Our Hidden Conversations: What Americans Think About Race

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, HOST: Well, we turn now to race and identity in America, which our next guest has been exploring for over a decade. The Emmy and Peabody Award-winning journalist Michele Norris was on her first book tour back in 2010 when she began inviting strangers to send her six words about race on a postcard. Well, she ended up collecting more than half a million personal stories and online forum. It’s the basis for her latest book, “Our Hidden Conversations.” And she joined Walter Isaacson to discuss why these conversations are so incredibly crucial.

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WALTER ISAACSON, CO-HOST, AMANPOUR AND CO.: Thank you, Bianna. And, Michele Norris, welcome to the show.

NORRIS: So good to be with you, Walter.

ISAACSON: You’ve got this wonderful bestseller of a book and it’s based on a project called The Race Card Project. Explain what that is.

NORRIS: It started with postcards. I wrote a book about my family’s very complex racial legacy in 2010. And when I went out in the world to talk about that book, I knew I would be talking to audiences about race. I was hosting a show at that time called “All Things Considered” and it was a chance for me to leave the studio and to get out into America at an interesting time, a black family had just moved into the White House then. But I thought no one wanted to talk about race. And so, I thought they needed an invitation, an on-ramp. And so, I printed postcards at Kinkos on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington D.C. And the postcards were simple. I actually have one with me. This is what they look like. And they said, raise your thoughts six words, please send. And the idea was that people would take this big toxic subject and try to distill it into the thing that was most important to them, their memory, their lament their question, their anthem. And I had no idea if people would actually send the cards back. And of the 200 cards that I printed initially, about 30 percent of them came back to me. Some of them handed to me at book events. But many of them, people would find a stamp. They would write their six words, they would find a stamp, they would find a mailbox, and then they would send them to me. And because so many of those cards were so interesting from the very beginning, I thought, you know, I need to keep going with this.

ISAACSON: And it became what was known as The Race Card Project. I mean, you made it larger than that, right?

NORRIS: Yes. Well, I called it The Race Card Project from the very beginning and maybe, you know, I didn’t know what it would turn into, but maybe in my thought process I was thinking, if I call it a project then it’s an actual thing and I have to, you know, go through with it. But I really start to sort of to see it as a project very quickly, Walter, because, you know, when the cards came back — you may — viewers may be thinking, what could you possibly say in just six words? People were really unburdening themselves. You know, the reason I ended a sweet relationship. White, not allowed to be proud. I’m only Asian when it’s convenient. Last night, they burned Roscoe’s house. Very intimate stories, very open stories. And then, eventually, we wound up creating a website because we wanted to share those stories with other people. And that’s when things got really interesting because as much as I love the postcards in the handwriting on the postcards, now that most of the submissions — and we’ve received more than 500,000 and we have tens of thousands waiting to be officially archived. Once people started sending in the submissions digitally, they could send a backstory. They could explain what they meant by their six words. And that’s when things got deep and interesting and they would leave an e-mail address and their name. This is the other thing that was amazing about this, is people weren’t sending these stories anonymously. They were signing their names. And once they started sending them in digitally, leaving their contact information so I could call them and do oral histories with them.

ISAACSON: Let me read you something from the introduction. You said, these stories revealed an obscured truth. People weren’t running away from talking about race, a lot of them were desperate to discuss it through the prism of personal experience.

NORRIS: Yes, yes. The cards are very intimate. You will see that if you go to the website, you will see that if you read the book. People are writing about their children, their marriage, their co-workers, their commute, the visit that they made to the hospital and how they were treated when they tried to check in. Their stories that are so much closer to the ground. And as a journalist, it was very humbling for me because I have been writing about race for years, but I realized that I didn’t have access to certain parts of people’s lives. When we write about race as journalists, we’re usually doing it because something has happened that merits our attention. And so, we’re writing about someone crossing a milestone, someone saying something that maybe they shouldn’t have said, something bad happening somewhere. In this case, people are setting their own agenda and they’re telling us, this is what’s important to me. And many of the things that people write about, adoption, blended families, you know, what it felt like to be in America after 9/11 if you were Muslim or North African or part of the Arab diaspora. We’re not getting to those stories. And that was the part that was humbling to me. This project was like finding a taproot into an America that even though I have been practicing the craft of journalism for more than three decades, this was a taproot into an America that I didn’t previously have access to.

ISAACSON: Do you think that Americans would want to talk more about race, but they’re inhibited on both sides?

NORRIS: Yes, I do. And I — it’s interesting because we say, we don’t talk about race, but actually, if you watch the news, if you listen to people in life, we’re always talking about race and we’re always talking about identity. So, I called the book “What Americans Really Think About Race and Identity” because that is a continuum. People don’t talk about it across difference though. And that’s the thing that I hope that this book will allow people to do is to kind of peer over the fence. People talk amongst themselves about race and identity in their tribe, in their cohort, in their comfortable circle, in their family, but they don’t always reach across that, you know, reach across some sort of cultural bridge to talk to someone else.

ISAACSON: Suddenly, it feels there’s a backlash against that, that people just don’t want to talk about it. What’s causing that backlash or — and what could we do about it?

NORRIS: Well, you know, there are several things causing the backlash. I mean, we saw America go through an interesting moment after the killing of George Floyd, and it was an awakening for a lot of people. A lot of people started to put Black Lives Matter signs and other bumper stickers on their cars and their windows. A lot of companies were making commitments and investments in trying to bring people together to talk about, you know, these issues that divide us. And then there was a backlash or perhaps also a level of exhaustion. And I’m really honest about this, and I don’t, you know, necessarily fuss at people for this because it is exhausting. I think a lot of people are exhausted by the topic. Racial exhaustion is a real thing. And a lot of people feel like we’re not solving the problem. A lot of people who are white feel like when we do discuss the problem, the fingers are always pointed at them. And there’s no way for them to enter the conversation without feeling shame, guilt, anger, you know, some sort of a program. And so, they’re just like, you know, I don’t even want to be a part of this.

ISAACSON: Well, wait, wait. Drill down on that with white people feeling uncomfortable that they’re being blamed. And do you think that they have felt that — you know, a lot of people felt that they can’t talk about race honestly and that maybe we really need to lance the boil, I mean, go even deeper on this conversation?

NORRIS: Well, you know, and it’s — and I’m not speaking in generalizations because I’m not trying to speak for all white people. I want to be clear on that. But the thing that I’ve learned in this project came out of a surprising result. The majority of the years that we’ve been doing this, 14 years, the majority of the submissions have come from white Americans. And so, I have had a rather unique perch here in listening to white people talk about race. That was not something I anticipated. And so, I understand that there are a lot of different dimensions to this, racial fatigue is one of them. And fear around race in different dimensions is also one of them. The fear that you’ll say the wrong thing. That is a justifiable fear, because if you try to express yourself and you don’t say something — if you say, something that’s in politics, you can get canceled. You can face a level of rejection. You will be labeled. And so, some people think, I don t even want to be a part of that. Sometimes people do participate and they feel like there are no answers, that people want this to be solved. That’s where the notion of America being post-racial perhaps came from. They want to just get over this hill. And this is not something that’s easy to do. And so, since it doesn’t happen quickly, people pull away. But we should be honest that there’s another category of people in that backlash that feel completely differently, that are actually invested in a divided America. And so, they don’t want people necessarily to come together to figure out how to work together. They don’t want to have conversations about race. And the people who are in that category, who are invested into a divided America, are busy at work. They’re spending a lot of money. They are doing focus groups. They are figuring out how message to gin up people’s fears, to make sure that we remain divided. And the people who are invested in a divided America are usually doing that because it benefits them. And it can be easy to prey upon people’s fears and these issues. I write honestly about this in the book. If you have spent time in America, in our wonderful country, if you’ve understood its history and its reality through the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s up to now. And you have looked at how minorities in this country have been treated over time. You might reasonably be concerned about becoming one. And that fear is something that can be fertilized and can also be exploited. And in some of those cases, when you actually talk to them, when they actually face their fear and you talk to them about what they’re afraid of, it’s interesting they are afraid of payback in some cases. How will I be treated if I’m in the minority status? What will happen to my kids? Will it be harder for them to move through life? And on the other side, you know, these cards are often feel like — the stories are often feel like they’re a conversation with each other. On the other side, you know, people who are part of an at present minority, who were part of — you know, who are black, who are Latino, who are Asian, particularly people who are black, will respond in a way that suggests, you know, we’re not looking for payback. We’re looking for paychecks. We want to move forward. And in order to move forward, you can’t hold someone else back.

ISAACSON: You start this book with a quote from the poet Lucille Clifton, sort of a personal thing. It says, they asked me to remember their memories, and I keep on remembering mine. I’m going to turn it back to you personally. How did your family members, you know, your father, your grandmother, provoked this project?

NORRIS: There were things in my family that were not talked about. I learned that my father was trying to enter a building where returning veterans, and he was one of them, he had served in the Navy, were entering a build in Birmingham, Alabama to learn all they could about the Constitution in order to pass poll tests. And when he was trying to enter that building, police officers tried to stop him in a scuffle and suit, and my father was wounded when a bullet grazed the side of his leg. He had scar on his legs, knew that, but he never talked about that. He never ever talked that incident. And I found out about it from an uncle who shared it with me. A lot of people whose families experienced the horrors of life in Jim Crow America didn’t always tell their children about every single aspect of that because they wanted the next generation to soar. And I realized I benefited from that in some ways because my parents didn’t want me to carry that anger forward. They wanted me see the possibilities in America. But I also have benefited understanding these stories now and being able to share them with my own children, not so they will be angry, but so they understand the path that we have traveled as a country and the path that we have traveled as a nation. And that speaks to this moment that we’re in where so many people don’t want to acknowledge the worst parts of our history.

ISAACSON: You talk about the need to look back in our history and to see and talk about and think about where we failed. And there’s a chapter in your book, which I love, which is called “Memory Wars.” And it’s really about how do we teach the civil war? How do teach more importantly, slavery. And you say, America has never had a comprehensive and widely embraced examination of slavery and its lasting impact. And there’s a simple reason, the United States does not yet have the stomach to look over its shoulder and stare directly at the evil on which this great country stands. Explain that to me and also wrestle with the fact that even though a lot of people would agree with you, that could also become something that has now been very divisive to talk about how we’re all built on an evil foundation.

NORRIS: It’s a very difficult moment to do it right now, in particular, because there are these wars over the teaching of history, because there is a concerted effort to erase that history or suppress that history. There have been moments of possibility that have been perhaps missed opportunities. And I hope that we face one of these moments again and soon so that we can figure out how to look at a history that we can’t erase. You know, other countries that have been able to move by past this, and I compare America to Germany, not to compare the Holocaust and slavery. You know, I’m not trying to set up comparative evils, but contrasting responses to a historical fissure. And America is very different than Germany. Germany decided, and in some ways they did it because the rest of the world was standing over their shoulder and pointing a finger at them, but they decided to figure out how to move forward by looking at a difficult past through a lens of honor and atonement for people — for the victims, people who were Jewish, who were Roma, who were queer or what we now call trans, who were marginalized, who, in some cases, were disabled. And they honor them and they teach that history in schools. If you become a police officer, you learn about this history. If you enter the military, you learn about this history. We have been unable to do that. And, you know, you’ve heard me say this, Walter, in America, it feels like we are the land of the free and the home of amnesia. We have gone through a willful amnesia, a willful forgetting, because that is a very difficult story to tell, understandably, understandably difficult story to tell. But unless we do tell that story, it is hard for us to reach any kind of reconciliation with the past and very hard for us to understand the lingering impacts of slavery, the lingering impacts of bondage, the lingering impacts of the period after slavery through reconstruction and through Jim Crow America. People often want to suppress this history because they don’t want someone else to feel bad. They don’t want to feel bad themselves. They don’t want their children to feel bad. It robs other people of the opportunity, though, to understand their history and to understand the triumph over those things. For instance, as an African-American, you rob people of the triumph of understanding how they overcame that history. If you look at literacy in America, black people who came to America as the enslaved were not allowed to learn how to read and write. After slavery, there was an almost 7,000 percent increase in literacy because there was a barn burning effort across the country. People were hungry to learn, to educate themselves. That is an incredible story to tell. So, you can balance. Yes, you have to be clear-eyed and talk about the horrors of slavery, but you can also talk about the moral triumphs, the human triumphs. And you can also, in looking back at the horrors, understand where we have come as a country. And you — if you understand where you started and where we have landed and where we can go, if we are willing to look at this history honestly, it is a benchmark that helps you appreciate where you are now and set your steps, order your steps, so you can get to somewhere better and do that in a way that perhaps does not marginalize people in the same way, does not demonize people on the same way, and allows people to work together, even if they do not agree. In a divided America, we have to figure out how we can work together, even with — if we don’t agree.

ISAACSON: So, after all of this, what six words would you offer up today if it were you?

NORRIS: Well, we do want it to be over. That is where the post-racial — the idea of a post-racial America comes from. That is where the fight over so-called critical race theory comes from, we want it to be over, but there’s still more work to be done. That’s my six words, still more work to be done.

ISAACSON: Well, as I’d say, let’s talk about it honestly, would be mine, and thank you for doing so. Michele, thank you for being with us.

NORRIS: Thank you so much.