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These are stories from families finding out about their past, these stories relate to "The Grace of Silence" because in Chapter 9 Michele was trying to find out more about her fathers shooting and more about the past, the people in these stories were trying to do the same

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In chapter 9 of "The Grace of Silence" Michele Norris talks about how her father Belvin Norris Jr.  was shot in the leg by white police men. This chapter talks about Michele finding out quite a bit of information about her dad's shooting. She is constantly searching for more and more about this event and will stop at nothing until she gets to the bottom of it. Michele talks to multiple people about the shooting in this chapter, but probably the most important person she talked to was her mom. Her mom had also just recently found out about the shooting and they related to each other about the whole situation. They connected over the racism and the harm done to the man they loved most. This chapter is a big step closer to her finding out about what happened to her dad.

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My parents were postal workers who took pride in simple things. Their home. Their garden. The sunny optimism they passed on to their children. I thought I knew my parents so well. I was wrong.

I set out to write a book exploring America's hidden conversation about race but changed course when I started listening intently to the hidden conversations in my own family. I was shocked to learn that my father was shot in the leg by white police officers in Birmingham, Alabama shortly after returning from his military service in World War II. While the wound was superficial, the experience was not and the story remained submerged for decades. He didn't even tell my mother. But my Mother also had a secret. She never spoke about the years her mother worked as an itinerant Aunt Jemima, traveling to small towns conducting pancake mix demonstrations, dressed in a hoop skirt and apron with a bandanna on her head.

My parents kept these stories to themselves because they wanted their children to soar. They didn't want to weigh down our pockets with tales of woe. Instead, they armed us with ambition instead of anxiety. I always knew I was shaped by my parents' expectations and the advice they doled out. What I did not realize until recently is that I was also shaped by the weight of their silence. I now understand that I was molded in myriad ways by those things they never talked about but that nonetheless dictated how they lived their lives. Silence, I learned, had its rewards.....and its costs.

I hope The Grace of Silence encourages people to think about their own complex family legacies and to consider a core question: How well do we really know the people who raised us?

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My parents were postal workers who took pride in simple things. Their home. Their garden. The sunny optimism they passed on to their children. I thought I knew my parents so well. I was wrong. I set out to write a book exploring America's hidden conversation about race but changed course when I started [...]

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This is linked to our blog because this is talking about racism and in chapter 9, Michele is talking about racism in the police and random people on the street.

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URI FRIEDMAN, The Atlantic JUL 2 2014, 9:05 AM ET ASPEN, Colo.-"The moment was fine for me.... But I don't know, how was it for you?" That's New York Times columnist Mark Oppenheimer asking Tessie Guillermo, president and CEO of the consultancy ZeroDivide, how she felt when he inquired about her ethnicity.

"Context is really important," Guillermo responded. "The context, the place of the situation in which the question is asked, really dictates the answer. I guess I'm one of those people that are always trying to put folks at ease." Guillermo had just recalled that when she was young, her mother used to clean her with a stone "because she thought she could rub some of the color off of us." "We were the only non-blacks on our block," Guillermo explained, "and she wanted to make sure that we weren't thought of as black." "What are you, ethnically?" Oppenheimer had asked in response. "Filipina," Guillermo answered.

The exchange took place at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is organized by The Atlantic and the Aspen Institute, during a panel discussion on The Race Card Project, a four-year-old effort by NPR host Michele Norris to solicit people's frank, unfiltered thoughts on race in bite-sized, six-word essays. She's received tens of thousands of responses from people in 63 countries.

Watch the The Race Card Project's, Say What?!? Performance at Belly Up, Aspen

"One of the most common submissions to The Race Card Project is some formulation of, 'So, where are you really from?'" Norris said. "To a lot of people that hits their ear the wrong way. It feels like someone is trying to point out their otherness: 'You're quite obviously not American, so where are you from?'" The question, Norris added, is, "How do you express curiosity without stepping on someone's feelings?" As these testimonies demonstrate, some people resent the question, others embrace or at least tolerate it, and still others find it thoroughly confusing. And sometimes people experience all these feelings at once, or different emotions depending on the situation. Immigrants around the world struggle with the question.

Here's how the researchers Virginia Mapedzahama and Kwamena Kwansah-Aido reflected on this "quintessential question of identity" in a 2010 paper on African identity in Australia: While acknowledging that a certain 'curiosity' sometimes drives the asking of this question, we still question the implications and multiplicity of meanings to those whom it is asked. We contend that being asked the question raises three key issues for us. First, we perceive it as exclusionary, in that in a white dominated society it is asked, mainly of certain groups of people who are visibly different. Second, the assumption behind the question-that one is not 'from here', constructs an/other whose identity is fixed and tied only to one faraway place, thereby erasing our hyphenated identities, which define our everyday lived realities. Third, it invokes feelings of ambivalence about place when it is interpreted as demanding a justification of the claim to belonging and being 'from here'.

Watch the Say What ?!? Performance from The Afternoon of Conversation at The Aspen Ideas Festival, 2014

The importance of context was a recurring theme throughout the Race Card Project discussion. Norris pointed out that the audience laughed when one card-"Not all Mexicans can do landscaping"-was read aloud. "The people who wrote this didn't write" with the intention of being funny, she observed. "Is it nervous laughter? Is it laughter because of recognition? Or is it the fact that laughter plays a role in creating a bridge to each other? I have always thought that the most honest conversation about race in America takes place on a comedy stage ... where people can say things that are impolitic almost everywhere else.

Where you're allowed to laugh." The panel also debated whether the fact that some stereotypes are based in truth makes them any less pernicious, and whether it's corrosive or cathartic for ethnic groups to stereotype and poke fun at themselves. "It doesn't bother me to have a little inter-ethnic humor, frankly," PBS anchor Gwen Ifill said. "I think you have to be careful about calling everything racism. Making self-mocking, humorous, loving references to stereotypes can be pretty funny. It's not so funny if those same things are said by someone else whose attempt is to hurt or scar or limit you."

The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg found the practice more troubling. "There are people in African-American communities, Jewish communities, other communities, who internalize some of these stereotypes and actually begin to believe them. That's the nature of minority self-hatred," he said. "We've seen this in comedy. Dave Chappelle went silent for six years, and many black comedians have this ... where suddenly they realize they're making these jokes about black people, and white people are laughing, not benevolently. They're running with this stuff."

_______________
Uri Friedman is a senior associate editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees the Global Channel. He was previously the deputy managing editor at Foreign Policy and a staff writer for The Atlantic Wire.

This article was originally published on The Atlantic. Click here to view the original. © All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency. http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/07/question-where-are-you-from-racist/373818/

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Is It Racist to Ask People Where They're From? - The Race Card Project

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URI FRIEDMAN, The Atlantic JUL 2 2014, 9:05 AM ET ASPEN, Colo.-"The moment was fine for me.... But I don't know, how was it for you?" That's New York Times columnist Mark Oppenheimer asking Tessie Guillermo, president and CEO of the consultancy ZeroDivide, how she felt when he inquired about her ethnicity.

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This is about the police in Ferguson, and how the police were being unfair. This connects to the book because Michele Norris also thinks the police that shot her dad we being very unfair and racist.

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They're a cross between Bull Connor, the iconic racist police chief of the segregation era, and the Keystone Cops.

Nearly a week after Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old black man, was shot dead by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo., the circumstances remain as murky as the nearby Mississippi River during a flood. Police and a Brown friend tell radically different stories about whether the shooting was justified or something closer to homicide.

It's too early for conclusions about the shooting. But the behavior of the Ferguson police department is another matter.
POLICE CHIEF : 'We want to build trust'
Its heavy handed, unprofessional tactics since the shooting raise grave doubts about both its competence and its credibility. It certainly cannot be trusted to investigate itself or, for that matter, to protect the community.

Police have enraged the public they serve by showing little respect for constitutional rights and little recognition of how Brown's killing has tapped into a deep vein of distrust of law enforcement among African Americans. By refusing to disclose basic information, including the name of the officer who shot Brown and autopsy results that could shed light on the case, they've needlessly raised suspicion.

Certainly, the officer and his family need protection, but a police department is fully capable of achieving that goal without resorting to stonewalling tactics that demolish public trust. After all, police and prosecutors routinely disclose names of arrested suspects, and in New York City, no stranger to this kind of controversy, it took only two days for police to make public the name of the officer who allegedly killed a black suspect in July by putting him in an illegal chokehold.

The Ferguson police just appear clueless about race relations, for reasons with a familiar historical ring. Thirty years ago, the community was overwhelmingly white. Today, it is two-thirds black, but blacks still hold virtually no political power. The police force's 53-person roster includes just three African Americans. Black residents say they are frequently harassed, and their anger has fueled unrest - including looting and demonstrators throwing Molotov cocktails.

There's no excuse for that behavior. The vandals should be prosecuted. But neither does there seem to be any need for authorities to clear the streets with tear gas and rubber bullets, or to muster heavily armed SWAT teams with automatic weapons and armored trucks.

Pictures from Ferguson make the police look more like an occupying force fighting jihadis in Iraq than law enforcement keeping order in their own community. They seem intent on acting with impunity and blocking scrutiny.

Officers roughed up two reporters Wednesday, and video also shows police lobbing a tear gas grenade at a TV news crew. Once the crew fled, police in gas masks began taking down the lights and video camera - until they realized another crew was taping them. They've managed to cast themselves as a cross between Bull Connor, the iconic racist police chief of the segregation era, and the Keystone Cops.

Adult supervision began arriving Thursday. President Obama and Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon called for calm. They noted the rights of protesters and reporters. Nixon put the Missouri Highway Patrol in charge of security.

Obama said he had asked the Justice Department and the FBI to conduct independent investigations of what happened to Michael Brown. That's reassuring.
USA TODAY's editorial opinions are decided by its Editorial Board, separate from the news staff. Most editorials are coupled with an opposing view - a unique USA TODAY feature.
Meanwhile, the police would help themselves with more transparency and less militarization.

Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1oyGCbW

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They're a cross between Bull Connor, the iconic racist police chief of the segregation era, and the Keystone Cops. Nearly a week after Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old black man, was shot dead by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo., the circumstances remain as murky as the nearby Mississippi River during a flood.

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"I am not a prejudice person, but I do not trust American white people. When you have seen people treated that way and hurt and the shooting and the bombings and the constant disrespect, it bothers me. It really bothers me to this day." Pg 104

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"I remember your grandparents walking home, in all white. They were coming home from church….Some white kids came zooming' down the street hanging out of car windows and they pelted them with rotten tomatoes." Pg 103