Isa Cruz

Last Saturday night, journalist and author Michele Norris spoke on race, difficult conversations and her book “Our Hidden Conversations: What Americans Really Think About Race and Identity,” as she delivered the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Lecture in Pickard Theater. The event, held each year in January, marks the anniversary of King’s 1964 visit to the College.

“The fraught reality of race in the United States includes both triumph and setbacks, which Dr. King’s life exemplified in both his public successes and the violent end he met before the age of 40,” Senior Vice President for Inclusion and Diversity Benje Douglas said while introducing Norris at the start of the event. “This lecture is meant to connect the dots from May 1964 to contemporary life.”

As Norris took the stage, she acknowledged the surreality of standing on the same campus that King once stood. She asked the audience to think of King not as a monument but as a man, describing how he changed his speaking schedule to visit the College after a group of students reached out to him.

“That’s something that’s more of the man than the monument, right? Someone who would be willing to change their schedule and come here, where it’s very cold, and spend time not just speaking to the community but in communion with the students,” Norris said. “Let us all be that kind of person.”

Norris described the impact of King’s legacy on her own life, including how his ideas have informed her work around race and identity. In particular, she said his belief in looking across barriers and trying to understand how others lived helped shape The Race Card Project, which she created with a simple concept: inviting people to join conversations on race by having them send in a postcard with their story in six words.

Reading some examples of stories submitted from people around the world, Norris spoke on the vast array of experiences, perspectives and histories reflected in six words. She explained that today the majority of submissions are digital, which allows contributors to attach longer backstories and photos along with their six words.

“I’ve shown you these pictures, because I want you to understand that I’m the conservator of these stories, but they’re not my stories,” Norris said. “I mainly hold them; I’m the vessel.”

While she said she initially expected the majority of stories about race to be from people of color, Norris was surprised to find many were actually submitted by white Americans. She explained that white Americans also reflected a wide range of perspectives on race in their six words, but a recurring idea was that they feel they have been “left out” of conversations around race and are tired of these discussions.

These responses seemed to stand out to many audience members, some of whom questioned Norris about them during the Q&A segment at the end of the night. After the event, attendee Will Fowler ’27 reflected on what can be done to increase openness toward conversations about race.

“She talked about how there’s this decreasing appetite for having this political dialogue and this dialogue around race,” he said. “Now, I’m very curious, does she think we’re having this conversation wrong? Is there a way we could fix this conversation to increase this appetite that we have for something that’s so important that it seems like we’re having less of?… What does that say about the conversations?”

After Norris concluded her lecture, Roux Distinguished Scholar Ayana Elizabeth Johnson joined her on stage for the panel portion of the event. They discussed Norris’s book, which features many of the six-word stories she has collected. Johnson asked how Norris chose which stories to include, especially when it came to ones she personally disagreed with or felt frustrated by.

“That is the point, as I’m holding a mirror up to America, you shouldn’t like everything you see. We’re talking about race. We’re talking about race in America. If you like everything you see, I have not done my job,” Norris said. “I just made a decision that, if I was going to do this, I was going to do it honestly.”

Norris and Johnson also explored the book’s recurring theme of dendrochronology—the scientific study of dating tree rings. Norris explained that she sees this as a metaphor for how The Race Card Project reflects the social climate as it changes over time. She noted that since 2010, she has collected stories through four different presidencies, a pandemic, several social movements and other global events.

“The reason I liken it to dendrochronology is because you cut down a tree, and the rings in the tree will tell you about the life of the tree and the surrounding community,” she said. “Black Lives Matter, #MeToo—all of it is captured and in individual stories.”

According to Norris, today’s social climate makes the words used in conversations around race all the more important, with certain words like “justice,” “diversity” and “privilege” being politicized and demonized. She encouraged young people to engage in dialogue with people who they disagree with and emphasized that trying to understand what someone means by a particular word can help these difficult conversations.

At the conclusion of the night, Norris left the audience with a six-word story of her own.

“Still more work to be done,” she said.