NPR’s Michele Norris: The Grace of Silence Salt Lake City Main Library Auditorium, 210 E., 400 South, 80, Nov. Traveling from her childhood home in Minnesota to her familial roots in the Deep South, Norris was forced to confront the silence perpetuated by her parents and grandparents in order to better understand both her own lineage and how that newly unearthed narrative compares to the bigger story of the “postracial.” Her resulting book, The Grace of Silence, mutated from a polling of that nationwide dialogue to a very personal examination of the complexities of national race politics. Gracefully written and carefully researched, it offers up long-buried family secrets as. The book is, at once, much less and much more. I wish NPR reporter Michele Norris hadn’t called The Grace of Silence, her tribute to her parents, a memoir. The fallout from that investigation into the dynamic role race plays in this country surprised even Norris herself. An NPR reporter offers up family secrets as a testimony to racism’s power and reach. With the election of Barack Obama to the White House, this country’s political and social dialogue altered in a direction that, to some, was impetuously deemed “postracial.” Michele Norris, co-host of NPR’s All Things Considered, decided to explore the undercurrents and hidden conversations boiling under that seemingly elevated surface.
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