Michele Norris

Michele Norris did something in 2010 that nobody in this field had tried: instead of telling Americans what to think about race, she asked them, gave them six words, and then read half a million answers.

The Race Card Project began as postcards carrying a single prompt, Race. Your Thoughts. Six Words. Please Send. Over twelve years the responses arrived from every kind of person, and the constraint is what made it work. Six words is too short to perform in and too short to hedge, so what came back was closer to what people actually think than any survey or training session produces. It won a Peabody Award in 2013.

Our Hidden Conversations, published in 2024, is the book drawn from that archive, and it is not the book most organizations expect. It carries what people said when they were not being observed by their colleagues, which includes discomfort, contradiction and confession as often as it includes grievance, and its argument is that the conversation Americans are avoiding is more complicated and more hopeful than the public version of it.

She spent a decade co-hosting NPR's All Things Considered, was a television correspondent for ABC News in Washington for a decade before that, and was a staff writer at The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times. She is now an opinion columnist for The Washington Post and hosts the Audible original podcast Your Mama's Kitchen.

She is the booking for an organization that wants the subject opened rather than instructed. The material is journalism, not training: it gives an audience other people's honesty to react to rather than a framework to comply with, which is why it also works well as a moderated conversation or paired with an internal discussion afterward.