For decades, listeners have grown accustomed to what is widely regarded as “NPR voice” – an accentless voice speaking in a low register and, more often than not, White and male.

Then came Ayesha Rascoe, a breakout star from the NPR Politics podcast who in 2022 became the first Black woman to anchor Weekend Edition. 

“I think about that responsibility and I take it very seriously,” Rascoe said. She said she constantly thinks about her late grandmother, a sharecropper from North Carolina, as she works. “I think about her, and I think about my whole family, and I never want to make them not proud of me. I never want them to look at what I’m doing and say, ‘What is she out here doing? How is she representing us? We didn’t raise her that way.’”

And much of that representation has to do with Rascoe’s voice itself — a voice that has been subject to racist listener feedback, comments that she should “sound more professional” or, simply, that people don’t like the way she talks.

Still, Rascoe leads on-air with authority and empathy, careful to select stories that speak to her own lived experiences and reach a wider and more diverse audience of NPR listeners. When she took over the Weekend Edition anchor chair, she launched with a series about heroes of the Civil Rights movement. She started by speaking with her mother, Phyllis Jones, and an uncle, Ben Thorpe, about living through the desegregation of their rural North Carolina town in 1970. 

Said Rascoe of the experience, “I have a voice that is not a voice that people necessarily expect — but it’s mine.”