- [Narrator] Support for "Overheard With Evan Smith" comes from HillCo Partners, a Texas government affairs consultancy, Claire and Carl Stuart, Christine and Philip Dial, and the Eller Group specializing in crisis management, litigation and public affairs communication.

Ellergroup.com.

- I'm Evan Smith.

She's a senior contributing editor at MSNBC, a former Washington Post opinion columnist, and the former co-host of NPR's "All Things Considered."

Her most recent book, "Our Hidden Conversations: "What Americans Really Think About Race and Identity," is a New York Times bestseller.

She's Michele Norris.

This is "Overheard."

(lively music) A platform and a voice is a powerful thing.

(audience applauding) You've really turned the conversation around about what leadership should be about.

Are we blowing this?

Are we doing the thing we shouldn't be doing by giving in to the attention junkie?

As an industry, we have an obligation to hold ourselves to the same standards that we hold everybody else.

- Two.

This is "Overheard."

(audience applauding) (audience cheering) - Michele Norris, welcome.

It's good to see you.

- Evan, it's so good to be here.

We've been trying to do this for a while.

- We have been.

Well, finally it worked out.

And never at a more important time than right now, right?

- Well, the old folks say "When it's right, it's right."

- It's right.

And it's the rightest time to be talking about the subject of this terrific book.

Congratulations on it.

- Thank you.

- And your success with it.

"Our Hidden Conversations.

This goes back to The Race Card Project.

I mentioned to you backstage, I can't believe it's been 14 years since The Race Card Project launched, and it's been extraordinary.

And, of course, it produced the material for this book.

But to talk about it, remind people, if they don't know, tell them about the origins of this.

- First of all, just thank you so much for having me here.

- Sure.

- It's great to be... Austin's one of my favorite cities.

- [Evan] Good.

- So I always look forward to...

I'm gonna see if I can get out of town without buying a pair of cowboy boots.

(audience chuckling) - It happens.

- It does happen.

- Yeah.

- I've been to Allens more than a few times.

This started with postcards.

- [Evan] Yeah.

- I wrote a book 14 years ago called "The Grace of Silence," and it was about my family's complex racial legacy.

I originally was planning to write a book about what Americans talk and think about race at that time.

But in the run up to, and then after the election to Barack Obama, the older people in my family, older African Americans, started shedding stories.

And I realized I had an interesting story tell in my family.

And when I went out in the world, I was on a sabbatical, I was on a 35-city book tour, on sabbatical from NPR.

And I knew I was gonna be going out into the world talking about race because my book was about my family's very complex racial legacy.

And Evan, I was concerned because I had been conditioned to think that no one wanted to talk about race.

So I thought, "What can I do to engage people?"

Because it was a chance for me to get out of the studio and be out in the world.

I actually wanted to talk to people while I was on book tour.

So I wanted a vehicle to create conversation.

And that's where the postcards came in.

- Yeah.

- I went and created postcards and they said, "Race.

Your thoughts.

Please send."

- [Evan] Right.

- And I printed 200 of them at a local Kinko's in Washington, D.C. - Right.

- And distributed them.

And I didn't know what would come back to me.

- Well, in fact, I think the hack here, the really interesting twist is it was race.

Six words.

- Six words.

- Right?

- Yes.

I left out that important piece.

- Right, race.

Your thoughts.

Six words, please send.

So you limited people to six words.

And how extraordinary to see the response, and how creative people were, and how meaningful the responses were limited to just six words.

- Yeah.

- Right.

Yeah.

- Yeah, and I thought because it's postcard, you didn't have much time.

And also, I figured if I asked for a sentence... - [Evan] Yeah.

- People would give me a whole paragraph and say it was a sentence.

And if I asked for a paragraph, oh boy, that's too much.

I don't wanna do that.

So six words just seemed to work.

And of the 200 cards we printed, about 30% came back.

And then I was off to the races, and I got my publisher to print cards.

And everywhere I went, I was leaving these postcards all over the place.

And when they started to come back, I realized, "Wait a minute.

Maybe people actually do wanna have this conversation."

You would be surprised.

You'd be surprised at what people can pack into six words.

White not allowed to be proud.

Only Asian when it's...

I'm only Asian when it's convenient.

Reason I ended a sweet relationship.

She called me Johnny Blue Eyes.

You said dirt, so I scrubbed.

Really deep sentence.

Yeah, I mean, amazing because you might not know or you might not think on the front end of this that people would be as thoughtful.

- Yeah.

- Right?

But people really rose to the challenge here, didn't they?

- They did.

- You've gotten back more than half a million of these cards over time?

- Well, when we published the book, we were at a half a million, and because of the publicity around the book, and frankly, the times we're living in.

- [Evan] Yeah.

- We're well over 700,000 now.

And they come from all 50 states.

We have submissions that have come in from more than 100 countries.

- Amazing.

- And I often don't know how people find us, particularly overseas.

- Yeah.

- And they're writing sometimes about race, and their thoughts about race in America.

And frankly, a lot of people are writing in, and they're looking at America like, "Y'all okay right now?

(audience chuckling) You know?

- Yeah.

- What's going on over there?

- Right.

- But sometimes they're writing through their own identity frame, and race is not the word that's used around the world but they will talk about identity through their own frame, and whatever it means.

And people divide themselves all over the place for all kinds of reasons: religion, class, geography.

And so people write about their experiences.

And I talk about race and identity.

When I first did this, I was focusing mainly on race.

- Yeah.

- I started talking about race, and identity for a couple reasons because part of it was trying to widen the aperture because I realized when you talk about race in America, there is a presumption that is a conversation about people of color, and usually Black Americans.

- Right.

- So that's a conversation about those people.

When I started to talk about identity, we just saw a wider pool of people participate because everybody has an identity.

- Well, the conversation has also changed.

This whole idea of the othering of America has also really shifted from being a conversation about race to being conversation about a lot more.

- Right.

- Right, so it's a natural evolution of the project.

- And there's someone who is... We get cards from people who say their identity frame is they were in the military.

It doesn't matter what color they are when they come back and reenter.

- That's how they define it.

- They realize that they're in a different cohort just because they're military service.

- What's interesting to me as I think about this, a couple of things.

First of all, that for people, for some people, let's say for some people, the conversation around race and identity is a home game.

And for some people, it's an away game.

- That's a really interesting way to put it.

I've always thought for some people, they're on the field, and other people are spectators.

- We're in a similar space.

For some people, this is a conversation that they come to willingly, naturally, comfortably.

For some people, it's really the opposite of that.

And they feel put upon to be put in a situation where they have to have an honest conversation.

- And I think that that's why this worked because it started with postcards, and then the submissions were so interesting that we wanted to give them back to people.

So I created a website and started to collect submissions digitally.

And then we added on the form, "Anything else?"

So you could explain where your six words come from.

- Made it as easy as possible.

- But also, it gave people the chance to explain why they chose their six words.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Got it.

- And that's when things got really interesting and people started giving us back stories.

- Well, in fact, the book, so just people are aware if they've not already bought or read this book, this book is kind of like an extension of this project.

And it's sort of a meditation on the what, and the why, and the what's behind, in a lot of cases, the stories that you received.

So the other point that occurs to me, Michele is that the world is ugly and cruel.

The cruelty is the point - In some cases.

- These days, in some cases.

And that opening yourself up to collecting these kinds of responses to your prompt, I suspect that a bunch of really bad people sent really bad things.

I'm just wondering what percentage of what you received was stuff that you threw out because it was people seeking to be part of the problem rather than part the solution.

- We don't throw it out.

We just move it over there.

- Well, okay, so my words, not your words, but yes, moving it out.

- If you go to the website.

- Yeah.

- And I hope that you do, and if you buy the book, and I really hope you do that, (audience chuckling) I can guarantee you, you will be confronted with someone that will make you uncomfortable.

- Yeah.

- You will see something in this that you'll recognize.

You will see something in this that will make you nod your head, "Oh yeah, I recognize it."

But you will also be confronted with something that is foreign to you, and something that might make you wanna spit because we're holding a mirror up to society about race.

And if you're holding a mirror up to society about race, frankly, you shouldn't like everything you see.

- Yeah.

- And so we do get a number of submissions from people who I don't agree with.

Sometimes they're saying ugly things.

- Right.

- Sometimes they're saying things that are not necessarily ugly, but you might think are in politics.

So someone says, "White privilege, earned it, enjoy it."

- Yeah.

- That's his point of view.

- Yeah.

- And he explains, he's in the book actually.

- Yeah.

- He explains that, in his point of view, men, and particularly white men, have made the most important contributions to American life and letters.

- [Evan] Yep.

- And so white people, and white men in particular, are owed a debt of gratitude and not mockery.

We include that, even though I know that a lot of people, "Well, why does he get a seat at the table?"

- Well, we'll come to this in a second, but you could say that's the story of the election we just had.

- It's the story of America.

- Right.

- And I could also say that I don't agree with him.

- Right.

- We would have a yeasty conversation.

- But it's a valuable point of view to include, right?

- Very valuable.

- If you wanna understand the fullness of this conversation.

- But I also understand how he could come to that conclusion 'cause he was, he was educated in America, and so was I.

- [Evan] Right.

- And so I am in my 60s.

- [Evan] Yeah.

- There are a lot of things I have learned, and I had a very good education growing up in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and went to land grant schools, and spent 10 years considering all things before 4 o'clock every day.

I know a lot about America, but a lot of it I learned after I left my formal education because my formal education taught me that, as he said, most of the main contributors to life and letters in America were men, and usually white men.

Women were often not part of the story.

Black people were not part of the story.

Latinos, Asians, Indigenous people were not part of the story.

So I don't agree with him, but I kind of understand how we could come to that conclusion.

- Well, again, if you wanna understand America today, that's got to be a point of view you consider.

In some ways, what I was asking about, and what I was thinking about, although I'm glad that you took us to that, was what's happened over the last, pick a timeframe, 10 years, is that there's a permission structure in place to say all the things that the royal you, not you and me, that you think, and say them out loud and say them without consequences.

And that wasn't necessarily always the case before.

- Well, it wasn't in recent-- - But it feels like it's more the case now.

- In recent times, we had entered a space where there was some mediation.

- [Evan] Right.

- Like this was permissive and this wasn't permissive.

And you might not wanna say that because there may be some consequence about it.

- The wrapper's off now, right.

- And now there is a different kind of permission structure, but it's interesting in the stories that we collect, sometimes people will pull up, they'll send us a story.

"Oh, I know you're never gonna print that."

- [Evan] Right.

- And then we do, we include it because again, we're holding a mirror up to society.

It's a mirror and a window.

- [Evan] Yeah.

- You get to see other people, you get to peer over the fence, and see other people but you also see America reflected back to you.

- And you see yourself, whether you recognize yourself in it or not.

- Right, or your community.

And then when we include those stories, then they're like, "Oh, I get a seat at the table too."

Sometimes they are engaged in a different way because they thought that they were gonna be barked out of the room.

- Yeah.

- And that's not necessarily the case.

And that doesn't all often happen in other places.

But when you talk about this permission structure, what we're seeing right now is a lot of things happening all at once.

So on one hand, America is steaming toward majority minority status.

It has arrived ahead of schedule in some places, lots of places in Texas.

- Right, well, we're now more than 60% of the residents of Texas are people of color.

We'll never go back down below 60%.

- It's already happened.

The future has arrived.

- The leading indicator of other places.

- And if you're under 25, under 18, it's already happened because of birth rates in this country.

So that's happening.

- [Evan] Yeah.

- At the same time, you've got people who are pushing against diversity, equity, inclusion programs, that are trying to prevent us from learning about our history.

So that's happening at the same time.

You've got people who are invested in our divisions, deeply invested in our divisions.

- Polarization is a business model.

- And they treat it as a business model.

So they do focus groups to figure out what is the best way that we can keep people polarized, usually because it benefits them but they actually do focus groups.

So the messaging in Texas is different than it is in Montana, is different than it is in Michigan, and different still than it is in Louisiana.

They're figuring out how to message to different people to keep them apart.

But Evan, I know this also because of the work that we do; we used this crazy project, which started on the third floor of my house... - Yep.

- Has been used in hundreds of schools around the country.

It has been used in businesses, it has been used in the Justice Department and the military.

It is usually used by people who want to use the archive, and these stories as a way to create a bridge so people can have a difficult conversation, and reach outside their own realm, and understand someone else, and maybe talk to and listen across difference.

And so because of that, I know that while all these other things are going on, as invested as people are in divisions, there are also a lot of people who deal with the consequences of that.

- Yeah.

- So someone runs a factory in a Southern state, and we have been in some of the reddest counties, and some of the reddest states during this work.

That foreman who runs that company, the owner who runs that company, regardless of their politics, what they have to deal with is the impacts on the productivity inside those four walls.

So when you are entering that space, and people are coming to work in cars, and pickup trucks, and EVs, and they have different anthems on the bumper sticker, some of them lean right, some of them lean left, some of them are wherever, all of that political discourse out there suddenly comes into the workspace, whether it's a factory, whether it's a hospital, whether it's a campus, and that starts to affect the culture.

And it's not just the sort of, I don't like the word woke, so whatever you wanna use about whether people feel crunchy or whether they can say, it affects the actual work culture that people aren't speaking to each other.

It affects the trust between people.

And so despite the divisions, and I know that there are a lot of people who are trying to figure out, "I run a hospital and I have to make sure that the doctors and the nurses talk to each other.

And I have to make sure that then the people who clean the building"-- - So you've given them a toolkit.

- In some cases.

- Effectively this is about the success of entities that don't necessarily think they are about hard conversations about race.

- What it allows people to do, and we are not a panacea, and I'm not gonna solve your problem, but we are diagnostic in that we go into spaces, and we allow people to have a conversation using an anthropological tool.

It's easier to get people to talk about their own environment or even themselves if they can talk about somebody else first.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

- And Zora Neale Hurston was an anthropologist and she was successful because she would go town to town, and she would take the stories from one town, and tell them to the next town, and then that town would open up about their stories.

- Yeah.

It's a catalyst, isn't it?

- And then it's a catalyst.

It's what anthropologists do.

- Indeed.

- And so they talk about these stories in the archive, and it renders the pot in a certain way that then people can start to talk to each other, not necessarily to try to agree with each other, but if you can get people to share stories, if you can get to see someone.

"I don't like your politics.

I don't like the way you dress.

Why does your hair have to be purple?"

- Yeah.

- All of this.

And yet you start to hear someone's story.

And there may be some kernel of something that you recognize, or not, but you see them as a person.

It's what Michelle Obama says, that it's hard to hate up close.

And narrative, and listening to someone, and listening even across difference can sometimes create in a work environment, even in a family what we call a trust dividend.

- So let me ask you about the moment we're in as it relates to this.

So I'll turn your concept or your prompt on you.

The election, six words, your thoughts.

(audience chuckling) (audience gasping) - Well, I go back to the six words that I end the book on.

Still more work to be done.

- [Evan] Yeah.

- We have a lot of work to do right now.

There are a few other things I could have said.

(audience chuckling) - Because you recognize, of course you recognize that as much as people wanna make this election about one thing or another thing or everything or nothing, the outcome, and what preceded the outcome was about race in America.

Full stop.

There was no way for it not to be.

- I'm not saying it was only about race in America.

- No, no, no, but definitely a portion of it was about that.

- But definitely, it was an onion in the stew.

Most definitely.

- [Evan] Right.

- And we haven't, if you look at all the first thought postmortems, they've talked about the price of eggs, and the price of bacon, and the price of housing, and who communicated.

And it seemed like it was... At one point I was thinking, "Are we are gonna talk about race or misogyny because that has to be a part of this."

And you're careful about this 'cause I'm not saying that people who voted for Donald Trump are racist.

- Right.

- That's not, I wanna be very clear about that.

But he was someone who repeatedly made racist statements, so you're voting for someone who had done things that were racist or was embraced in some ways by people who are unapologetically-- - It's kind of extraordinary to me.

I mean, we've both been around long enough to remember previous elections.

This was one that was different for me because it was a because election, and it was a despite election.

- Yes.

- And the ways in which it was a despite election are exactly what you said.

He said all these things, but the price of eggs.

Like, they made themselves comfortable with the idea of embracing that because of this other thing.

- But there's a lot of stuff that's going on.

And I really understand the nuances and complexities about this, and that's why I'm really careful about saying, "It was just this or it was just that or it was just this."

If we're really honest, if you look at our leadership culture in America, at some point, if you're gonna have an honest assessment of the election, we probably should look at the fact that one of the candidates was a person of color, and a woman, and a person of color who happens to be a woman.

There's a study that's been done, and I'm gonna be careful about citing it 'cause I wanna be careful about not misquoting it, and I wish I had it right at my fingertips, but they looked at the corporate, the CEO leadership culture, and they found that a very large percentage, like 20% have one of seven names or something like that.

It's Bob and some derivative of John, and some derivative of James, and some derivative of Richard.

And they usually are a certain height, and they go to one of 20 schools.

And so we have a sort of sense of what leadership looks like, and there's a comfort zone in that.

And we asked America to move out of that comfort zone in a really tumultuous moment, at a point when you had these forces that were really invested in our division.

So we can't pretend that that wasn't part of this.

- But Michele, you know that one of the conversations that we will be having is whether or not there was enough emphasis placed by the Harris campaign on race or gender as a component of the pitch.

And in fact, what has been said, what is thought about the campaign was that they actually deemphasized that, they didn't actually.

And, of course, I said, "How do you not recognize the nature of the candidacy based on the candidate?"

- I think in some cases the analysts who are making that assertion are sometimes outsourcing the conversation.

Like, "She should be talking about race 'cause then we don't have to lead the conversation."

- Interesting, interesting.

Yeah.

- "If she brings it up, then I don't have to."

So it's kind of like, "Leave it up to her."

But Toni Morrison told us that race is often a distraction.

- [Evan] Yeah.

- And so why is it that people of color or women or someone who is outside of the cohort norm in terms of leadership, why do they have to lead the conversation?

When Barack Obama ran for office, everyone expected him to have the big conversation about race.

And then everyone expected him to have a national conversation about race, as if we were all gonna get together on Tuesday and suddenly have this conversation.

- Well, and he was also criticized.

I mean, I remember at one point-- - But we don't have the same expectation of white candidates, and yet we should.

And that's one of the-- - Okay, that's a good thing.

- And yet we should because if we are ever going to have an open, honest, productive conversation, it cannot be by, for and about people of color.

White Americans need to have a seat at the table.

And I am more convinced of that than ever after writing this book because when I put the basket on the table, and I admit that I created this project based on a mistaken assumption that Americans didn't wanna talk about race.

I was wrong.

They do.

- Yeah, they do.

- I created this project on the mistaken assumption that if I put a basket on the table and ask people to talk about race, that the majority of the people who showed up would be people of color.

- People of color, right.

- And in the 14 years that we have been doing this, in the majority of the years that we've been collecting stories, the majority of the stories have come from white Americans.

- White people.

Amazing.

- And that was a surprise.

I mean, I write this in one of the chapters in the book.

When I began this, I did not know that I was gonna be embarking on a 14-year odyssey of listening to white Americans talk about race.

I didn't even think that was possible.

- [Evan] Yeah.

- And yet it told me that a lot of people feel left out of the conversation.

They feel that they don't have control in the conversation.

They feel like America looks past them.

They feel like if they do say anything, they're walking through a minefield or walking on eggshells.

And so many people showed up with so many different kinds of stories that it reminded me, frankly, of our faults in journalism; that when something happens...

I'll give you an example.

The Mother Emanuel tragedy.

When Dylann Roof went into that church, went into Mother Emanuel, and took people's lives while they were worshiping, we had a knee-jerk reaction to call certain kinds of people.

And they were usually ministers, they were sometimes activists, they were almost always people of color.

But we did not have a concomitant effort to understand the roots of the hatred that led to that action.

We did not invite other people to the table to talk about how did we get here?

What was the syllabus of hatred that led him to do something like that?

And whether we're talking about a hateful act like that, or just sort of the discomfort around the demographic changes that we're going through, whether we're talking about just the complications in life if you have married someone across the color line, which so many people have.

- Yeah.

- Go to the mall, go to the movies, go to the grocery store.

- Turn on the television.

- Turn on the television.

- We see biracial America now in places we never did before.

- And that is a sign of progress.

- It is.

- It is a sign of progress.

But also, that doesn't mean that the complications are over.

Sometimes that ushers in, and that's what I've learned from this project, sometimes that ushers in different kinds of conversations and layers of complexity.

And we don't invite in those conversations.

So as people who drive the narrative, we tend to stay in a certain groove.

- [Evan] Yeah.

- And one of the reasons that people feel left out is because they actually are left out.

- And that brings us back really to the book.

The book was at least a way for people who felt left out to have their voices heard.

And in the end, that's such an important thing, and especially right now.

- Yeah, and politically - Given everything going on.

- And politically, I think the right understood that.

- Yeah.

- That there are a lot of people who feel like that they're not heard right now, and that they are caricaturized in some way, they're mocked in some way.

And they understood that, and they came up with a very sort of potent kind of messages to say, "We hear you, we understand you, and we're going to make America better for you by going backwards."

- Right, remains to be seen.

Yeah.

Michele, we could talk about this all day.

It's terrific.

And I appreciate so much the hard work you've done on everybody's behalf here.

You've made this conversation a little bit easier to have, and I wish you great success with the book.

So thank you very much.

- Evan, thank you.

Good, Michele Norris.

- My best to you.

Thank you, great.

All right, thank you, great, excellent.

(audience applauding) (lively music) We'd love to have you join us in the studio.

Visit our website at austinpbs.org/overheard to find invitations to interviews, Q&As with our audience and guests, and an archive of past episodes.

- If you had talked to me ahead of the 2016 election, I actually had a pretty good indication that Donald Trump was going to win.

And one of the reasons, that I started to see a lot of white men in the inbox talking about feeling like they were invisible, a lot of people talking about feeling like they lived in an America that they didn't recognize.

- [Narrator] Support for "Overheard With Evan Smith" comes from HillCo Partners, a Texas government affairs consultancy, Claire and Carl Stuart, Christine and Philip Dial, and the Eller Group, specializing in crisis management, litigation and public affairs communication.

Ellergroup.com.

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