with Vilashini Cooppan, Professor of Literature and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies
Thursday • Mar 7 • 7:00 PM • FREE • wheelchair accessible
Cowell Ranch Hay Barn • UCSC • Santa Cruz
Bookshop Santa Cruz and The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz welcome Peabody Award-winning journalist Michele Norris for a discussion of her new book Our Hidden Conversations: What Americans Really Think About Race and Identity—a transformative dialogue on race and identity in America, unearthed through Norris’s decade-long work at The Race Card Project. This is event is cosponsored by NAACP Santa Cruz County.
The prompt seemed simple: Race. Your Thoughts. Six Words. Please Send.
The answers, though, have been challenging and complicated. In the twelve years since award-winning journalist Michele Norris first posed that question, over half a million people have submitted their stories to The Race Card Project inbox. The stories are shocking in their depth and candor, spanning the full spectrum of race, ethnicity, identity, and class.
Our Hidden Conversations reminds us that even during times of great division, honesty, grace, and a willing ear can provide a bridge toward empathy and maybe even understanding.
Michele Norris is one of America’s most trusted voices in journalism, earning several honors over a long career, including Peabody, Emmy, Dupont, and Goldsmith awards. She is a columnist for The Washington Post Opinion Section, the host of the Audible Original Podcast, Your Mama’s Kitchen, and from 2002 to 2012 she was a cohost of NPR’s All Things Considered.
Vilashini Cooppan is Professor of Literature and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at UCSC. She teaches and writes about comparative and world literature, the memory and legacies of colonial and racial violence, and literary theory. She is the author of Worlds Within: National Narratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing (Stanford UP, 2009), numerous journal articles and book chapters, and has co-edited the forthcoming volume Autotheories: Transdisciplinary Experiments in Self-Theorizing.
Showing Up for Racial Justice-Santa Cruz County, CA 