Our Hidden Conversations is an almost 3 lb., 9.5x7.75-inch, 471-page world of all of us. I didn't believe I could finish it in the space of a library loan, so I posted an early review to Goodreads, which I'm replacing with this one now that I have indeed slurped it down well before its due date.
This is us. This is everybody—all races, genders, the whole mess.
The book is packed with remarkable stories, history, analysis, and real-people quotes. (It's the perfect follow-up to Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns, which I just reviewed.)
From a section by author Michele Norris:
"I find it deeply ironic that there is such a fierce battle to evade and erase historical teachings about slavery because, in the time of enslavement, there was such an assiduous effort to document and catalog every aspect of that institution, much in the way people now itemize, assess, and insure their valuables. The height, weight, skin color, teeth, hair texture, work habits, and scars that might help identify anyone who dared to flee were documented. The menstrual cycles of enslaved women and their windows of fertility—because producing more enslaved people produced more wealth—were entered like debits and credits in enslavers' ledgers." (178)
Michele Norris's commentary is wise, compassionate, objective, and elucidating, and the effect of all these stories—they came out of Norris's The Race Card Project which invited people to send postcards with 6-word thoughts on race—is to showcase how much we all have in common. Everybody is pained by being judged and put in boxes they don't identify with, asked ignorant questions, insulted by others' lack of understanding that they are even being insulting.
Everybody is in this book, and so that includes plenty of White people who tell their stories of difficulty and deprivation. There are first-person accounts of the struggles we have at other people's assumptions, biases, and projections. Black, White, Native, Arab, Middle Eastern, Asian, mixed-race people and families, adoptees and adopters, gay people, people with disabilities, poor people, White men who are turned down because of being White men. Nobody is left out. And it seems that most of us believe that nobody but similar people with difficulties really understands what we face.
But the more I read, the more it came clear that if you are abled and White and from a marginalized place (poor, don't speak the language without an accent, gay, uneducated, from extreme dysfunction and/or deprivation), you still have an option to change your situation that non-White and disabled people do not have. You can get an education, change your accent, learn a language, get therapy, change your ethnic name, work four jobs, learn what you don't know. I'm not saying this is easy or fair, but still you do not face what disabled people and people who are not White face just because of their appearance.
Many of the people in this book, and many of us, seem to think hardship is a contest. This book puts that in perspective in a way that everybody will receive or not receive according to their openness.
It is hard not to quote large sections of this book, but suffice it to say that Norris's essay about lynching (pp. 382-384) is a work of monstrous art. That this practice was legal for so many years, that the pride and display associated with doing it were common should turn all of our stomachs. (Personally, it hits me the same as the Nazis' proud mass extermination of Jews, complete with saving relics and records of the acts.) This, too, is us, and to quote the last line of the essay: "If you are unwilling to do this work [acknowledge, face, and discuss this truth]—and it is work—then leave the word [lynching—and I would add: any comparison or debate about equivalent suffering or proclamation of innocence, which is totally moot and has zero to do with what should be a communal disgust at what did happen] alone. (384)" [I apologize for that long interrupted quote, but I'm steaming and am not going to edit it out.]
I have certainly heard many of the stories in this book from individuals, but there is something incomparably powerful about having them gathered here together, along with color plates and commentary from every kind of person. And what comes into the sharpest focus is the necessity to know everybody's story, know true history, and thereby empathize rather than defend or compete to have had a worse or equivalent hardship.
I think everybody could benefit from reading this book. I certainly did.