Author of the week: Michele Norris

last updated 8 January 2015

NPR host Michele Norris was recently shocked to learn that even in her own family, a lot still goes unsaid about race, said Michael Sragow in the Baltimore Sun. Norris spent much of 2008 hosting on-air dialogues about the topic and was planning to translate that series into a book when the story became personal. Poking into her family background, the 49-year-old African-American journalist discovered that her grandmother had once traveled the Midwest for Quaker Oats dressed as Aunt Jemima. More surprising still was that her father had once been wounded by a police officer during a wave of violence against black veterans in Birmingham, Ala. “I’m positive I would have been a different person if I had heard this story even once,” Norris says.

In her memoir, The Grace of Silence, Norris acknowledges that her parents kept such stories from her so that she would grow up feeling empowered, rather than a victim. “I benefited from my parents’ silence because I wasn’t laden with their disappointments.” Even while growing up in Minnesota, she was never aware that some white neighbors had fled as soon as her parents moved in. Now a parent herself, Norris says she struggles to decide how much to tell her children about her own brushes with racist attitudes. “People like my parents pushed the country forward with their decision to put away their own pain,” she says. “I’m not sure that in the confessional culture of today we could do the same.”