Still others know me as a suburban mother of three, while to those who remember me from my hometown of Los Angeles, I am the native daughter done good. Others may recall my time as First Lady of New Orleans, including the spectacle of my wedding to the scion of one of the nation’s most powerful Black political families, Marc Morial, then the youngest mayor ever of his storied city, and now president of the National Urban League. By giving me agency on a national platform, that show changed my whole trajectory in the news industry. These days, some might recognize me from CBS Saturday Morning, which I cohost weekly with Dana Jacobson and Jeff Glor, guided by our fearless executive producer Brian Applegate. Such encounters never failed to short-circuit me back to a childhood in which I was bused to four different schools in five years, a Black girl integrating White environments, who ached with wondering where she truly belonged. With my untamed exuberance, transparent vulnerabilities, and penchant for blurting out the right sentiment at exactly the wrong moment, I stepped into my calling in fits and starts, navigating spaces where people weren’t quite sure what to make of me. All of it has shaped me not only professionally, but also personally, amplifying my voice as a Black woman storyteller.įinding my way into network newsrooms wasn’t always easy, however. There has been triumph, art, and inspiration, as well as stories of pure joy and whimsy, such as the royal nuptials of Prince William and Kate Middleton, and when I donned my tartan and traveled to Scotland to report on the hit TV series Outlander, with its romantic time-travel plotline. Through the years, my work as a TV news correspondent would place me at the center of epochal moments in Black history, from the tragic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, to the shocking massacre of Black worshippers by a White supremacist in a Charleston church ten years later, to the fevered George Floyd rallies in the shadow of a global pandemic, when Americans of all creeds and colors marched together for a brief hopeful moment in the cause of racial justice and the sanctity of Black lives.įortunately, in my career as a journalist, I have been tasked with bearing witness to more than Black trauma and pain. Broadcast news in particular appealed to me-I suspect that I secretly hoped that my mother might one day see me on her television screen and come to claim me. One story at a time, I wanted to investigate life’s unknowns, to engage the larger narrative of my American homeland and witness human experience from the center of its unfolding. This might explain why a career in journalism called out to me. As I grew older, the unsolved mystery of my mother inclined me toward chasing the answers. Those in the Black community would recognize me as Black, but the nod usually came with a wrinkle to their noses, as if to say, but what else you got mixed up in there, girl? Other times, people queried whether I was Italian, Jewish, or Hispanic, peppering me with questions about my heritage long before I had examined such questions for myself. My physical appearance only complicated things as a kid my lightly toasted complexion and mass of wavy brown hair baffled some people. My southern grandmother referred to her as Caucasian. In my two-plus decades as a motherless child, I had learned that identity is shaped as much by those who are absent in our lives as by those who stay by our side.Īs a child, the only detail I’d known about the woman who birthed me was that she wasn’t Black. I was twenty-four when my father directed me to go find my mother.
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