Hard conversations

It started 14 years ago with a postcard and a simple invitation:

Race.

Your thoughts.

6 words.

Please send.

  Michelle Norris, a widely respected Black journalist, hardly expected the huge response she received – first on thousands of postcards, then an avalanche of electronic replies when she expanded the project to a website.

  The Race Card Project, as she called it, was intended to be a conversation starter. It has been that, and much more, and yet it can be argued that the conversation needs to be expanded so much farther. So many of our conversations remain hidden.

  Norris tells her story, and many others, in a new book, Our Hidden Conversations: What Americans Really Think About Race and Diversity. A friend kindly loaned me her copy (thanks, Patti!), and over the last week I’ve made my way through its 400-plus pages.

  Yes, it’s a big book, in a big format, on glossy paper with lots of color photos – a fitting format for its subject. Reading it blew me away. It is so much more than I expected.

  “I started this exercise because I thought no one wanted to talk about race,” Norris says. Turns out, a lot of people do – at least in the safety of the relative anonymity allowed by a postcard or an email.

  Norris says the six words of her invitation “could make you gasp or smile or wonder about the full story behind that brevity.” In her book she explores many of those stories more deeply.

  It is truly amazing what can be said in only six words, a miracle of compression.

·       I’m their Mom, not their nanny.

·       No, where are you really from?

·       That’s funny. You don’t look Jewish.

·       I forget I am not White.

·       I can’t help being born White.

·       Black babies cost less to adopt.

  And hundreds more. Plus, I learned these things, among others:

·       Jan. 1 was Heartbreak Day on the plantation, when families might be split up as slaves were sold to pay off debts.

·       One in five marriages in America is interracial.

·       The phrase “the real McCoy” is named after a Black inventor, Elijah McCoy, the son of former slaves who escaped to Canada. In 1871 he invented a lubricating device for steam locomotives that became the industry standard.

·       The phrase “cotton pickin’ ” was first used to describe slaves – and only much later, as when I first heard it as a child, as a euphemism for “goldarned,” itself a euphemism.

·       How do you define racism? If you’re Black or Brown, Norris says, you probably don’t need a definition, though a lot of White people do. It’s a lot like the question posed to Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” It’s an act of avoidance.

·       Book burning is only the beginning. In a library in Berlin where Nazis once burned books is this bronze plaque: “’That was but a prelude; where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people as well.”

·       The horrors of lynching are such that even today in the South some communities won’t allow plaques to mark the sites where lynchings occurred.

When Barack Obama was elected president, some people spoke of America becoming “post-racial.” That notion was shattered, of course, when a certain White man came to the White House.

  When George Floyd was murdered by a White cop whose smirk as he did it betrayed his conviction that he could get away with it, there was talk of a racial awakening or reckoning in America. Such a national conversation has not happened, though it must if the issue of race is not to be our national undoing. This book is a major step toward such a conversation.

  Read more about it at https://michele-norris.com/theracecard/ or https://theracecardproject.com/.