A contributing columnist and consultant at the Washington Post, Norris is founder of “The Race Card Project,” which has collected post card narratives, from all 50 states and 96 countries.
As the discussion began, Norris asked the audience to provide their definition of the word, “race card.” After noting the negative connotations, she added her own interpretation.
“It means shut up. It’s an elegant way of saying ‘please stop talking. You’re making me uncomfortable.’ So, I use the term to stoke a conversation instead,” she said.
Norris explained how she took a negative and turned it into a vehicle that encourages people to think and talk about their legacies with race as the core, starter question.
Even so, she added, the initial responses surprised her.
“Since I am a woman of color,” Norris said, “I thought most responses would come from people of color, but I was wrong.”
In the almost 13 years she’s been doing the project, Norris said that people who are members of the “majority culture” and people from “parts of the diaspora” have been part of the conversation.
This includes Muslims, Asian, Latinos, disabled and even individuals with red hair. They talk about the stereotypes and false expectations of them based on how they look, locations of their births and their differences from the majority culture.
Before engaging the audience with her project, Norris detailed how she started. It began after publishing her memoir,The Grace of Silence, where she wrote about her family's complex racial legacy. In Birmingham, Alabama, for example, she spoke of how her father kept secret how he was shot in the leg by white, Birmingham policemen for simply trying to exercise his right to vote.
“While the wound was superficial, the experience was not and the story remained submerged for decades,” Norris detailed.
“He didn’t even tell my mother. But my mother also had a secret. She never spoke about the years she worked as an itinerant Aunt Jemima, traveling to small towns conducting pancake mix demonstrations, dressed in a hoop skirt and apron with a bandanna on her head.”
She said her parents, who were postal workers, “kept those stories to themselves because they wanted their children to soar. They didn’t want to weigh down our pockets with tales of woe.”
Norris said that although her parents armed their children with “ambition instead of anxiety,” she came to realize that she was also shaped by the “weight of their silence.”
Norris embraced her family’s complex legacies. But the revelations led her to consider another core question:
“How well do we really know the people who raised us?”
That internal inquiry led to powerful external action.
Norris detailed how she printed 200 postcards in 2010 then issued a call to action. She asked people to think about the word “race” and then distill their thoughts, memories, emotions, experiences and perspectives down to one sentence with six words.
Norris described how about 30% of those initial postcards came back. Overwhelmed by the responses, she printed additional cards and received even bigger responses. Norris then embarked on a 35-city book tour leaving cards behind for people to fill out and send back.
Now, 13 years later, The Race Card Project possesses an archive of more than 500,000 personal narratives from people in all 50 states and more than 96 countries.
In a 2020 interview with one of her sponsors, Capital One, Norris described her intent.
“As a journalist, I wanted to share some of these stories. I thought the world would benefit from seeing people speak their truth, and saying things out loud that we don't normally hear people say out loud,” Norris explained. “We invited people to look at these cards on our website, then we created a form for people to submit cards digitally.”
She also shared some of the responses she’s received with the SLU audience.
“Asian Americans, we the ultimate invisibles.”
“Must we forget our confederate ancestors?”
“Hated for being a white cop.”
“The invisible Arab until Sept. 12th.”
Norris then shared a card from someone who wrote: “My father was racist. I am not!”
“He wants you to know that he has evolved,” Norris said. “It’s only six words but there’s some sort of higher short story involved. He evolved but did his dad? What was the relationship or the holidays like?”
Putting a card on screen where a young girl asked: “Did my grandpa attend lynchings?” Norris expounded on the relevance of those six words and how people use them to try to figure “something out” about themselves.
There was an interesting exchange between Norris and a young attendee, perhaps a student. A card on screen showed a young lady, in water, back turned to the camera with the words, “Feeling uncomfortable in my own skin” imposed on the card.
At first glance, the woman seems attractive and confident but the young man noted that this was not her “everyday” and it may be her attempt to “code switch” from a more chaotic life. The card elicited a robust conversation that night about what’s behind a person’s words and drove home the point that you can’t judge a life by a picture.
Norris showed another card that read: “Married, male, 65, gray, overweight, invisible.”
She noted how in the beginning of her project she received numerous cards from people of color expressing similar feelings of invisibility. But, she added, around 2014, she started receiving cards from white men who felt America was looking past them and toward other races and ethnicities.
“That was very interesting to me,” Norris confessed. “It meant that there are feelings out there that we (as a society) aren’t catching.”
Norris said the Race Card Project adds to the richness of America’s soil. The project, she added, is coming to life through conversations in schools, dinner tables and workplaces. Even if people don’t share their personal stories, “they can listen and learn so much just by visiting the website.”
“In a small, but significant way,” Norris said in her Capital One interview, “these six-word stories are contributing in vast ways to the discussion on race and equality.”