A well-known journalist and host of “All Things Considered” on National Public Radio, Michele Norris discussed her memoir and the role of conversations on race in America today.
“There is often grace in silence. But there is always power in understanding,” Norris writes in her book The Grace of Silence: A Memoir.
Norris’ lecture on Feb. 16 came in the midst of Black History Month, the buzz around Beyonce’s Superbowl performance, and the Black Lives Matter movement. The event was sponsored by the Division of Student Affairs and the Office of the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Affairs.
In 2008, Norris took a sabbatical from her radio program to follow the presidential campaign and, while traveling the country, developed two influential projects: NPR’s Backseat Book Club and the Race Card Project.
“They were suddenly experiencing something they never thought they’d see. Seeing an African-American family move into the White House for people who grew up in Jim Crow America was like saying, ‘Oh I’m just gonna go outside and reach up and touch the sun.’”
During her time following the presidential campaign she noticed something interesting happening—both a man of color and a female were running for the Democratic nomination, and there was another woman running on the vice-presidential ticket on the Republican side.
“[This] sparked a lot of conversations about race and gender,” Norris said.
Norris’ initial intention was to write a book about the conversations circulating around America. This also stemmed from a series she collaborated on for NPR called “Race in the 2008 Elections,” where she and a colleague, Steve Inskeep, put together a diverse group of voters from York, Penn.
“We just let them talk about issues and let them talk about their experiences and their viewpoints on race and identity and the world as they saw it,” Norris said.
The result was what Norris called “radio magic”—the voters in the focus group opened up and were comfortable enough to have an honest conversation about race. They were asked simple leading questions like, “If your son had dreadlocks, would he be treated differently?” This snowballed into bigger conversations around issues like, “Do black Americans make too much of race? Do white Americans underestimate race?”
The conversations delved into anecdotes and personal stories that inspired her to write a book about how Americans, in general, thought and talked about race.
“I wanted to understand America better at this interesting moment in American history,” Norris said.
These conversations also inspired the Race Card Project, a project where she invites people of all kinds of backgrounds to write their stories about race in just six sentences.
As she began to explore the conversations further, she began to encounter them in her own home, as well. The older people in Norris’ family told stories about their own histories and experiences.
“They were suddenly experiencing something they never thought they’d see,” Norris said. “Seeing an African-American family move into the White House for people who grew up in Jim Crow America was like saying, ‘Oh I’m just gonna go outside and reach up and touch the sun.’”
Discovering these stories she had never known about—these stories that had been kept from Norris for so long—inspired her to write them all down and dig deeper in order to fill in the holes in her family’s stories.
The most shocking one was her father’s.
Reading an excerpt from her memoir, Norris said, “As a young man, my father had been shot by a white policeman. He never talked about it. He never spoke about the incident after leaving Alabama and moving north. He never even told my mother. He took it to his grave.”
It happened when her father, a returning serviceman of color, was on his way to a building that was used to educate returning servicemen on the Constitution so that they could vote.
And like this one, many more stories could be told from many different families. In fact, Norris’ memoir includes many other stories from her family. These stories, she said, can be difficult to learn but are important to understand.
“Through these stories I have rediscovered part of my family’s wealth,” she said. “Not the kind of wealth that you can measure … but wealth that is treasured nonetheless because you understand where you come from.”
During the question-and-answer portion of the event, Norris opened up the conversation about race even wider, asking the audience members to consider their own experiences, of either privilege or of prejudice, and to think about where these feelings came from.
“I don’t want to weigh the next generation, particularly my own children, with tales of woe, but I want them to be grounded,” Norris said. “I want them to soar, and I want them to understand where they came from.”
Featured Image by Amelie Trieu / Heights Editor
