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St. Paul, Minn.

Aspen Ideas Festival: The Race Card Project

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Michele Norris
Michele Norris, co-host of All Things Considered on NPR, is author of a new memoir, "The Grace of Silence."
Courtesy of Random House

After writing her family memoir and thinking about her race and cultural identity, Michele Norris decided to start a conversation about race, and ask others to describe their feelings in six words. It's called The Race Card Project.

My idea was to use these little black postcards to get the conversation started. But I quickly realized once I hit the road on my book tour that I didn't really need that kind of incentive. All over the country people who came to hear about my story wound up sharing their own.

Despite all the talk about America's consternation or cowardice when it comes to talking about race, I seemed to have found auditorium after auditorium full of people who were more than willing to unburden themselves on this prickly topic.

So the postcards that were supposed to serve as a conversation starter wound up instead serving as an epilogue.

Michele Norris and others "performed" these statements and talked about what they mean, in a special event held at the 2014 Aspen Ideas Festival.

From the original Race Card Project

Carol Zachary of Washington, D.C., has puzzled over fragments of memories from her childhood — bits of mysterious and uncomfortable history — for years. This history centers on an envelope she was given by her grandfather when she was 9 years old, and it led her to submit her six words to The Race Card Project: "Grandfather's poker gift, a hanging invitation." (More)

Alex Sugiura, of Brooklyn:"I have always thought I've had a particularly strange face," he explains. "I looked at my parents growing up and I didn't see their faces in my face — I did see some combination, some mixture." When he looked in the mirror, he says, he didn't see a "typical American face." (More)

Jessica Hong, of Philadelphia: "I think the question of my ethnicity wouldn't bother me so much if it was a true inquiry about the substance of who I am and what makes me ME (including but not limited to my ethnicity). But more often then not, I find that the desire to know "what" I am seems to be motivated by an anxiety about the unknown, an anxiousness to know which category of people to put me in." (More)