![\"SPRING15six-words\"](\"http:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/SPRING15six-words.jpg\")
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Since it was launched four years ago, The Race Card Project has inspired a wide-ranging conversation about race in this country. The project\u2019s creator, Michele Norris, addressed a packed crowd in Georgia Southern\u2019s Performing Arts Center as the featured speaker for the University\u2019s 2015 Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration.<\/p>\n
Norris is best known as the former co-host of NPR\u2019S flagship news program, \u201cAll Things Considered.\u201d She is also the author of her family\u2019s memoir, The Grace of Silence<\/em>, which explored the family\u2019s complicated racial legacy, and the hidden conversation about race in the wake of the election of this country\u2019s first African-American president. The veteran journalist said during the 2008 presidential campaign she noticed people were engaged in an interesting conversation about race, and she decided to \u201ccreate this exercise that would invite people to talk about it in a new way and the hook was the six-word sentence.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI knew that taking something complex and\u00a0reducing it to six words\u00a0would help people put \u00a0a fine point on issues of\u00a0race, and it was kind of \u00a0a challenge that I\u00a0thought people would \u00a0accept,\u201d Norris said.<\/p>\n The first submissions were by postcard, but the project really took off when people would post their essays online or via social media. \u201cSuddenly people would slide into the conversation and say that sounds racist, that sounds biased and I realized that people were actually talking to each other,\u201d she said. \u201cIt has been interesting to watch people engage, argue, lament, celebrate and tweet those six words representing their point of view.\u201d<\/p>\n The archive now contains tens of thousands of essays with just as many waiting to be archived. Norris is hopeful the archive will serve as a valuable resource for future researchers, including those at Georgia Southern. \u201cThey may want to investigate what campus life was like in the 1960s when colleges like this one were beginning to integrate.\u201d<\/p>\n Georgia Southern\u2019s Diversity Peer Educators implemented the project on campus from October until February and they received more than 500 postcards said Dorsey Baldwin, director of the Multicultural Student Center. \u201cWe had great feedback from the students with The Race Card Project,\u201d Baldwin noted. \u201cWe will be sending the postcards collected from our students to Michele Norris so that she can include them in the project archives that will be stored at the Library of Congress.\u201d<\/p>\n The project has more than fulfilled Norris\u2019 goal of encouraging people to have a conversation about race. In case you were wondering, her six words are: \u201cStill more work to be done.\u201d – Sandra Bennett<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Noted Journalist Headlines MLK Day Celebration<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2790,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[47],"class_list":["post-2671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-spring-2015"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2671"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2671\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2790"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}