On November 12, 2019, Peabody Award-winning journalist, NPR host, and author of The Grace of Silence Michele Norris came to the University of Richmond to discuss The Race Card Project. Founded by Norris in 2010, she has turned a flippant phrase into a meaningful discussion about race. Not expecting really anyone to respond, Norris began the project while on a book tour for her memoir The Grace of Silence. At different stops on the tour, Norris and her team left postcards that asked the responders to write six words about their experience, perception, questions, observations, or any thoughts they had on race. Soon, Norris began getting postcards from states she hadn’t even toured and realized she might have found a mechanism for facilitating a conversation our country so desperately needs.
Since the project’s conception, Norris has received over 500,000 postcards, both physical and online, and has a team dedicated just to archiving the postcards. I was personally fascinated not only by the responses she shared but specifically by the decision to limit the responses to just six words. Norris explained her thought process, saying that if she asked people to write an essay or a paragraph she thought they’d never respond because they would think it’s too much work but if she asked for a sentence responders would try to pass off an essay as a sentence. Norris concluded that she would need to make it very specific and with five words being deemed not long enough, she settled on six. Her approach clearly is working as more people than I would have ever expected have responded, taking time out of their days to contribute to a meaningful conversation about race. It gives me hope that the United States is moving towards a place where we can have these difficult conversations on such a large scale in person and in more than six words.
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