Michele Norris is a former journalist on NPR and now is the head of the Race Project. The Race Project asks people to describe their experience and relationship with race in six words or less. She started by leaving postcards everywhere she went, with the address already written on the cards so that they could just stick them in the mail and the cards would be sent right to her office. Norris has been collecting these cards over the course of the years. During her presentation, she shared a number of cards with us. A lot were as I expected, minorities talking about their experiences. I was surprised to see that there were a lot of cards about gender or sexuality because neither are what the project was initially designed for. Michele Norris said that this surprised her too, but what she discovered is that when people are given an avenue to expose their true feelings, they are going to take it.
I think my favorite moment about her talk was who she handled differing opinions. She showed a race card from a white man from Wisconsin. It said something along the lines of “I’m white and I pay for it.” When she put this card on the scene, the mood of the room definitely shifted, and you could hear grumbles and objections spike up in the room. She immediately addressed these by saying that the race project is designed to facilitate conversation and does not aim to judge. Everyone has a story to share, and every single person’s story should be valued equally to each other’s. I think that this point is really important because that it something that we as Americans fail to do a lot. Our highly polarized, partisan world means that people judge without listening. I think that the Williamson article echoed this idea of listening and trying to understand one another, which is part of why I liked both that article and this talk so much.
Be First to Comment