After premiering The Michelle Obama Podcast on Spotify last week with her husband, former President Barack Obama, the former First Lady invited a Minnesotan on for episode two: the Peabody award-winning journalist Michele Norris, whose voice you might recall from her years as a host on NPR's All Things Considered.
While discussing how they were brought up in the U.S. as Black children, the two touched on why Norris left Minneapolis to pursue her career and the challenge many face in doing so.
"I knew that, as much as I loved my people, and the Land of Lakes, I knew that I was gonna go someplace else. And I wonder, maybe it was the National Geographic magazines. Was it something that my parents instilled in me?" Norris says. "Because there were a lot of people that I grew up with, who didn't leave, and who barely leave the Southside of Minneapolis. And I wonder how much of it was told to us overtly or was just the messaging. Because as young Black kids, getting ready to go out into a world that was not really fully ready to accept us, our parents had to do some sort of jiu jitsu messaging around that, right, because they were trying to encourage us to be bold, to go out into the world, but at the same time, they were terrified about what would happen if we did."
Norris became the first African-American female host at NPR in 2002, when she joined All Things Considered, and stayed there until she stepped down in 2013, as her husband Broderick Johnson became the White House Cabinet secretary for the Obama administration. Norris joined the Washington Post as an opinion columnist in 2019. She also was a guest on Obama's stadium-sized book tour for her bestselling memoir Becoming.
Norris grew up in a neighborhood just blocks from 38th and Chicago, where Floyd was killed. Her memoir that she published in 2010, The Grace of Silence, recounts her upbringing in Minneapolis and familial legacy, tracing her ancestry to the Deep South, and she writes about her father’s shooting by a Birmingham police officer and her grandmother’s job working as an "itinerant Aunt Jemima" selling pancake mix for Quaker Oats.
In the conversation, she also talked about the wave of protests following the murder of George Floyd.
"Norris: And I think that people are, you know react in a way that suggests that they're tired of these old rules. I mean, never in my life, would I have thought, that Minneapolis, the Southside of Minneapolis...
Obama: That's your hometown.
Norris: Ten blocks from where I grew up, and the corner of 38th and Chicago, that that would be the epicenter for a wave of protests that would sweep around the globe. That would lead to the removal of monuments and statues, and lead to a moment of reckoning, and recognition, almost said reconciliation, cause I don't think we're there, reconciliation."
After graduating Washburn High School, Norris briefly attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison to study engineering before transferring to the University of Minnesota. She started her journalism career here, reporting for the Minnesota Daily college newspaper and becoming a reporter for WCCO. While working at ABC News, she won an Emmy and Peabody Award for her 9/11 coverage. Today, she works from Washington D.C.
The two also discussed how the pandemic has changed each of them and their outlook on the world, and what this moment in history means.
"We are all going through a significant period of evolution, and it means, that there's an opportunity in that, it feels burdensome right now, because so much has been taken from us. But there's such an incredible opportunity, to decide how you want to show up in the new world. Because it will be a new world. And my greatest hope is that we don't reach for normal, that we reach for better," Norris says.
Listen to the full episode on Spotify.
