When Jeff Rogers was 16 years old he started referring to himself as a “halfrican.” Jeff has a black father and a white mother. And like many teenagers, he was trying to figure out who he was. I met Jeff back in 1998, and I gave him a tape recorder to document his life for our Teenage Diaries series.

I started thinking about Jeff when we produced our Teenage Diaries Revisited series last year for NPR. On today’s show, Jeff’s original teenage diary, plus…a conversation I recently had with him, more than 15 years later.

-Joe

You can find Jeff @ProfessorJGrey on twitter.