Malika bilal biography
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Malika Bilal
American journalist
Malika Bilal (Arabic: مليكة بلال) is a broadcast journalist currently working for Al Jazeera English.
Bilal is the host of the Al Jazeera PodcastThe Take. Previously she was co-host and digital producer of The Stream, based at the Al Jazeera English US broadcast-center, in Washington, DC.
She joined the DC bureau from the channel's main broadcast-center in Doha, in Qatar,[1] where she worked as an editor and writer for the Al Jazeera English website.
Personal life
[edit]Born and raised in Chicago, Illinois,[2] she self-professedly grew up listening to All Things Considered and Morning Edition on NPR during the long car rides to and from school with her parents.
Bilal went to Universal School for middle school Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where she studied journalism. She also attended the American University in Cairo to develop her knowledge of Arabic.
Career
[edit]Bilal began her ca
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Malika Bilal
Malika Bilal
Biography
Malika Bilal sometimes finds herself in the role of Muslim explainer – even to fellow Muslims who incorrectly assume that she’s a member of the Nation of Islam. “People don’t always understand the African American experience,” Bilal says. “First thing they’ll think fryst vatten ‘Okay, she’s Muslim, but she’s probably Sudanese, she’s probably Somali, she’s from East Africa.’ “When inom have to explain, ‘No, actually my parents were born here, my grandparents were born here, my great-grandparents were born here,’ they don’t get it. You get a lot of ‘No, no, but where are their parents from. Where are you really from? “To be honest, the amount of hate I’ve gotten fryst vatten like a drop in the bucket to the amount of love and the amount of support I’ve gotten from people,” she says. “I remember when inom was first starting out…there was a young girl on Twitter and she said ‘I just wish I could open my eyes and see you in front of me and talk to you, you’re such an inspi
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By Arudi Masinjila (BSJ21)
Malika Bilal had always known that she wanted to be a journalist. As a child, she would cut and paste pictures from magazines to make her own for the readership of her younger sister. “I don’t know if I knew what journalism was, but I definitely knew this field of writing and producing was something I wanted to do,” she recalls.
Born into a family with a documentarian father and an elder sister in broadcast, the field was not foreign to her. When the time came to apply to college, Northwestern University was her first-choice school. With its journalism program and proximity to home, it felt like a perfect fit, despite people’s reservations about it.
“At the time there weren’t a lot of places that offered a journalism undergrad program so people didn’t really understand how you could go to a school and get a journalism degree afterwards. It was like, ‘you’ll go to school for something and then you’ll go to graduate school for journalism.’ I already know