Faced with a sharp rise in racial tensions and concern over seemingly intractable structural inequalities, simple acts of speaking and listening can promote understanding and create opportunities for progress. In a recent public forum the Klau Center for Civil and Human Rights, part of the Keough School, launched its new initiative to collect stories of race and encourage dialogue at Notre Dame.
Created as a response to student interest in proactive ways to address concerns about race, With Voices True made its campus debut on January 21 in the Navari Family Center for Digital Scholarship at the Hesburgh Library. The project is a collaboration between the Klau Center, the John W. Gallivan Program for Journalism, Ethics, and Democracy, and University Archives.
Klau Center Associate Director Dory Mitros Durham described the project as a hopeful step taken at an opportune time.
We believe that people are ready to talk and ready to listen.
“It seems to us that we have arrived at a moment when there is a renewed openness to talking about race and its implications in American society today,” Mitros Durham said. “People have been reading Robin DiAngelo’s White Privilege and JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and trying to make some sense of the modern implications of racial identity. We believe that people are ready to talk and ready to listen.
“We wanted to set up a mechanism to let that happen—to tell and to hear real stories that give content to the concepts of race and racial identity.”
Housed within University Archives, participants’ personal stories are available in their entirety for research purposes. A curated collection of abridged narratives is also available publicly through the With Voices True website, providing classrooms and other groups a tool to begin constructive conversation around race.
A panel discussion accompanied the website launch. Participating were project partners Richard Jones, the Walter H. Annenberg-Edmund P. Joyce Director of the John W. Gallivan Program in Journalism, Ethics, and Democracy; Angela Fritz, head of University Archives; and Claire Rafford, one of the student journalists responsible for collecting the narratives for the project.
Photo, left to right: Event panelists Richard Jones, Angela Fritz, and Claire Rafford.
Acknowledging the importance of the institutional partnerships, which helped solve technical, legal, and ethical challenges to implementation, Mitros Durham summed up hopes for the project.
“The collection we share with you tonight is, we think, a remarkable beginning to this effort,” she said. “It engages with difficult issues and tells moving stories, and at the end of the day that’s exactly what the vision always was.”
All members of the Notre Dame community are encouraged to participate in the project by telling their story. With Voices True can be accessed at voicestrue.nd.edu.
