NPR spoke with 30 small groups of people around the country about what they'd want other people to understand about their community — and what they want to understand about others
Audio will be available later today.Alba Lopez remembers inviting the secretary of the company she works for to a birthday party. And the woman asked where she lives."I live in Wyandotte County. And the boss say, 'No, no, no, no, no, don't go there.' She's driving a Mercedes. And he say, 'Oh no, when you get out and pick up your Mercedes, you're not going to have tires. And it's going to be on top of blocks.
When Lopez said,"They don't live where we live," she tapped into a sentiment we heard a lot: We know our own communities but we don't often get a chance to sit and listen to people in other communities. The project also encouraged people to define themselves in ways that didn't start with politics. This project yielded hours and hours of taped conversations. So we used Cortico's AI tools and a prototype from MIT to search for shared themes across all the recordings so that we could listen more closely. We only used the AI tools to analyze the conversations, not to generate any content. That's NPR policy: Everything we do is written and edited by real people.
"And I've become more grateful for the fact that I know people on more than a transient level," she said."So when I go to the grocery store, I'm not just buying groceries from a random person. I can ask them how their day was. I can care about things in their life, and that makes my life more fulfilled."
"You hear stuff all the time about, 'Oh, the cow farts,'" he said."They're trying to demonize the cattle industry as a whole." But"we're not out there trying to ruin the planet at all. We look at ourselves as environmentalists in a way that we want the best for the ground and the earth too.Pearson is getting at something similar to what Lopez, the woman from the neighborhood in Kansas City, hinted at when she said:"They don't live where we live.
Dominique DiLorenzo is a family practice physician in Orlando, Fla. She wears a hijab, the traditional Muslim head scarf, and described a time she felt stereotyped.
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