Because they could use a bookmark just put a postcard right inside the book. But the postcard started to come back. And you might think six words What can people possibly say in six words? I chose six words because people were familiar with six WORD exercises. Because I knew as a writer, when I write something complicated, I try to reduce it to one sentence and then I understand how I can build it back up. And because this is a big toxic subject, if people could just distill their thoughts, maybe they would get to the essence of what they were thinking. In the beginning a lot of the postcards were very we call them rainbow and Bunny postcards. And maybe it was because we were in that post racial aura, but only one race the human race. A lot of people quoted Rodney King Can't we just get along, but then things started to get deep white not allowed to be proud. I'm only Asian when it's convenient. You said dirt? So I scrubbed to black for black men's love. No My name is not Maria. People would send in postcards and they would turn them into art. Look at what Dorothy Dorothy Umi Garcia did to that card. No WORD for what I am. She lives in Santa Cruz. And her card is unique to her. That's her as a little girl. That little Fair Isle sweater sitting between her mom and dad her dad is Latino her mother is Asian. Now if you are mixed race yourself if you are part of a partnership, where you have married or love someone across a culture, you know what it's like to go to kindergarten and they put that form in front of you and you get to choose one box that you have to check and one box sometimes is not enough. So she's saying no WORD for what I am. And I love it. That card is individual to her but it's also universal. Because so many of us are put in boxes of fixed servitude, and it's not enough. You may look at me and you said she's an African American woman. Because that's often what you do quick, but you check a box. I'm a journalist. I'm a wife, a mother, a daughter. I like to think I'm a dancer. I'm a cook. I occasionally rollers i There's a whole bunch of stuff. But often it's just one thing that sticks to us. Most of the cards now come in digitally, but I still love the postcards. I love the intention in them. I love the way you can see how people think. When people send in their cards digitally because we created a website. Once the card started to come they were so interesting. I wanted to share them with the world so we created a website and then the cards started to come in digitally. But the postcard you you can't cut and paste on a postcard. So when you write something you can you can fix your sentence and it's perfect by the time I see it right. But in this case, there's no cut and paste function on there. So you see his thought process. Now he brought it down to six words and we're glad about that because it was seven and a lot of people are slick. I asked for six words. And I knew that if I asked for a sentence people would give me a paragraph and I asked for a paragraph people say oh too much work. I'm not going to do that. So I asked for six words. And sometimes people hyphenate several words. Or they put words in parentheses or there's an asterisk and then there's more stuff down below. So he got his down to six. And I love this card because his thought process is evident in this. The cards are pretty heavy stock, and he says Father was racist. I'm not progress exclamation point. But he goes over those words. I'm not over and over and over with his pen so much that it goes through in dense the card. He wants you to know something. His dad was in one place and he is evolved and he's someplace else. That's the story you see on the card. But doesn't it make you think about what happens outside the four corners of that card? Did dad ever evolve with him? What was the relationship like? Over the holidays like this is another card that's unique to him but it's universal because many of us have people that we love and cherish and adore but we don't love or cherish or adore their values, their perspectives, the things we say out loud. Everybody in this room has probably had that experience at a holiday table at some point, especially right now right? Uncle Earl says something and the conversation just goes to another place. My house started to fill up with these postcards. And I kept them as you see in Tupperware containers and shoe boxes and I realized that I was archiving something very interesting about America and that I had to figure out how I could contain these stories hold onto these stories, share them with people I created journalism around them. As I said we created the website. And the stories often came in the form of questions suggesting to me that people were asking questions that they weren't able to ask in other spaces. This is a woman who said did my southern grandpa attend lynchings? In case you can't see that? And if you ask a question like that, you probably have a pretty good idea of the answer. We have archived more than 500,000 of these stories we have 1000s of stories waiting to queue since the book has was published our hidden conversations published by Simon and Schuster on January 16. We've received 10s of 1000s of new cards in the inbox just since then, and I'm going to take you inside the inbox because I want to give you the experience that I have every day when we go into the inbox. I work with a very small, teeny but mighty team maintaining this archive and I included these photos here to help you understand that the stories that I'm about to share with you. They are included in the archive that I administer but they're not my stories. I am a conservative other people's truths. And at some point my teams suggested that we do a few things and some of the things I agreed to and some of the things I fought and this is another case where I admitting I was wrong. I created this project because I thought no one wants to talk about race. Apparently a lot of people do. And we added two words to the forum that said anything else. So people would sign on there six words on the forum when they sent it in digitally anything else? And that was like opening a spigot. Oh, you want to know why I chose these six words. So people would send in paragraphs essays, sometimes entire treatise in some cases. And the team said, you know, we should include photographs, and I didn't want to include photographs. I was so afraid that the website would start to look like and I apologize if anyone here works for Mehta or Facebook or has relatives that do but I was afraid that the website was going to look like Facebook, which to my mind looked like a messy teenage bedroom. I didn't know where my eye was supposed to go there was all kinds of stuff all over the place. It was another example I was wrong. We asked people to include their photos in the adorn their essays, their six WORD essays in many cases, and the pictures themselves tell a story. So I wanted you to see the pictures to understand that these are individuals who are telling their own stories, and in some cases, sharing something that they're proud of look at that picture that she's holding, sharing a moment that meant something to them, oftentimes sharing pictures of them when they were young, because in many cases, the stories that they chose to share with us suggested that they're still adjudicating something that happened to them much earlier in their life. That little boy in that little outfit. How many of you had that outfit because I had something that looked just like it. It came from Sears or Montgomery Ward's it was like Garanimals and everything match. So I'm going to take you inside the inbox to let you understand what it's like to listen to Americans singing all on its own octave around a subject that no one allegedly wanted to talk about. And I like to bring the room into this. Does anyone want to read these six words? Just shout them out if you don't mind. Anyone? Thank you. Thank you. We just met this morning. Isn't this interesting? Because she's telling us that she's feeling uncomfortable. This photo is so beautiful that we actually did forensics on it to make sure that it wasn't like enhanced in some way. It actually is a photo. We know what kind of phone it was taken on. Is there anything about this picture that suggests that she's uncomfortable? She looks like she has got it going on. And yet it is a reminder to us that maybe we shouldn't judge people because you never know what's actually going on. Who wants to read this one? Thank you. That's Kyle Lin from Grand Rapids. And again, I had to check the photo because look at that photo. I thought is that really them or is that a did they just grab that from sort of ice stock or something like that? That's actually the two of them. It's on their wedding night. They had a fantastic wedding for a photographer that caught them in this beautiful Moran gay moment. And I called him for two reasons because I said Kyle's not really you and I also call them because we're going to put it on the website. And I know that the first year of marriage can be tender. And so I said, you know, I'm gonna put this on the website and I didn't miss his wife, Claire, and I didn't want Claire's cousin to say Did you see what Kyle put on the internet? And he said, No, I want you to post this and this is his story. They met and married. They met in college and marriage soon after that. They had many of the same interests. They liked the same theater. They liked the same music. They had the same ideas for vacation. And Kyle says that his wife looked at him he is Chinese and Singaporean because he is mixed race but Asian. And she said that he said that his wife looked at him as someone who was basically an assimilated white man.