To combat racial injustice, we must fully tell its stories

A year ago a Black man named George Floyd lost his life under the knee of a white Minneapolis police officer. Floyd’s death sparked massive civil rights protests around the world and a painful racial reckoning in the United States that is far from resolved.

One hundred years ago a white mob destroyed Greenwood, a prosperous Black district of Tulsa, Oklahoma, in a two-day rampage of looting, burning, and shooting that killed as many as 300 people and left some 10,000 homeless. The attack on what’s remembered as Black Wall Street is one of the worst acts of terrorism in U.S. history—and I’m embarrassed to admit that until recently, I’d never heard of it.

In many respects, the distance between 1921 and 2021 is enormous. So much about our country has changed, and that includes significant progress on extending equality and opportunity to all. And yet, in other ways and places, echoes of a segregated and hateful past remain. There are still massive economic disparities between Black people and white, and massive disparities in incarceration rates. And, as we have seen in the killings that preceded and followed George Floyd’s death, systemic violence continues to claim Black lives.

National Geographic has been covering the human journey since its founding in 1888. Through the years, the mission has been much the same: to observe the world’s people and cultures, to shed light on the human experience—and to show how much more alike we are than we are different. But only in the past several years have we directly tackled the topic of race—and that has resulted in some of the most difficult and forthright conversations we have ever had with our readers and within our institution. 

Of course, these complicated conversations aren’t just happening here. They’re everywhere—across dinner tables, at workplaces, in civic and faith organizations, and even with ourselves.

This month we look again at race, with a focus on Black-white relations in the United States, in recognition of the one-year anniversary in Minneapolis and the 100-year anniversary in Tulsa.

Despite the scale of the destruction, for decades the Tulsa tragedy was obscured, like the unmarked graves of its victims. Then in 2018, Washington Post reporter DeNeen L. Brown wrote about how Tulsa investigations had been thwarted, and her coverage helped get the inquiry reopened. With Brown’s moving story in this issue, and a powerful documentary on our television channel, we revisit what happened in Tulsa and how it informs events today. 

Also in this issue, an essay by Elizabeth Alexander—poet, educator, scholar, and president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation—explores how we can’t escape our history but must reckon with it. “Without learning, without knowledge, without the voices and the experiences and the insights gained from a determined excavation of our country’s past, we will never eradicate racism and racial violence,” Alexander writes. “If we are to stop weaving white supremacism into the fabric of our country, then we must learn our full histories. We must live like we understand what that history teaches us.”

Finally, we have turned to writer Michele L. Norris—and to you—to continue a frank conversation about race. More than a decade ago, Norris began the Race Card Project, in which she asked people to think about the word “race” and boil their thoughts down to six words. She expected few would respond. She was wrong. “I had no idea that what I was actually creating was a taproot that would carry me into people’s most private spaces,” she writes. “I had no idea that there were so many people who were so eager to talk about race and identity that they would share their thoughts with a stranger.” How many? So far, she has more than 500,000 six-word micro-essays, from every state and about 100 countries and territories.

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Norris recently has brought the Race Card Project to the National Geographic Society, as a storytelling fellow. We’ll support Norris in using a wealth of tools—audio, video, animation, cartography, photography, art, technology—to bring the project’s archived stories to life. These aren’t just binary conversations about Black and white people; this “quilt,” as she describes it, pulls at all manner of cultural threads, from Latinos and Indigenous people to Asians and Iranians.

We invite you to add your thoughts about race and identity to the project. It’s challenging to take a subject such as race and distill it into six words. We all have a lot of “race cards” inside of us, and no doubt they change with time and circumstance. I asked a friend who had participated in the project to share hers: “Only Black family in the neighborhood” was one of her race cards. “Suburban soccer mom. Doesn’t fit narrative” was another.

So, what’s my race card? This is a hard exercise, but reflecting on the difficult past year, on our fraught politics, and so many conversations I’ve had with friends and colleagues, for now I’ll leave it at this: “White, privileged, with much to learn.”

Thank you for reading National Geographic.