Michele Norris, a Washington Post columnist and former host of National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, repurposed the accusation of “playing the race card” by inventing the Race Card Project. In 2010, Norris began sharing postcards labeled “Race. Your Story. Six Words. Please Send.” People mailed them to Norris, who reported the results. TRCP won a Peabody Award in 2014, and Norris kept it going amid a national reckoning around diversity.
Norris’s Our Hidden Conversations: What Americans Really Think About Race and Identity (Simon & Schuster, out now) draws from the project’s vast archive.
How many stories has TRCP received?
We’ve cataloged more than half a million six-word stories via postcards, workshops, and digital submission. We don’t get many postcards anymore, and I love when we do because there’s something special about seeing someone’s story in their own handwriting.
Why do you ask for only six words?
Simple is best. Years ago, when I was a young beat reporter for the Washington Post, publisher Don Graham used to roll up to someone in the newsroom and ask, “Hey kiddo, what are you working on?” If your answer was convoluted, you ran the risk of talking yourself off the front page; if you could reduce a complex story to one sentence, it showed you had command of the narrative. That exercise has worked so well in asking people to consider a complicated, prickly topic. People tell their six-word stories with creativity, courage, humor, pith, pathos, and usually a full command of their narrative.
How did you organize this book around TRCP’s growing collection of materials?
I wanted to write a book that felt almost like a scrapbook, with pictures and indexes. The goal was to make sure my essays were buoyed by a river of stories that would present a 360-degree view of race and identity. My editor Mindy Marquez was fantastic, and Melissa Bear [COO at TRCP] has understood the power and possibility of this project from the get-go.
How have people’s self-revelations and primary concerns changed over time?
The stories that arrived 14 years ago tended to be optimistic and even simplistic. We had a lot of people saying, “Can’t we all just get along” or “Only one race. The Human Race.” But within a month or two, the cards started to get deep. “Reason I ended a sweet relationship.” “White. Not allowed to be proud.” “I’m only Asian when it’s convenient.”
“I will not ruin your bloodline.” That led to a wellspring of candor: more people talking about policing, about immigration, about how their lives were deepened by a DNA discovery.
In some cases, the cards were a bellwether. We started seeing cards about Trayvon Martin’s killing before it became national news, and about white Americans feeling invisible or displaced in “their own country” before those themes were bellowed at political rallies in the 2016 campaign. A lot of people want to discuss race, if they can find the right entry point.
How has building Our Hidden Conversations changed your perspective?
I’m much more willing to listen to someone I don’t agree with, much more aware of this country’s fault lines around race and the need to bridge them. America is known as the home of the brave, but it’s also the land of amnesia on a grand scale. There’s a conscious effort to skip past race or chastise those who examine it. You can’t fully understand this great country without examining race and its role in our public and private lives.
Do you have your own six-word story?
When I began TRCP, my six words were “Fooled them all not done yet,” as a Black girl who grew up in a largely white Midwestern town with a speech impediment. Who would have figured that I would grow up to make my living as a communicator? Over time, I’ve settled on a set of words that speaks to the road ahead for all of us: “Still more work to be done.”
