Fourteen years ago, journalist Michele Norris began distributing postcards with a straightforward prompt: “Race. Your story. Six words. Please send.” At the time she believed no one wanted to talk about race — but the outpouring of responses proved otherwise.
Norris’ Race Card Project gave individuals an outlet for thoughts they might not otherwise articulate: “You’re pretty for a Black girl.” “My ancestors massacred Indians near here.” “Don’t fear me, I’m like you.” She would ultimately receive more than 500,000 of these six-word responses, originating from all 50 states and more than 100 countries.
Norris’ new book, “Our Hidden Conversations: What Americans Really Think About Race and Identity,” archives and expands upon these postcards through a mix of photographs, first-person stories and Norris’ own deeply reported essays. On Tuesday, May 14, she presented the work at a Village Books event in conversation with former Bellingham council member Kristina Michele Martens.
“I do think this is my legacy work — not that people listened to me, but that I helped people listen to each other,” Norris said at the event, which took place at Whatcom Museum’s Old City Hall.
Norris is currently an opinion columnist with the Washington Post and is well-remembered for hosting “All Things Considered” from 2002–2011 on NPR, where she was the first Black female host. But the Race Card Project allowed her to dive into a different type of reporting: one that she describes as an “exercise in curiosity,” or even “eavesdropping with permission.”
“It’s been humbling for me as a journalist,” Norris told Cascadia Daily News. “Usually I’m showing up to talk about race because something in the news … requires that journalists suddenly pay attention to matters of race and identity. In this case, people are setting the agenda. And it’s not based on the headlines; it’s based on what’s in their head, and in their heart.”
As opposed to politics, responses in “Our Hidden Conversations” address deeply intimate matters: marriage, families, memories and all manner of formative life experiences. Notably, many of the responses came from white Americans.
“Racial exhaustion is real … and yet my inbox is filled every day,” Norris said. “That tells me that people are looking for a place to be heard. That tells me that I created this entire project based on a mistake: I thought nobody wanted to talk about race, and apparently they do. What they don’t want is to yell at each other. They want to talk about personal experience.”
In one of the evening’s most impactful moments, Martens and Norris took turns reading these responses aloud to the audience. Some are bracingly honest (“I was taught fear of others”), others humorous (“never eat fried chicken in public”) and even disconcerting (“white privilege: enjoy it, earned it”). But Norris said the project is about “holding a mirror to America” — and “if you’re holding a mirror to America around race, you should not like everything you see.”
Some cards flip traditional scripts: The response “lady, I don’t want your purse” prompts readers to consider why they might instinctively clutch their belongings when a person of a different race walks by. (The Race Card Project team picks a six-word response for their business cards; this is the phrase Norris herself chose.)
Norris also underlined how these “mini-essays” are launch pads for more nuanced, deeply reported journalism. If the six-word responses function as “rivers that flow through the entire book,” then the essays are anchoring islands, allowing her to further explore the “tendrils of American history that reach forward and backward.” Norris said she studied how jazz and classical musicians compose music with movement, and aimed to apply a similar flow to the book.
Chapters combine six-word responses with Norris’ own commentary and research; for example, a particularly challenging response — “Black babies cost less to adopt” — led to a chapter on transracial adoption. Norris said working on the Race Card Project and book was “an education,” just as valuable as anything she’d learned in college or in her journalism career — and hopes it might be an education for others, too.
Ultimately “Our Hidden Conversations” is both a window and a mirror: It gives readers glimpses into the lives of others, while also prompting them to reflect on their own beliefs, biases and identities. She’s already heard from readers who’ve used the book as a tool for dialogue at book clubs, church or even the dinner table. Beyond this, Norris said these conversations allow people to “do the diagnostic work” necessary to uncover what’s needed in their own communities.
“Many of us have an idea that we’re still dealing with a race in terms of a civil rights construct that’s often as binary as Black people and white people,” Norris said. “There are a lot of people who feel really left out of that; you’ll notice the title of the book is ‘what Americans think about race and identity,’ because a lot of people don’t feel racist — but everybody has an identity.”
And while the Race Card Project explicitly confronts these issues, matters of identity and belonging are present across Norris’ body of work. This includes her memoir, “The Grace of Silence,” about her family’s “complex racial legacy,” and the podcast “Your Mama’s Kitchen,” which focuses on the “meals and memories that make us who we are.”
“It makes sense because much of what I do as a journalist — and really everything I do in my columns, my podcast, my writing, my authorship — is to try to create a space where people can see themselves and see others,” Norris said. “And also, [to] create a space where people whose stories aren’t often told have an entry point — so that their stories are included, too.”
Info: theracecardproject.com.
Cocoa Laney is CDN’s lifestyle editor; reach her at cocoalaney@cascadiadaily.com; 360-922-3090 ext. 128.
