[Opens with saxophone]
Shawna 0:09
That sound is coming from a museum in Klagenfurt, Austria. A live jazz musician was playing at the opening of an exhibition featuring seven people who talked about what it feels like to be overlooked, erased, or told that you don't quite belong. Tonight, that museum opened its doors to this new exhibit, and somehow I am one of the voices inside it.
I'm Dr. Shawna Gann, your host. Welcome to this very special episode of Our True Colors.
I want to tell you about something extraordinary that a group of students in southern Austria have built, and I am honored to be a small part of it. It's called Code of Courage: Diversity Begins with Me. It was created by students from the HTL Mössingerstraße, a technical school in Klagenfurt, in the region of Carinthia. They spent months conducting interviews, recording podcasts, designing exhibits, and doing the kind of work that a lot of folks talk about but don't actually do.
Their teacher is Professor Dr. Mirjam Rein, and she's been my friend for over 35 years. We were accidental pen pals who found each other by mistake and never let go. When she was building this project, she needed someone who could speak to what it means to exist in a liminal space: between racial categories, between cultures, somewhere between belonging and not quite belonging. And that is exactly what I research. So I said yes.
I want to paint a picture for you, because this space deserves it. The kärnten.museum sits in the heart of Klagenfurt. From the outside, it is a grand golden building, three stories of ornate windows and columns, with the word Landesmuseum carved high across the pediment at the very top. It was completed in 1884, nearly destroyed by bombs in the Second World War, and then restored. The most recent restoration finished in 2022.
Step inside, and the first thing that hits you is the light. The main hall has a pitched roof made entirely of glass and black steel, running the full length of the building. Not a mere skylight, the whole ceiling. It pours daylight into everything below, and what's below is a Roman mosaic, an enormous one, raised on a platform in the center of the hall. Cream and black and warm earth tones, geometric patterns radiating outward with figures at the center. And it is surrounded by seven roll-up displays made by a group of teenagers who wanted the world to pay attention.
Think about that combination for just a moment. Two thousand years of history on the floor, and the voices of young people standing right next to it, saying, hey, this still matters. We are still here, and we have something to say.
The idea for Code of Courage began the way the best things usually do, with a conversation. Mirjam talked to her students about creating a project that addressed courage, civil courage, and standing up for others. She had some ideas, of course, but the students brought their own. Here's how she tells it.
Mirjam Rein 4:10
The idea for Code of Courage began with a simple conversation in class. I told my students that I would like to create a project focusing on civil courage and standing up for others. At the beginning, I suggested several people we could interview and shared some ideas about possible topics and perspectives. As the project developed, the students increasingly contributed their own ideas. Step by step, the project became a true collaboration between teacher and students.
Once we had selected our interview partners, we started discussing the overall concept. During one of these conversations, Zoe, a student in the class, said that the project was simply too amazing to be presented only as a school exhibition. She asked me, what would be the most beautiful and fitting place in Klagenfurt for this project, Miss Rein? I replied, for me the most beautiful place would be the mosaic area at the very top of the kärnten.museum, but I have absolutely no idea how one would ever manage to exhibit something there. So Zoe immediately responded, I'll send the museum an email and ask. Maybe they find our project interesting as well.
At that moment, I learned something important about the nature of courage. Sometimes courage is simply having the confidence to ask. The museum was enthusiastic about our idea from the very beginning. We were invited to meet the deputy director of the museum on Friday afternoon. Together, we presented our project, our vision, and our goals. To our great surprise and delight, we immediately received permission to use the exhibition space in the mosaic area at the top of the museum. It was proof that remarkable things can happen when young people believe in an idea, take initiative, and have the courage to ask. Quite simply, it was phenomenal.
Shawna 6:24
Mirjam knew that my work is very much centered around understanding racial interaction and identity, and so she invited me to join her class. I did that. I joined her class by video call in spring of 2025 for a conversation with her students. It was a fireside chat. They responded very positively to it, and they also found Our True Colors, the podcast, and started listening to that as well.
So she asked if I would come back again in early 2026. So I did. I joined her class again this past March and gave a fuller talk. I believe stories are the best way to show lived experiences, better than textbooks, better than definitions, and better than any reference material you could hand someone. So that's how I decided to open my conversation with her students, with a story.
I want to tell you about this little girl. She's about four years old, maybe four and a half years old, going to kindergarten. And she was a little young starting kindergarten, just because of when her birthday is, but it didn't matter. She was just super eager. Her mom noticed that she started to come home a little late every day and wasn't understanding why. What's going on? How come she's suddenly the last person off of the school bus?
So her mom one day waited at the bus stop to talk to the bus driver, to ask what's going on. And the bus driver said, this little girl, she's a half breed, she needs to know her place, so she's cleaning the bus. So the bus driver had this little girl cleaning the bus after all the other students got off the bus, because she felt like she's mixed race, she's not good enough, this is what her job is to do in the world.
From there, I wanted to go deeper, because racism is one of those concepts where everyone thinks they already know what it means. Most people are only seeing part of it. I wanted to talk with these students about all the ways racism can exist, including a concept that most people aren't familiar with, and that's monoracism. Have any of you ever heard the term monoracism? No. Okay. Monoracism is a form of racism that is specific to legitimizing race in certain categories. It ignores the fact that people can hold multiple races as part of their identity, and it tries to force people into those categories, and then discriminates against them based on that.
This gets to the heart of what I research: the experiences of people who don't fit neatly into one category, the pressure to choose, the cost of that pressure in workplaces and schools and relationships. That bus story, the one that I shared with the students, is also in my book, Mixed Signals: A Multiracial Window into Civility and Belonging at Work.
I want to tell you what being part of Code of Courage stirs inside of me, because it's personal in a way that goes beyond being honored to participate in this amazing project. I've lived in Europe 10 years: Italy, Germany, and the Czech Republic, and have had lots of travels across the region. When you live in those places and visit those places, something happens that doesn't happen when you just read about history in a book or watch a documentary. You walk through it. You stand in the spaces where things happened.
In Germany and across much of Europe, there are these small brass plaques embedded right into the sidewalk. They look like brass cobblestones. They're called Stolpersteine, and it translates roughly into stumbling stones. Each one of those marks the last known address of someone who was taken during the Holocaust: their name, their birth year, where they were deported to, where they died. You're walking down the street, and suddenly you're standing on someone's story. That is what it means to live inside history rather than just read about it. You feel this. You can feel the weight of it in your body. I felt this when I visited Auschwitz and Birkenau.
Shawna 11:34
It's tangible, and it changes you. So when I say I understand what it means to refuse to forget, I mean it as someone who has literally walked over the names of the people history has tried to erase. And these students are doing that refusal work in Austria, a country that has had to reckon deeply with what happens when a society tries to forget. They spent months doing this work, helping to teach us about memory and courage, and the decision to look instead of look away. That is not just a school project. That is a statement.
And here in the United States right now, we are watching our own version of that reckoning, except we're moving in the wrong direction. There's a compiled list, drawn from documents across multiple federal agencies, of hundreds of words that have been flagged, limited, or removed from official use. Words that name the experiences of real people, scrubbed from the language of the government that is supposed to serve them. President Trump issued an executive order called Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, and with this came the attempt to strip references to slavery from national parks and public spaces. We'll see where that goes. Right now, let's hope that the true restoration is happening, where we're bringing back those plaques, those posters, those booklets, those pamphlets, everything that we need to remember.
When I see these young folks in Klagenfurt standing in a museum, saying we will not forget, we will not look away, we will say the hard things out loud, well, it speaks directly to the work I'm trying to do. And I'm grateful to be in that room with them, even if it is from across an ocean.
It's an honor to be included alongside the six other voices that are part of this exhibition. The students sought out each of these people, so that all of us could learn from their stories.
Sakhidad Amiri left Afghanistan at age 13. His father had died in the war, and the Taliban were coming for him next. His mother made the decision no parent wants to make and sent him alone toward Europe. He traveled through Pakistan, Turkey, and Greece, and spent time on the island of Lesbos before ending up in Carinthia, partly by accident, a wrong train that turned out to be the right one. He finished school, graduated from the same HTL where Professor Dr. Rein teaches, and now works as a technician at an international company. And in his hardest years, while his own future was uncertain, he volunteered to help other refugees navigate the same system that had nearly broken him. His question for this project: what does home even mean once you've lost everything?
The question of memory belongs to Manfred Morokutti, who leads the Mauthausen Committee in Carinthia. His focus is the Loibl Pass, a mountain route that most people think of as just a road that connects Austria and Slovenia. It is not just a road. During the Second World War, over 1,600 prisoners from the Mauthausen concentration camp were forced to dig a tunnel through that mountain for Hitler's war machine. The Holocaust did not only happen in distant camps in the East. It happened right there in Carinthia, in the same region where these students go to school.
Heinz Pfeifer leads the regional association for blind and visually impaired people, and he draws a distinction I think everyone needs to hear. A blind person, he says, has the same human needs as anyone else. They simply need different tools to meet them. Accessibility is not a special accommodation, it is infrastructure. And his vision for the future is a society where it is completely unremarkable for a mayor or a government minister to have a visual impairment.
At Belladonna, a women's counseling center that is celebrating its 40th year, Angelika Rauberger does work that exists because too much violence stays hidden. Listen to what she says. Violence does not begin with a black eye. It is the many invisible threads of psychological pressure and economic dependency that bind women.
Alexandra Stocker works in human rights education, and she offered something that I keep coming back to. Civil courage is not a personality trait you either have or you don't. It's a muscle. Her framework for using it is simple: look, assess, act.
Shawna 17:12
She also said this, and I want you to sit with it. Doing nothing is the worst thing for any person affected.
Peter Stocker carries his family story as an act of resistance. His family, the Wolfharts of Carinthia, were Jehovah's Witnesses who refused to serve in Hitler's military. His grandfather was executed for it in 1939. His grandfather's son was executed shortly after for the same reason. Other family members were tortured, sent to camps, shot. All of this happened in Carinthia, right there where these students go to school. Peter Stocker has spent over 30 years making sure that story does not disappear. His message is direct: never stop asking why, and never let anyone convince you it is time to move on.
And then there's me, Dr. Shawna, again, speaking on race, identity, and the in-between. Seven different doors, but walk through any of them and you end up in the same room: somebody being told they don't count, they don't fit, that something about them and their identity is wrong. Somebody deciding to look away. But you can also find someone deciding to look closer, pay attention, and learn, and remember.
Going back to the concept of memory culture, there's no better example of it in this exhibition than Manfred Morokutti and the work of the Mauthausen Committee in Carinthia. For decades, people in that region tried to ignore the fact that there were camps right there, including the Loibl Tunnel that we talked about. The committee has spent years dedicated to making people pay attention. This past December, they received the Carinthian Human Rights Award for their work in this, for keeping the memory alive, so that the past doesn't repeat itself.
During my talk with Mirjam's students, I also addressed memory culture. Here is part of what I told them.
The other thing I really wanted to highlight, because this is such an interesting thing that I'm seeing you do with your Code of Courage, is the memory culture. I think that's so important, especially with some of the current events that are happening here in the United States. Obviously, it's not just an American thing. You all know your history there in Europe, and it's very important what you're bringing to light and continue to bring to light, because culturally, if we practice erasure, we forget our history. And what is doomed to happen? It's doomed to happen again.
What we see happening in the United States right now is that our current presidential administration, and the folks that are working for President Trump, are actively trying to erase some of the shameful, icky stuff that happened in the United States, namely slavery. Trump has signed several executive orders to try to remove plaques and exhibits from museums that reference slavery. For example, there's the Philadelphia President's House, a very historically important location. And recently, the city of Philadelphia sued the Trump administration because they removed all of the references to George Washington's slaves. He had slaves, and that kind of erasure does not change history. It just tries to make people believe it didn't happen, and then future generations would go on forgetting, not knowing, never learning. And so I think it's very important that you continue with what you are doing with regard to your memory culture work, so that you're contributing to understanding, even when our past is not pretty, what we can learn from it and grow from it.
Same mission, different continents. Near the end of my talk, a student asked me a question that I think is worth bringing up.
Student 21:34
I have, like, a last question.
Shawna 21:36
Okay.
Student 21:37
So, speaking up against injustice is hard. So why is civil courage so vital, and how can we overcome the fear of saying something against it?
Shawna 21:49
Wow, that's a very, very good and important question. And I have an opinion on this that I'll share. First of all, it's very important to have civil courage, because simply put, if we don't use our voices, we lose our voices, and power goes to those who want to take that away from us. So in order to continue to have our freedoms, we have to speak up for them.
Now, the second part of that is this. There are different levels of activism. I don't believe every person needs to be out on the street with a picket sign. I don't believe everybody needs to put themselves in harm's way or be at risk for being arrested or some sort of civil disobedience. But there are little ways that we can do that. I demonstrated one of them today when I said I caution you against thinking of people as themselves diverse. That was a very small thing, to give a little bit of education. That's one way to practice civil courage.
Sometimes we're afraid to even say, like, maybe you shouldn't say that thing. But being able to say, well, let me share this with you, because I bet you didn't know that this is a better way to do this, that is an act of civil courage. So are things like writing letters to politicians, or speaking out in different ways, like you are with your podcast. Those are all acts of civil courage, all the way up to protesting actively. But if we don't use these things, we are sure to lose them. So I think it's important that even if we act in the very smallest of ways, we all continue to act.
Student 23:20
So then I would say, thank you, Shawna, for your honesty and for your great words. I really appreciate talking to you, and thank you for your time.
Shawna 23:30
It's my pleasure. Thank you, and good work. Thank you all.
Civil courage does not require a megaphone or a protest sign. It lives in the small moments too. The conversations you have with a coworker, with your neighbor, even your family. Maybe it's the time you actually speak up and say something instead of staying quiet. The decision, however small, to not look away is really what it's all about. And that is what this project is built on.
Tonight, Dr. Rein and her students opened the doors of the kärnten.museum to the public. Together, they welcomed strangers into something they'd built from scratch: seven roll-up displays, seven podcast episodes, seven people whose stories these students decided the world needed to hear. Mirjam addressed the room, and one by one she recognized each of the seven featured voices. When she got to me, her friend who was holding the camera turned her screen toward the audience.
Mirjam Rein 24:38
[Video call] ... aus Washington.
Shawna 24:47
I waved at this room full of people that I've never met, and they waved back.
I have to tell you what today felt like from this side of the screen. I knew this exhibit was coming. I'd seen the plans, I've talked with Mirjam along the way, and I've done what I could do to help from here. But this afternoon she sent me photos, and there it was: a two-meter-tall roll-up display with my name, my face, my story, and my message. And I just kept thinking, gosh, people I've never met are going to stand in front of that and read about this. They're going to scan that QR code and listen. And maybe, just maybe, when they hear me talk about individual, cultural, and systemic racism, and when I introduce to them the concept of monoracism, maybe something will shift, even just a little bit. Maybe just for one person. From way over here, that is everything.
[Mirjam, from the opening speech:] This exhibition is the result of many encounters. Encounters with people who are willing to share their experiences, perspectives, and stories with us. Encounters that inspire reflection, sometimes touch us deeply, sometimes challenge us, and often change the way that we see the world. From the very beginning, our goal was not simply to convey knowledge. Our goal was to start conversations, to create spaces for meaningful encounters, to invite people to listen, reflect, and empathize. Because wherever people truly encounter one another, understanding, respect, and empathy can grow. And that is exactly what our society needs today more than ever.
And this brings us full circle. The philosopher Hannah Arendt pointed out that the loss of empathy is one of the earliest signs that a society is losing its humanity. When we stop caring, when the suffering of others becomes irrelevant to us, we lose something essential: our ability to recognize one another as human beings. Because indifference does not simply mean doing nothing. Indifference often means looking away when others need our support. That is why we need people who are willing to take a stand. People who listen instead of rushing to judge. People who build bridges instead of walls. People who have the courage to stand up for dignity, respect, and humanity.
Perhaps that is the true Code of Courage. Not the absence of fear, but the decision to remain human toward one another, despite all our differences. Every person has a story. Perhaps even more than that: every person is a story. A story worth hearing, a story deserving of respect, a story that reminds us that we often have far more in common than what divides us. If we are willing to listen instead of judge, to look instead of look away, and to build bridges instead of walls, then something emerges that holds our society together: humanity.
Because diversity begins with me. Courage begins with me. And humanity begins where indifference ends. Thank you for your interest. Thank you for being here today. And welcome to Code of Courage: Diversity Begins with Me.
Shawna
That is my friend Mirjam, and those are her students. A group of young people spent months on this. Late nights, weekends, hours that had nothing to do with a grade. They decided that seven stories were worth that kind of work, worth standing up in a museum for strangers to read about and to listen to. And they decided that my story belonged in that room too, next to a refugee, a historian, an advocate for the blind, a defender of women, a human rights educator, and a man who has spent 30 years making sure his family story is never forgotten.
I am so proud of them. I am proud of my friend who taught them how to listen. And I'm honored to be one of the seven voices they chose to carry.
The exhibition is open at the kärnten.museum in Klagenfurt from June 17 through August 16, 2026. If you are anywhere near there this summer, go. Every display has a code you can scan to hear the full interview right there in the room. And if you don't make it to Austria, you can still hear all of it. The students put the whole series on Spotify. I'll make sure that the link is in the show notes.
Shawna 30:52
Memory culture. That's the whole thread running through everything these students made. What does that look like? Find out whose stories your own town has tried to forget. Learn the history that nobody wants to put on a plaque. Say the names out loud, because the moment we stop remembering is the moment it happens again.
Until next time, stay curious, stay connected, and keep embracing your true colors. Spread the love, y'all. I'll talk to you soon.
Outro 31:39
You've been listening to Our True Colors.
