In the talk that I went to on Tuesday November 12th, 2019 the speaker Michelle Norris discussed her work with the Race Card Project. I really enjoyed this talk because Norris was taking a completely different approach to having those hard conversations about race in the US. She was explaining why she wanted to even do this project in the first place, and the was saying that she wanted to lubricate the conversation about race. The way that the Race Card Project worked was 200 post cards were sent out asking people do express race in only six words. Norris got a lot of things that she did not necessarily expect back. There were a lot of “no word for what I am” or “father was racist. I’m Not. Progress!”. All of these results were super interesting because people ended up writing a lot of things that they would probably never say in real life.
I really enjoyed this talk because it brought to light a lot more of the problems with how race is dealt with in this country, especially because most of what was being written on the race cards were things that people would not be comfortable to say out loud. One example that really stuck out to me was the example of a principal hiring a person named Jamal. This was because the principal wanted to promote more diversity in the school, and he assumed that Jamal was black due to his name. Then when he showed up, and he was not black the secretary said something along the lines of “oh I thought you would be taller”. To me this shows how we need a change in this country, which is why I respect what Michelle Norris is doing because she is trying to keep the conversation about race going, and change it for the better.
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