The Atlantic Interview: Michele Norris

Summary

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Podcast Summary: The Atlantic Interview: Michele Norris

Podcast: The David Frum Show (The Atlantic)
Air Date: April 11, 2018
Guests: Michele Norris (journalist, founder of the Race Card Project)
Host: Jeffrey Goldberg

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Overview

In this episode, Jeffrey Goldberg sits down with Peabody Award-winning journalist Michele Norris to discuss her recent work examining whiteness and the dynamics of race in contemporary America, focusing in particular on themes she raised in her National Geographic feature. Norris draws on years of listening to diverse Americans through the Race Card Project to shed light on the fears and anxieties driving conversations about race, with special attention to changing demographics, the roots of privilege, and economic and cultural dislocation. The conversation is candid, nuanced, and explores both the historical and emotional realities behind today’s fraught racial discourse.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Shifting the Focus of Racial Discourse to Include White Americans

[02:05–04:43]

• Norris explains the impetus for her National Geographic piece, which explores “white America” and the increasing focus on whiteness as a racial identity.
• She observes a shift: conversations about race are now more inclusive of white Americans, whereas previously they centered almost exclusively on people of color.
• “Whiteness is something that is being placed under a microscope … White America had almost like a bystander status.” — Michele Norris [03:05]

2. The “You Will Not Replace Us” Anxiety

[04:43–07:24]

• Reflecting on the 2017 Charlottesville rally, Norris discusses the emergence of overt white nationalist sentiment and the broader, more private anxieties among white Americans about demographic change.
• “The core sentiment in that statement is something that people in private spaces actually talk about. It’s a deep anxiety.” — Michele Norris [06:46]
• These anxieties find expression in various sectors (sports, politics, economics) amid rapid demographic and social changes.

3. Stories from the Race Card Project

[07:29–10:08]

• Norris shares stories from her Race Card Project, highlighting how white Americans (including those from formerly marginalized European immigrant groups) grapple with shifting privilege.
• She recounts one six-word story: “I now understand the WASPs.” The storyteller described losing the “easy pass” long associated with whiteness, acknowledging both discomfort and the necessity of change.

4. Hazleton, Pennsylvania: A Microcosm of Change

[13:13–16:59]

• Norris recounts her reporting from Hazleton, a town demographically transformed by Latino immigration after economic decline.
• Sixteen years ago, Hazleton was ~97% white; now it’s ~44% white—rapid, vertigo-inducing change for longstanding residents.
• Many factory jobs disappeared, and Latino workers were recruited to fill new roles, revitalizing the town even as cultural and economic tensions simmered.

5. The Latino Threat Narrative and Cultural Dislocation

[17:14–22:01]

• Some whites in Hazleton express fears rooted in actual experiences (e.g., crime) but also a broader “Latino threat narrative,” often fueled by rumor rather than fact.
• Norris remarks on tradition and the discomfort caused by changed community rituals, foods, and cultural cues.
• “You have traditions that you hold onto that you enjoy, and those traditions change … And that doesn’t always feel good.” — Michele Norris [19:09]

6. Understanding vs. Sympathy; The Roots of Bias

[20:07–22:01]

• Norris positions herself as a neutral listener, more invested in understanding the drivers of bias than sympathizing with it.
• She likens examining bias to diagnosing a disease: understanding the roots is the first step toward addressing it.
• “You have to understand the dark forces and the social diseases that take root in the body politic … It means that you look something in the eye that you might personally disdain.” — Michele Norris [21:02]

7. Economic Anxiety, Technology, and Being Left Behind

[22:01–24:00]

• It’s not just race; economic fragility and technology-related anxiety also drive resistance to change.
• Goldberg points out that the feeling of being left behind, now common among some whites, has long been experienced by minorities.

8. Privilege, Fairness, and Material Loss

[11:38–13:11]

• Norris notes that while people may intellectually understand the value of fairness, emotionally many struggle with the loss of privilege it entails.
• “I think they’d rather have privilege because … And before people jump down his throat, I actually give him credit for being honest. … He’s putting something on the table that … people perhaps express in the quiet of their home or at the kitchen table.” — Michele Norris [12:09]

9. Persistent Inequity and Misconceptions About Upward Mobility

[24:04–27:14]

• Norris discusses research showing persistent downward mobility among African Americans, even when born into affluence, in contrast to common white anxieties about being “left behind.”
• She references work by Derek Hamilton, Sandy Darity, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, illustrating how structural barriers limit true equality and economic mobility for minorities.

10. Trumpism, Selective Racism, and the Limits of Curiosity

[27:14–29:01]

• Goldberg and Norris talk about the complicated interplay between racism, economic anxiety, and support for Trump, highlighting the phenomenon of people supporting candidates with racist rhetoric without seeing themselves as racist.
• Norris stresses the need to go beyond curiosity to education, diagnosis, and collective engagement for real change.

11. The Need for Historical Understanding

[29:01–36:12]

• Norris argues that truly addressing racial inequality requires a deeper public understanding of American history.
• She highlights misconceptions about slavery, the GI Bill, FHA loans, and the roots of wealth inequality.
• “If you don’t understand that, perhaps you don’t understand why you have certain advantages and why privileges are accrued to one class or another … This is something that happened through socialization over a long period of time.” — Michele Norris [31:01]
• She asserts that public policy, historical decisions, and “social engineering” determined current disparities.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the evolution of racial conversations:
  “The notion now that whiteness is something that is being placed under a microscope … White Americans are … being examined.” — Michele Norris [03:18]

• On the Charlottesville rally:
  “For a lot of people, they will remember that weekend in the summer as the moment where white nationalism came out of the shadows … they were not hiding at all … it was a social media moment for many of them.” — Michele Norris [05:07]

• On changing definitions of privilege:
  “If you really want a world where equality is not just talked about but practiced, it means that he may not be on easy street … and yet he understands that’s necessary.” — Michele Norris [09:45]

• On the persistence of racial headwinds:
  “Something is pushing down on them. … Even African American males who were born to relative affluence have a much greater propensity toward moving downward economically.” — Michele Norris [25:37]

• On historical ignorance:
  “They think of slavery as ancient history, as in not three generations ago, four generations ago, 1865 made everything flat, that it was a long time ago, and that at the end of slavery, that it was the end of the problem.” — Michele Norris [33:08]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Opening — Introduction & Purpose: [00:20–01:28]
• Shift to Including White Americans in Race Talks: [02:05–04:43]
• Charlottesville & White Anxiety: [04:43–07:24]
• Stories from the Race Card Project: [07:29–10:08]
• Hazleton, PA Case Study: [13:13–16:59]
• Latino Threat Narrative & Cultural Change: [17:14–19:09]
• Bias, Sympathy, and Diagnosis: [20:07–22:01]
• Economic Anxiety/Left Behind: [22:01–24:00]
• Privilege & Loss: [11:38–13:11]
• Downward Mobility Among African Americans: [24:04–27:14]
• Trumpism/Selective Acceptance of Racism: [27:14–29:01]
• Need for Historical Understanding: [29:01–36:12]

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Tone & Language

Michele Norris is reflective, clear-eyed, and careful not to generalize, emphasizing nuance in both experience and interpretation. Goldberg injects a slightly wry, probing tone, pushing for clarity but allowing Norris space to explain and complicate the narrative. Throughout, the conversation remains respectful but unsparing, employing plain language to address both discomfort and hope.

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Conclusion:
This episode is a thought-provoking, grounded look at how race, privilege, and anxiety are playing out in 21st-century America. Norris’s on-the-ground insights and her skill in drawing out human stories offer listeners new ways to think about the nation’s racial landscape and the vital importance of understanding our history to create a more equitable future.

Transcript

[A]

An official message from Medicare.

[B]

I'm saving money on my Medicare prescriptions. Maybe you can save too. See if you qualify for Medicare's extra help. It pays. To find out, go to ssa.gov extrahelp paid for by the US Department of Health and Human Services.

[A]

Michelle Norris is a Peabody Award winning journalist. She's the founder of the Race Card Project and executive director of the Bridge, the Aspen Institute's new program on race, identity, connectivity and inclusion. And of course, you know her from her stellar care at npr. Very, very glad to have Michelle Norris on the show today. Michel, welcome to the Atlantic interview.

[B]

It's good to be with you, Jeff. It's always good to be with you.

[A]

You're just saying that.

[B]

I'm not just saying that.

[A]

No, you're just saying that. But that's okay. That's okay. I want to jump right into. I mean, we've been having a continuing conversation about race in America. Oftentimes we spend a lot of time talking about African Americans, the condition of the African American community and the politics of African American community. Let's talk about white people. All right. You okay with talking about white people?

[B]

I'm totally okay with talking about white people.

[A]

And let's start with the piece that you just wrote for another magazine, which just whatever. I can't even deal with that fact that you're writing in another magazine. But it's a magazine with a big yellow border and it used to exoticize people of color. I won't tell you the name.

[B]

I will tell you the name. It's National Geographic.

[A]

I think people got that in the.

[B]

Special issue on race. Top to bottom, front to back. The entire issue looks at several threads, tendrils, tendrils, issues only a word journalists would use. Tendril that examine tributaries.

[A]

All I want to say is that the Atlantic has been doing that for 161 years. But we're going to move on from my personal resentments to a larger discussion of race. And tell me about this fascinating piece and actually the fascinating reporting that went into the piece and we could jump off from there.

[B]

Well, because Natjio was doing this entire issue on race, they wanted to look at white America. And the conversation, the issue of race in white America. And it's interesting because we're at a point where conversations about race are more inclusive of white America than they've been in the past for a long time. If you were going to have a conversation about race, if you're going to have a program about race, the expectation is that it would be Bi for about people of color and attended almost exclusively by. Intended almost exclusively by people of color. And the notion is that whiteness is or was the cultural default. And every other group that orbited around whiteness was otherized in some sense or in many cases, problematized. So race was the problem of people of color. White America had almost like a bystander status.

[A]

Right?

[B]

And there are all kinds.

[A]

This is classic, though, with prejudices, right? I mean, homophobia is not thought of. It's thought of as a problem for gays when it's actually not a problem that comes out of the gay community. It's a problem of other people. And anti Semitism is the same thing. The problem is with the anti Semites. It's not right. What you're saying in race is the same as.

[B]

That's true for racism. It's also just true for race. You know, the notion that when you go to the doctor, when you go to the dmv, if you are white, you are not excluded from checking a box. You too check a box. You're raced in some way. And using race as a verb there, as Toni Morrison would do. But the notion now that whiteness is something that is being placed under a microscope, that white Americans are. And I'm not. You know, I did this based on reporting. The reason I was able to do this story is because I run a project. I run something called the Race Card Project. So I spent the last eight years listening to people of all colors talk about race, including white Americans. So it's not like I just dipped in and decided to.

[A]

You've been listening to white people. You've been listening to the ID of a lot of different people for years.

[B]

And so I felt like I could do this piece without it sounding like I was just kind of landing in dipping into whiteness to write the story. Because I had been really listening to people. And there's all kinds of evidence in the conversations that I've had and the stories that people share with me on the Race Card project. But also just in, and I would say globally, where white people are responding to their cohort status, you see that with nationalism flaring up all across the.

[A]

Globe, you will not replace us.

[B]

You will not replace us. Which is interesting. I write about this in the piece.

[A]

You will not replace us as the Charlottesville mantra.

[B]

If people recall, right, White Americans marching in Charlottesville, where the city had removed, was in the process of removing Confederate monuments, marching with tiki torches, chanting, you will not replace us. For a lot of people, they will Remember that weekend in the summer as the moment where white nationalism came out of the shadows. The people who were marching were not wearing hoods. They were affiliating with white supremacist groups, in some cases with Nazis. And they were wearing polo shirts and khakis and looking like someone you might see at the mall or at a Dave Matthews concert or I maybe aged myself there, maybe Arcade Fire or something like that.

[A]

I think you might still be aging yourself.

[B]

All right, okay. You know, they were not hiding at all. And it was. In fact, it was a social media moment for many of them. And some were later faced a program when people found out who they were and it was reported they lost jobs and whatnot. But that chant, that menacing chant, you will not replace us. On the whole, people across the spectrum, political spectrum, socioeconomic spectrum, racial spectrum, denounced what happened in Charlottesville. Not just because Heather Heyer lost her life, not just because it created, you know, it sparked a wave of violence in the city, but because it represented something that most Americans don't accept, the notion that people would march in favor of white supremacy. So that chant, you will not replace us, was attached to something that most people disdained. And yet, you will not replace us. The core sentiment in that statement is something that people in private spaces actually talk about.

[A]

It's a deep anxiety.

[B]

It's a deep anxiety. And you see it in sports, you see it in politics, you see it in economics. You see it in a country that is changing, where the demographics of this country are changing, where social norms have changed such that people have access to jobs that weren't available to them, have access to neighborhoods that weren't available to them, where we talk about equality in a different way than we did even within my lifetime, and I am not.

[A]

That old.

[B]

That there is a fear that a way of life and a certain kind of provenance is slipping away, and we don't.

[A]

Is it a fear of sharing, or is it a fear of something more than sharing?

[B]

You know, having to share? And I'm careful to talk about this because it means different things to many people. I don't think that there's one explanation I can share with you what people have shared with me. There's someone that I spent time talking in the piece. He's a professor in North Carolina, and he wrote into the Race Card Project just to help people understand. I run a project, it's called the Race Card Project. People send in six word stories, and they often send in the backstories and their photos and artifacts that explain Their six words. And I don't want to misquote his six words, but he basically says, I now understand the wasps. And he wrote an eloquent, interesting essay attached to his six words. And in his six words, he said he was writing about watching his family. They came from Eastern Europe. They came to America. They aspired to become all American. They came to America at a time where people who came from that part of Europe were sort of American with an asterisk. They were, you know, like a special category of white American, I should say.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And as they, a lesser category, moved and matriculated into society, he said he understands now how perhaps the WASPS felt when they joined their clubs and went to their colleges and moved into their neighborhoods. And he used JFK as an example, America's first Catholic president. And he says, you know, the same thing is happening now again. And for a white man in America doesn't always feel good to him because he was honest about what he fears. And it's on a lot of different levels. He teaches English literature, and he says that may not be as important to a lot of people in the future. And yet he's. You know, it's always complex. You know, he's someone who bell hooks will float off, you know, roll off his tongue. He studied African American literature. He teaches that in his class, too. He embraces. But he also understands that for a long time, the pact, the American pact, sort of that idea of the American dream meant that some people had a little bit of an easy pass. If you're a commuter, you understand what I mean? That little white box that you put on the front of your dashboard, and you don't have to go through the toll booth, you just zoom, you skate right through. And he feels like that's changing. And if you really want a world where equality is not just talked about, but practiced, it means that he may not be on easy street in the way that he was before, and yet he understands that that's necessary, that that's what he really wants, but he's being honest about what that means.

[A]

Before we get to the story, Hazleton, Pennsylvania, and what you found when you went there, answer this question. The people you've talked to. So here's the premise. White males make up 25 or 30% or so of the adult population of the United States. It makes sense. All these different groups, male, female, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, whatever, gain representation in leadership across government and business and everywhere else, in more or less proportion to their level in the population. Americans think of themselves as, generally speaking, as people who understand fairness, people don't like unfairness, at least in theory. So when you explain to white people, white males in particular, that, hey, we're not talking about a revolution that's going to end up with you in the guillotine, we're just talking about sharing some of the things that white males have traditionally held for themselves, which is to say leadership in government, leadership in corporate America, leadership at the top levels of universities, et cetera. Do they understand that? Theoretically, the people you talk to intellectually, but they can't get it emotionally. What is the. You know what I mean? The logic of that to me is overwhelming. Right. Fair, equal. Everybody has equal access. The leadership should represent what the country looks like, more or less.

[B]

People are complex. Yes. They understand that. Yes. I'll just. I'll quote Professor Glover. He says that a lot. It means that a lot of people, this notion of equality and the changing, you know, America, he says it means that a lot of people are just going to lose materially and are already losing materially. I can somehow feel more virtuous, he says, because it was necessarily built on equality. I just don't know if that really keeps people warm at night knowing that there's equality out there. I think they'd rather have privilege because.

[A]

The natural human status.

[B]

And, you know, before people jump down his throat, I actually give him credit for being honest. You may, what he says may be repulsive to you, but he's putting something on the table that, you know, a lot of people perhaps express in the quiet of their home or at the kitchen table. And yet this notion of equality and fairness, we're in America. So, you know, let's remember that white supremacy was built into every law, every custom, every bit of America's fabric from the very beginning. So the notion that this is the land of the free and the home of the brave, that's true, yes. But we have not always lived up to the standards that we put on paper in our Declaration of Independence, in our Constitution, in our sort of credo that we've tried to live up to. We have not made that real in our actions and in our laws and in our customs.

[A]

Go to the piece. Go to Hazleton. What'd you find?

[B]

Well, I found a community that changed rapidly, and Hazelton has been under a spotlight, and some would say a harsh spotlight for some time because it was the center of an anti immigration debate sparked by a law that moved up to high court, and it was in response to rapidly changing demographics in the area There was an attempt to pass a law that would impose fairly stiff penalties for someone who hired or provided housing to someone who was found to be illegal. The community is near the top of the 80s, where 80 and 81 meet in Pennsylvania. It is a former coal mining community. It produced a very specific kind of coal that's very hard. And so it was highly sought after. So waves of immigrants moved to Hazleton and found steady work and created fiefdoms through much like you see in several coal mining communities or in cities like Chicago and Detroit. So you had people who had moved there from Germany, from Ireland, from Italy, from Slovakia, Slovenia, Montenegro.

[A]

And they stick to their own kind?

[B]

Well, they stick to their own kind perhaps when they first get there. But interesting immigration patterns as they came. They eventually became seen as white Americans. And so some of those divisions were still there, but they kind of faded away. They were not as bright defined as they were when they first arrived. Maybe the tension or the division between the Irish and the Italians, you know, there were religious divisions, but you don't see them quite so much now. You see that the divisions are more apparent in part because the new immigrants that are moving to the area are largely Latino. The mines closed, the manufacturing center closed, and a lot of those factories closed. And the jobs that replaced the factories that went away were primarily light manufacturing, food processing, warehousing. So Amazon has a huge distribution center there. American Eagle, Cargill has a big meat packing plant there. And large numbers of Latinos started to move to the area to fill those jobs because Hazleton was a dying community. It was aging out. And so there was an effort to actually bring in new jobs. They needed employees for those new jobs. Many of those employees wound up coming from New York and New Jersey. They largely were originally, you know, their lineage originally traced back to either the Dominican Republic or Puerto Rico. And the demographics of the community changed rapidly. Sixteen years ago, Hazleton was almost 97% white. It's now about 44, 45% white. So rapid change in a very short period of time. And the town has gone through a certain amount of vertigo about that. Not everyone is comfortable with that. And there has been a debate about what this means for the town. And yet the town's economic vitality is largely based on this new right, these newcomers that have come to town and taken jobs and, you know, now they're buying homes, they're buying cars, they're raising families. Well, we know this from opening churches again, that have been closed.

[A]

We know this from numerous studies show that Those parts of the country that are worse off economically are the most homogenized. They have the fewest number of immigrants. Because we all know anecdotally and experientially that immigrant communities bring an enormous amount of vitality and restless energy and economic development with them. But you're saying that the whites of Hazleton have not adjusted to that?

[B]

I'm saying some whites, I'm always careful. I don't want to paint with too broad a brush.

[A]

I'll paint with a broad brush.

[B]

Be careful about doing that. You get in trouble when you do that.

[A]

You get in trouble when you do anything these days.

[B]

But I am particularly careful about doing that. I think that you tell me about.

[A]

The whites who have problems with that. How about that?

[B]

The people that I talk to who do have problems with it, in some cases, it's based on actual experience. Something has happened to them. Their neighborhood has changed. Crime is a big issue. I mean, a lot of this. I talked to a professor who's done some really interesting work. He's from Hazleton. He's now an associate professor at John Jay College in New York. But he's done a lot of research on Hazleton, and he writes about this Latino threat narrative and how there is this anxiety that sort of feeds into the Latino threat narrative that they're bringing crime into the area, that they're changing the sort of tone and tenor of the community.

[A]

So it's reflective of presidential politics, because the president of The United States, Ms. 13, is terrible gang. It's not the form of national security threat.

[B]

It is actually a gang. There actually is, Ms. 13, but it's.

[A]

Not the foremost national security threat in the United States. But this is the way the narrative is developed, right?

[B]

And some people have had actual experience. A car has been stolen. You know, something happened, and a business had to close because, you know, there was actually drug trafficking on a corner. And that had a distinct impact on his business. But in some cases, you know, Long Gazel talks about this Latino threat narrative, and it's interesting. I saw that in the interviews that I did where people are talking about this fear of crime in the abstract. And the stories are strikingly similar. You know, the question, did everyone see a Latino family using food stamps to buy seafood? Has everyone actually seen this? Or does that sort of move forward on the weight of its own? You know, it becomes anaerobic. It doesn't even need oxygen. It just is this kind of rumor that permeates the community. Did everybody actually see that same thing happen? Or is it just repeated as actual fact then and embraced by people?

[A]

Right.

[B]

And so this crime narrative has a big impact on the way people respond to this. When you spend time talking to people, though, there's this other thing that happens that they talk about, and people are quick to attach bias to it. But it's interesting. You have traditions that you hold onto that you enjoy, and those traditions change. You're used to going downtown and seeing certain kinds of restaurants. You're used to going to the festivals that they have in a community and eating certain kinds of food. You're used to the sort of cultural cues that provide you with comfort and that affirm your sort of ethnic pride or who you are as a person. And that changes. And someone else gets to see the things that affirm their ethnic pride. And. And that doesn't always feel good.

[A]

Do you have sympathy for people who don't feel good when they see that?

[B]

You know, in the work that I do, I have to take a somewhat neutral position so I can listen to people. I create a neutral space where they can share their story. Sympathy is an interesting word, because I don't have sympathy for bias.

[A]

What about understanding? Do you understand this in the framework of. Of a generalized human resistance or fear of change?

[B]

I am interested in the roots of bias. And sometimes if you can examine the roots of bias, you can start to attack it. You can pull it apart. You don't ask. I'm not trying to. I'm gonna stop myself because I almost said, I don't want to compare myself to a doctor who deals with something like cancer or heart failure or something like that. But in order to understand the body, you have to understand the disease that is attacking the body. As journalists, we look at the body politic. We try to understand America and try to understand the people who live and make up this country. And so you have to understand the dark forces and the social diseases that take root in the body politic. And you have to be able to understand them. And it's hard. It means that you look. You look something in the eye that you might personally disdain. It means that you look something in the eye that sometimes you recognize. But in order to understand it, you have to be willing in order to understand something that is so deeply embedded and so complex as race and bias and prejudice and difference, and all those aren't the same thing. I'm careful about that. Difference is not the same as bias. Racism is not the same as diversity. They're all sort of manifest in different ways.

[A]

I guess what I'M asking is, do you see some of the people that you interview who say these things that a lot of people might find objectionable? Do you look at them as people who are generically fearful of change? And this fear expresses itself because the thing that's changing is the ethnic makeup of their neighborhood. It expresses themselves.

[B]

It's one of the things that changes. So the other thing about this, and I'm sorry to interrupt you, because I just think it might inform the way that you pose the question. The other thing that I've learned, this.

[A]

Is what journalists do to each other.

[B]

What we do, we do to people when we're not in front of microphones. It's what the two of us do also. But it's never just race. It's never just race. It's also, and I'm not sliding to a zone where you give people a pass because they're feeling some sort of economic fragility or economic anxiety, yet economics are part of this. Technology is part of this. You know that people are, when they're responding to change, they're responding to demographic change. Yes. But they're also responding to a world where they don't feel like digital nativists.

[A]

Well, your broader theme in this piece and a lot of your work, is those who are left behind. And what you're saying, I think, is that there are some people who legitimately feel left behind, that the America of the 21st century doesn't care about them. Which, by the way, is a feeling that African Americans and maybe Latinos and other groups have often and often felt for. For long periods of time that Americans care about them.

[B]

And you adjust. I mean, for those who are listening, you may not know, but I'm African American.

[A]

I had no idea.

[B]

You assume that you're always walking uphill. I mean, that's the assumption that you're always walking uphill and that you're facing a headwind of some sort and that you get up before you go to bed. And the stories that you hear, and you've heard me say that my mother would say to me, did Harriet get tired? As in Harriet Tubman, just keep working steady on the grind?

[A]

And what did you say, by the way, when your mother said, did Harriet ever get tired?

[B]

You don't say anything. Have you met my mother?

[A]

Could you just. Couldn't you just say, I'm sure, in fact, Harriet Tubman every so often got tired?

[B]

No. I learned early on, my parents are postal workers. And there was the line that you get, you know, there are starving children in Africa or China or something. And I said, you work at the post office. Send it back to them. And that was the last time I ever spoke back to my family. But. But, Jeff, the idea that you have to push against some force is part of minority culture in many ways. And yet the lore is that it's supposed to be part of American culture, right? That the plow that broke the plains coming to a country, building a country, leaning against great difficulty. But that's something that I think accrues in a particular way to people who are part of minority culture and face laws and customs and a reality that is that means that they're not necessarily on a level playing field. And the fears that people have about this changing America are also interesting and surreal because on one hand, people are afraid of being left behind, and yet the statistics don't bear that out. You know, I mean, we saw reporting on the front page of the New York Times in a graphic that I don't think I can ever forget now, in the sorting, you know, in the way that you saw this sort of sorting system that had for African Americans, particularly African American males, women, but particularly African American males, that there's this level of downward mobility that they will face no matter what station that they're born to, something is pushing down on them. So even African American males who were born to relative affluence have a much greater propensity toward moving downward economically, such that they will find themselves in a sort of lower economic strata that is either living in poverty or just above it by the time that they leave this earth. There are all kinds of statistics and work that's done by people like Derek Hamilton and Sandy Darity that show that access to capital is an important issue, that home values are an important issue. Ta Nehisi Coates, on the pages of your magazine, has written beautifully about this. That show that a black family with a high degree of education, good credit scores, money in the bank, will have access to much more onerous terms in terms of the credit, in terms of borrowing than a white family with a high school degree and with much less resources, assets that don't match what the black family brings to the table. So these headwinds are real. And the fear that people feel, that's real also. I mean, one of the things that we know in politics, for instance, is that politics is about people's perceived needs. You know, it may not be their real needs, it's their perceived needs. And you have to react to them. And so when you ask the question, do I have Sympathy. Sympathy may not be the right word. I have great curiosity and sometimes I feel that as journalists, that's our secret weapon, is trying to understand the forces that are at work that lead to these fears, these needs, these reactions that sometimes don't match the reality that, that we see all around us.

[A]

It's a secret weapon, but curiosity in itself is necessary but not sufficient. And what I mean by that is, at the end of the day, I'm trying to. And you mentioned Ta Nehisi, he did this in an article for us recently, trying to grapple with the roots of Trumpism, for instance, and sort of trying to understand what role racism plays in that. And as he points out and others point out, yeah, you're talking about a lot of people who are in the left behind parts of America who have a lot of resentments based on a whole bunch of things. But Donald Trump won the votes of well off white people, engaged white people, educated white people.

[B]

And so who would not see themselves as racist?

[A]

Well, very few people see themselves as racist. The Charlottes crowd saw themselves as racist, some of them. But very few people see themselves as.

[B]

Racist but are willing to support someone who says things that in some cases that they admit are racist, but they don't see themselves as racist. And there's an a la carte nature to setting something aside. I support his economic plan. I don't much like what he says about brown people, but I support his economic plan, so I'm willing to set that aside.

[A]

Right, right.

[B]

And I'm saying that not by excuse, by explanation.

[A]

No, no, no, no. But this comes to this point where maybe curiosity isn't enough, which is to say there needs to be a diagnosis and eventually a cure. And so my question for you is, what's the cure for where we are? Because we're certainly not in a good place on issues of race relations, equality, the battle against racism.

[B]

I don't know that I'm careful to talk about a cure for something because I think that.

[A]

Or what's the way to make it better? Forget the word cure.

[B]

Well, I think journalism is a big part of that. I think holding a mirror and a window up to society. I mean, the person who is able to dismiss something that they deem is racist, helping them understand what that leads to, helping them understand that the America that you wind up with when you're willing to dismiss those kinds of things, I think part of the curative might involve, and it sounds perhaps Pollyannish, but. But reaching outside of your comfort zone to understand life is lived by somebody else. Part of it requires understanding. A big part of it, and this is the piece that we seem never to get right, is understanding our history. I mean, we don't understand where we have come from as a country. We don't understand the vestiges of slavery. We barely understand what slavery meant in America, how it manifested itself in everyday life. Most people really don't have a strong understanding of how this nation was formed and the benefits that certain classes of people had and certain classes of people didn't. And if you don't understand that, perhaps you don't understand why you have certain advantages and why privileges are accrued to one class or another, or why some people, if they look deep into their hearts, still hold lower expectations for certain classes of people. You know, some people don't actually believe why leadership looks a certain way, why authority in the minds of many people still looks a certain way, why people have certain expectations about the behavior or the intent of people of color, particularly black men. You know, why are we so afraid of black men? You know, that didn't just happen. There's a certain amount of social engineering and media manipulation and modeling around a narrative of the scary black man or the angry black female or the Latino threat or, you know, there's all kinds of examples of this that have been molded and shaped. They did not happen naturally. This is not something that just happened by some sort of natural decree. This is something that happened through socialization over a long period of time.

[A]

Talking about history and the way we understand our own history in this country. Some of the people you've talked to, both through reporting stories like this one and the race car project, it put you in touch with a lot of diverse kind of thinking. Tell the story of America and its relationship to its African American citizens, or first its non citizens and then citizens, the way I'm gonna use a crude term and you fix it the way one of your more racist white interlocutors might tell that, or not even racist, but one of those people you describe as the kind of Trump voter who overlooks certain things, doesn't think of himself as racist, certainly, but found it okay to vote for Donald Trump for a set of other reasons. How do they understand that? Because I think there's a clue embedded in something you said that we're never gonna get to where we need to be until we actually grapple with the reality of certain aspects of the way this country was created and built. So how do they tell that story?

[B]

I can answer the question, but I'd have to remove the Trump nature of it, because I don't ask people who they voted for. Sometimes they will say. Sometimes they will say it in the course of telling their backstory, but that's not one of the questions we ask. So that's not something I can speak to. But for people who do set aside history or don't fully understand history, one of the things I learn is how often people don't understand history, that they think of slavery as ancient history, as in not three generations ago, four generations ago, 1865 made everything flat, that it was a long time ago, and that at the end of slavery, that it was the end of the problem. And that to the extent that slavery existed in America, that they don't. They think that slaves were well taken care of. You know, they were.

[A]

There can't be a lot of people who think that.

[B]

There are a lot of people who think that more than you might fully understand. And even if they don't think that they were well taken care of, they don't understand how horrible the conditions of slavery were. They don't understand that families were ripped apart. They don't. I mean, to the extent that we understand it, it's probably through popular culture. You know, we learn a little bit in textbooks, we learn a little bit in the pages of magazines like yours. But I think films like 12 Years a Slave do a lot more to educate people about the conditions of slavery that those who were enslaved lived under than what most people actually learn in the years that they spend in American schools or even private schools, or even if they went to college, even if they have master's degrees, they might not fully understand and what that means. And the importance of that is then understanding that if you were not allowed to own property, if you were not allowed to get an education, if you were not allowed to fully matriculate in society, if you came back and you fought for your country and you could not take advantage of the GI Bill. I mean, the GI Bill was added rocket fuel to the American middle class. But there's a whole category of Americans who were black and brown, Filipino, Mexican, you know, who were not able to. To fully take advantage of that. We're not able to go to school, we're not able to buy homes with those GI Loans, then you understand the owner's nature of this. When you understand that for neighborhoods, if a black family moved in, your FHA rating sunk just by having that family in the neighborhood. Now, if you lived in that neighborhood, you might actually like the idea of integration, but you also like the idea that your nest egg is tied up in your home. So then you face a conundrum. Do I support integration or do I actually support the black family that moved into the. Is dropping my home, the value of my home, which my retirement, my kids education and everything is wrapped up in that. And suddenly that person faces a quandary, a conundrum. I'm not sure that a lot of people really understand those issues. And when you are honest about those kinds of issues, you have a better understanding of America and the America that we see today. And so. So as journalists, we tell the first draft of history, but I increasingly see the importance of also paying attention to what we see in the rearview mirror and putting that in context and helping us understand how it has an impact on the policies that we see today, on the inequality gap that is so wide in America, on access to opportunity. All of this is not something. And the institutions that we have and the inequalities that we see in the institutions that they have, that didn't just happen by osmosis. It happened because of decisions that were made over time and policies that were developed over time. And all of it based on a foundation of inequality that was at the root of the founding of our great nation.

[A]

Michel Norris, thank you very much for being with me.

[B]

You're welcome.

[A]

Thank you all for listening to the Electricity Lannick interview. This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend with Productions award from Matt Thompson, Kim Lau and Katherine Wells. If you like the show, give us a rating. And by that I mean a positive rating. Thank you very much for listening. See you.