitano: Connie Napolitano.
Jim: Born in Brooklyn.
Connie: Greenpoint section.
Jim: Was it good growing up there?
Connie: Oh, great. Not today but when I was there, yes. I'm out here 46 years.
Jim: Where, what town?
Connie: Shirley.
Jim: Greenpoint used to be great, but not today. Like America, Connie says she and her husband Fiore moved to Long Island in 1970 to escape the crime in Brooklyn and raise their seven children. All of them grown now.
Connie: They all got houses. They all got good jobs.
Jim: Technically, the Napolitanos have achieved the American dream. Still, she worries.
Connie: I'm worried about this president shit, what's going to happen here.
Jim: What's worrying you about it?
Connie: I don't like either one of them but I'd rather see Trump get in rather than Hillary Clinton.
Jim: Why is that?
Connie: I think he knows more what to do with money and about the war. What does she know about the war? She don't know nothing.
Jim: I start to ask about race and immigration but she cuts me off.
Connie: Go talk to my husband in the truck. He'll talk to you better than I will.
Jim: Hey.
Fiore: How are you doing?
Jim: She said you have opinions.
Fiore: About this country?
Jim: Yes.
Fiore: Are you kidding me? It's going down the tubes.
Jim: It's going down the tubes. Why?
Fiore: Why? Look what's happening in this country. First of all, all the jobs are leaving, number one. Everything is made out of plastic, no more metal, and bring back the steel industry. There's a million things. The kids can't do nothing with their hands no more.
Jim: The loss of manual labor is a big deal to Fiore. He's retired after working 40 years as a mechanic.
Fiore: I was a truck mechanic for one of the largest companies in the world.
Jim: In where?
Connie: Spector Freight in Brooklyn.
Jim: Smith Freight?
Fiore: No.
Connie: Spector.
Fiore: Spector Freight.
Jim: S-P-E-C-T-O-R, Spector Freight in Brooklyn.
Fiore: You got the wrong guy, can hardly write my name. I got more brains in my little thumb than people. I had no schooling, no education but I can straighten out this country I would say halfway at least.
Jim: Fiore doesn't trust Hillary and is no fan of President Obama.
Fiore: Obama talks for eight years. He didn't do nothing.
Jim: He tells Arnade and I that he likes Trump.
Chris: I want to ask you a question and don't take it the wrong way. A lot of people say Trump is a racist. What do you think to that?
Fiore: I think everybody's a racist.
Connie: There's good and bad in black. There's good and bad in white. There's good and bad in Hispanic. Nobody's better than anybody else.
Fiore: I have an old gentleman, old coal miner, and he lost his arm almost, and just took the blood from the colored guy. Okay? A Negro man saved his life. I have a Puerto Rican friend of mine. He is so close. He's my brother. He's a millionaire. This guy I've never posed on him, but he would be there for me if I needed it. Now, he's Puerto Rican and believe me, I’d stand in the way of a bullet for him.
Jim: We say goodbye but Fiore stops us to reveal that while he'll vote for Trump his ideal candidate is another man.
Fiore: Well, my candidate, you're going to laugh if I tell you, is John Wayne. He ain't thereno more. Okay? He ain't there no more.
Jim: John Wayne, the legendary cowboy actor?
Fiore: [crosstalk] because if he ever catch you burning an American flag, you better hope to God he don't kill you.
Jim: The Duke, not a man who guides finance guys to the local trout stream, a man who saves widows in the West and kicks ass on Omaha beach. A father figure who could retrieve our mythic past.
John Wayne: Face the flag son and face reality. Our strength and our freedoms are based in unity. The flag is but a symbol.
Jim: Arnade and I get back in the Honda because we're members of the media elite, we eat knishes with mustard as we drive back to the city. He says Fiore's lament about the changing nature of work is familiar to him from his travels.
Chris: The kind of jobs that have been lost, as physically demanding as they were, gave some people a sense of pride. You don't hear a lot of country music songs about people working at the McDonald's or being a greeter at Walmart or stocking shelves at Walmart.
Jim: Songs like Alabama's 40 hour week.
[music]
Alabama Band: Hello Pittsburgh steel mill worker. Let me thank you for your time. You work a 40 hour week for a living. Just to send it on down the line.
Chris: What's driving so much of what's going on is the need for pride, the feeling of being humiliated.
Alabama Band: This is for the one who swings the hammer.
[music]
Donald Trump: Pittsburgh played a central role in building our nation, but our workers' loyalty was repaid, you know it better than anybody, with total betrayal.
Chris: Once somebody feels humiliated, they will do most anything to try to A, get revenge, or B, find a way to get pride back. I think Trump, he's selling them a scam of cheap pride. This is a cheap way to feel included. This is a cheap way to get back at the world that's wronged you.
Trump: Don't worry, we're bringing it all back. Don't worry about it, okay? Don't worry.
[cheering]
Alabama Band: With a spirit you can't replace with no machine. Hello, America.
Kai: But you know, not all white people in Long Island feel like they've lost something. For some, the American dream is alive and well and has gotten better, precisely because it accommodates change. After the break, we go back to Phil Tamburino and the Italian American dream.
[music ends]
Jim: First, we're hearing from you. We're broadcasting every Thursday night on WNYC radio and taking your calls. Last week, we asked you how often you engage with opposing political viewpoints. We heard from Mike in Westchester.
Mike: I think if we all spent a little bit more time listening to the other side, trying to understand where they're coming from, there is a little bit of middle ground. I find that when I have a respectful conversation with whether it's my father-in-law or anyone else coming from the right, we end up agreeing more than we end up disagreeing. We just have to calm down and listen to each other.
Jim: What's happening in your community that's making you anxious? Give us a call at (646) 783-9692.
Kai: I pointed out at the top of the episode that Italian Americans weren't always considered on par with other white people. They got special classification on their immigration documents noting their dark skin. They were barred from a lot of jobs and industries, and they were confined to ghettos like Corona. In some ways, you could say they were the most recent group to be fully admitted into whiteness in America.
Fred Gardaphé is a distinguished professor of English and Italian American studies at Queens College. He remembers the tail end of those days when he was a kid in Chicago in the 60s and the shame that came with being at the bottom of the social ladder, both here and back in Italy. So much so that when he tried to get in touch with his Italian roots, his family really wasn't into it.
Fred Gardaphé: I learned proper Italian. I come back to my grandmother and I started speaking to her in Italian. She answers me in English. I said to my uncle, "How come grandma always responds to me in English when I speak to her in Italian?" He goes, "You really want to know?" I said, "Yes." He said, "She doesn't want to tell you this, but she says, when you speak Italian, you sounded like a priest."
I said, "What does that mean?" She goes, "Well, she didn't trust the priests in Italy. It's better you speak the dialect that you grew up with with her. Don't worry about this Italian because it reminds her that she didn't have that education."
Kai: She really didn't want to talk about how she was received when she came to the United States.
Fred: I would ask my grandmother, "Tell me what it was like coming here." She goes, "Miseria," and she would throw her hand out and she would say, "Miseria." That just means misery, and she didn't want to talk about it. A lot of what the Italians didn't talk to their kids about, didn't process that discrimination, didn't get passed on.
Kai: He says they passed on something else instead, the warning that Italians were already entirely too close to Black people, not just in the racist imagination of other whites, but literally.
Fred: If you look at the lines in the city that divide neighborhoods, the Italians are always in this buffer zone between the Blacks and the whites. Sometimes they're called in-between people.
Kai: If you're in-between, you can go up or you can go down. The way up was clear to anybody paying attention to how America works.
Fred: Italian Americans learned very quickly the sooner you become white, the sooner you get to benefit by white privilege. They tried very hard, I remember my mother saying to me when I was outside playing, "Don't stay outside, you're going to get dark as a," and she would use the N-word. We have to separate ourselves from them otherwise, we'll end up like them. American means white for them. They want to be American.
[music]
Kai: Then, a really big change offered full American status, the suburbs. We've already talked about this back in episode two, a combination of public and private investment moved all kinds of white people out of the cities and into the suburbs to create a very particular middle-class. Nuclear families headed by men in all-white neighborhoods. Italians benefited from this just like all kinds of other white people benefited from it, which brings us back to Phil Tamburino living the dream in his Huntington Station Garden of Eden.
Phil and Ted are notably not Trump's white guys. When manufacturing disappeared in Long Island, it didn't upset their lives because their family stories had in fact followed the narrative of progress that was supposed to define the 20th century.
Phil: In my family, I'm the first one to graduate from college.
Ted: I was the second.
Phil: It was unheard of. You went to high school. If you went to high school, you graduated, and you got most likely a blue-collar job. To go out and go to college and to become a white-collar professional was unheard of back in the 60s and 70s.
Kai: Those blue-collar jobs were the first step. Historians note that for Italians, Phil and Ted's parents broke the economic barriers and the next generation broke the cultural barriers. Phil explains how that worked for his family, how his dad got his foot in the door of a job in the city sanitation department, setting them down the path to middle class.
Phil: This was 1939, the World's Fair, which was in Corona. It's funny because when the Italians lived there, they called it the Corona Dumps. After when they built the World's Fair in 1939, it became Flushing Meadow.
[laughter]
Phil: He applied for a job at the fair doing sanitation work, and was getting nowhere. He reapplied under the name, instead of Tamburino, he reapplied under the name Phil Tamb, T-A-M-B, and they hired him instantly. You could do that with your name, but you can't do it with your skin color, unfortunately, because they were not hiring Black people for those jobs either. His claim to fame was that at the World's Fair, he actually cleaned up the horse manure behind Queen Elizabeth's carriage when she visited the World's Fair. It's a great story. He picked up the-- [chuckles] Exactly.
[laughter]
Kai: Cleaning the Queen's crap. That's how you get ahead in America, but hey, the Tambs thrived from there. When they got enough money together, they bought a piece of land way out on Long Island on what was then barely used farmland and they built the house Phil lives in today. It was their escape from the cramped Italian ghetto of Corona. When Phil graduated college, his dad gave him and his wife the house to start their own family.
Phil wanted to be a teacher, a public servant, just like his dad. This is the other industry that built Long Island, public workers. Unlike manufacturing, it's still thriving.
Phil: I interviewed for the job in '72, and I later found out the story behind the job. When I interviewed for the job, the principal of the building was Swedish and he was not sure about hiring me for whatever reason, I don't know why. His secretary was Italian and years later, she told me the story. Her name was Terry and she said, "After you walked out of that interview, he came out of the office and said to me, 'Well, should I hire the little Italian?'" The little Italian. She said to him, "You better."
Kai: That's the last bit of anti-Italian bias Phil can recall because life was good for Italians in the suburbs. In fact, it felt like all of a sudden, Italians were running things, Mario Cuomo and all that.
Phil: I remember thinking, "My God, an Italian governor." That was so foreign to me. Italians just didn't rise to that level and then things changed. Then De Niro, Pacino, it became cool to be Italian.
Robert De Niro: You talking to me? You talking to me?
Kai: The legacy of being in between people remained. That fear of nearness to Black people, or farness from full white status, it still shaped life. Phil notes that he was 44 years old before he made friends with a Black person.
Phil: I felt so sad that it took me 44 years to actually break down that barrier and socialize with people of color. It's just ignorance. It's just we are ignorant of each other and it's sad. It really is. Integration is a wonderful thing. Once you break down those barriers, it's like, "Oh, my God."
Kai: Phil is sickened by Donald Trump and his campaign. To him, Trump's fear-mongering of Mexicans and Muslims has played on all the worst parts of America's immigration story.
Phil: There's a pecking order in this country, every new immigrant that enters this country has to start at the bottom, I guess. In the end, they're going to be very productive citizens, they can be very grateful as Italians are. Very grateful that we came to this wonderful country of opportunity. Look at where we are here, right? [chuckles] It's paradise. I thank God every day that my family did what they did and sent me to college and gave me a better life. It's all about a better life.
[music]
Kai: That's what the 20th century promised, a better life, at least for white America. It delivered pretty broadly for Phil's generation, even for those without a college degree. As you've heard, for the Trump supporters we've met, that promise is gone. They are particularly concerned about what that means for the next generation. To a lot of people on Long Island, the kids are not all right. It's not just about jobs and money. It's not even just about white kids. Next week, gangs and drugs.
Male Speaker 9: Our opioid crisis is the worst drug addiction epidemic in United States history. The number of people dying of overdoses today is far higher than anything we've ever seen. The CDC has recognized that this is the most urgent public health problem facing the country.
Joseph Capriglione: The United States of Anxiety is the production of WNYC Studios and The Nation magazine, reporting this week by Jim O'Grady and produced by myself, Joseph Capriglione. It's recorded and mixed by Bill Moss and Casey Means. Our theme music is by Nathan Halpern. Thanks to our digital team, Lee Hill and Alex Kahn. Karen Frillmann is our editor and executive producer along with Kai Wright.
Just a reminder that if you like us, subscribe on the WNYC app, iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please take a minute and write a review. Tell us what you think. It really helps the show. We'll see you next week.
[music]
Copyright © 2020 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.
New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.
