Tracing Trauma With WNYC’s KalaLea
WNYC host and reporter KalaLea learning she has won a duPont-Columbia Silver Baton for the audio series “Blindspot: Tulsa Burning” .
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“I would just allow myself to cry. I cried a lot. Even now just thinking about it, there's so much tape in there where I would have to just stop and let the tears flow and then come back. I think that's really important not to hold it in.
--- WNYC host and reporter KalaLea on reporting on painful but critical subjects
When WNYC host and reporter KalaLea was a child, her home was robbed and her most prized possessions stolen. The trauma of that event haunts her to this day. It’s why she views trauma as the heart of certain stories, specifically of the Tulsa Race Massacre.
The theme of generational trauma drives her six-part audio series “Blindspot: Tulsa Burning,” a historical account of how a racially-motivated massacre in 1921 still affects people today. The series won KalaLea her first duPont-Columbia Awards Silver Baton, and is the topic of her Zoom interview with the J-School’s Prizes Department Executive Director Abi Wright and duPont Awards Director Lisa R. Cohen.
In this episode, KalaLea describes her chilling revelations about the redacted history of the Tulsa Race Massacre that Americans aren’t being taught – the true story of police violence literally removed from newspaper archives in libraries.
She also details the bold editorial choices her team made, including some unconventional, creative storytelling devices that transformed the audio story into what she called “radio theater.” Her editorial team also used a voice actor to revive the spirit of a Tulsa man, from a harrowing personal account they dug up in the Smithsonian. Though tough to revisit, his manuscript, KalaLea said, was an asset to the story.
“It was just a perfect opportunity,” KalaLea says. “We have somebody who was literally there who wrote the following week about what happened in Greenwood.”
She married that historical manuscript with the present-day voices of victims’ children/descendants, to demonstrate how generational trauma resurfaces to affect the present. Kala thinks audio is the perfect medium to make that story known.
“There's a certain richness when stories are passed down from one generation to the next that audio was really able to capture,” KalaLea said.