Reparations Daily (ish) Vol. 74

Seeding A New Narrative on Reparations

Happy Wednesday!

A few months ago, I spoke with the folks behind the recently released report titled, ‘Spotlight on Impact Storytelling: Mapping and recommendations for the narrative and cultural strategies ecosystem.’

The report is a scan of the growing narrative and cultural change ecosystem and was done to “help those of us in the ecosystem see and understand ourselves: our roles, our relationships to one another, our strengths, and the opportunities we have to make improvements that will result in greater impact,” according to the authors.

They reviewed several dozen articles and reports on narrative and cultural change and then interviewed eighteen practitioners, researchers, and funders who have helped develop the narrative change practice.

There are a ton of great findings throughout the report, and I discuss a couple in today’s Hot Takes section. The authors broke down the approaches to narrative change into four buckets:

• Narrative Lifting or Expansion: which helps a positive, existing alternative narrative become mainstream (Example: Love is Love)

• Narrative Destabilizing: which diminishes a narrative that does harm to part or all of our society (Example: Men are caregivers, too)

• Narrative Seeding: which develops a whole new narrative (or new to certain audiences) with the hope of becoming mainstream (Example: Reparations are needed to heal our nation)

• Narrative Defense: which holds the line on a positive narrative that we have “won” and need to defend (Example: Tobacco use is harmful —whether in cigarettes or now in vape pens)

I’m thrilled that I was able to be a part of this report and for the classification of the narrative change work we are trying to do at Liberation Ventures. The report stops short of describing what exactly these descriptions mean. A few questions I’ve been asking myself since reading it through a few times:

• What does it mean to seed a new narrative? Who decides that this is the narrative to be seeded?

• Who should seed this narrative?

• How does this new narrative grow?

• Are those who seed narratives different than those who water them?

I don’t have the answer to all of these, and even if I did, it wouldn’t matter. As I tweeted a few weeks ago, no single person or organization can answer these questions alone if they hope to build power around new narratives. I

Trevor Smith @tsmith1211

Communication strategies are for organizations. Narrative strategies are for movements. #narrativepower #narrativechange #narrativenorthstar

I offer my thoughts below and hope to expand on them with those within the reparations movement at a later date.

Some news you might want to check out today:

• St. Louis just passed a bill allowing taxpayers to opt into a slavery reparations fund.

• Black authors are being targeted, as detailed in this LA Times op-ed by Clyde Ford, the author of ‘Of Blood and Swear: Black Lives, and the Making of White Power and Wealth.”

• Two hundred forty-nine people have been killed by the police as of March 24, according to Mapping Police Violence.

• George Mason University erected a new memorial dedicated to the people George Mason IV, who the school is named after, enslaved.

• Forbes details how MacKenzie Scott literally can not give money away fast enough.

• The Pope apologized for the Catholic Church's role in the government-sponsored residential schools used to indoctrinate Indigenous children. Victims want cash reparations.

With radical love,
Trevor

National News

LA Times: I never imagined that being a Black author could put me in harm’s way

CNN: How a diverse coalition in a red state shut down anti-CRT legislation

Governing: Mayors Face a Reckoning With Racial Wealth Gaps

Fortune: Changes to U.S. tax policy were supposed to help more Americans. Instead, they widen the racial wealth gap

Forbes: Black Men Are Being Cropped Out Of The Employment Wave

Washington Post: Baby bonds? Reparations? There’s no quick fix for racial wealth gap

NBC: Churches played an active role in slavery and segregation. Some want to make amends.

Politico: Addressing Structural Racism in Public Health is Overdue. Here’s How to Do It.

The Guardian: ‘No progress’ since George Floyd: US police killing three people a day

The Grio: Passage of reparations bill H.R. 40, once an impossibility, is almost within reach

Vox: The impossible task of truth and reconciliation

The New Yorker: Joe Manchin Can’t Shoot Down the Logic of a Wealth Tax

Forbes: How MacKenzie Scott Has Given Away Billions–And Is Still One Of The World’s Richest Women

Business Insider: Biden's billionaires tax is 'better than nothing,' says leading wealth inequality researcher Thomas Piketty

Local News

KY3: St. Louis Mayor signs bill allowing voluntary reparations

Washington Post: George Mason U. unveils memorial for people enslaved by namesake

Washington Post: Cannabis bill leaves champions of criminal justice reform dissatisfied

KOMO: Re-upping the decades-old debate over slavery reparations

Star Tribune: St. Paul begins process leading to reparations

Detroit Metro Times: Detroiters overwhelmingly voted for reparations. What happens next?

Pioneer Press: St. Paul’s reparations committee to host community sessions

Philadelphia Tribune: Slavery never really ended because 13th Amendment still allows it

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Racial disparities in homeownership are a statewide problem in Wisconsin. Milwaukee's affordable housing plan is one effort to address it.

Fox Carolina: Appeals court says Asheville can remove the rest of Confederate monument

CNN: South Dakota restricts teaching of critical race theory in schools

Daily Californian: Reparations must go beyond alleviating white guilt

NDN Collective: NDN COLLECTIVE RESPONSE TO IPCC REPORT POINTING TO COLONIALISM AS CLIMATE CHANGE DRIVER

AL.com: Alabama civil rights speaker says she was snubbed by Florida school over CRT fears

AL.com: Legislating while Black in Alabama: CRT and the struggle for respect

The Guardian: Opponents of Mississippi’s anti- critical race theory law fear whitewashing of history

KGET: Senator Steven Bradford on reparations in California

International News

New York Times: How Catholics Avoided Paying Millions in Reparations for Residential Schools

NPR: First Nations delegate calls Pope apology for residential schools 'healing'

BBC: Liverpool slavery street plaque unveiling a 'milestone moment'

HuffPost: Why One London Borough Is Rethinking Its Links With The Transatlantic Slave Trade

Reuters: After Pope's apology, Canada's indigenous survivors want compensation, records

Hot Takes

If you’re subscribed to this newsletter, then you’ve likely read, or at least heard of, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Case for Reparations, published in The Atlantic in 2014. Many point to the piece as reinvigorating the conversation around the issue of reparations, but the question of what the United States owes Black people dates back centuries.

Many within the reparations movement might argue then that there isn’t a narrative to be seeded, that we are, in fact, building off of the centuries’ worth of organizing, research, and writing of Callie House, Queen Mother Moore, Randall Robinson, and Frederick Douglass, to name a few.

The argument can also be made that the narratives of white supremacy, colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism have proved too strong for our narratives to take root despite these efforts. The report points out that developing a whole new narrative might not be new but only new to certain audiences, which I believe is the case as it relates to reparations.

Which groups are we hoping to seed our new narratives with, and what exactly are the new narratives we are trying to seed? A question I am addressing in my work at Liberation Ventures (which is hiring, for a Chief of Staff and Director of Partnerships and Innovation, by the way!)

Once we figure this out, we’ll have to understand how to get our narratives to grow and take shape. Ken Plummer, a Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex, has offered that we must “look at the life stories of stories and build a sustainable narrative care that searches for the human values that lie behind the best of our common humanity.”

Narratives and stories are all around us; if we communicate with another person throughout our day, we will likely engage in some storytelling. But, as Plummer points out, humans are very good at telling stories but are far less good at understanding them.

What does Plummer mean by narrative care? I interpret it as being able to make the space for narrative pluralism — the ability to hold multiple stories at once. There is never just one single story or one single narrative that we all will tell. If you talk to 100 different people about the story within the story of the Oscar fiasco last week, you will likely never get the same take.

Plummer says that at the heart of storytelling is human empathy. But, as it relates to the stories we tell about race in the United States, stories that, when aggregated, create a sea of anti-Blackness, we know that there is little empathy for Black people.

Would it be more useful as a movement to focus our efforts on what the Spotlight on Impact Storytelling report calls ‘narrative destabilizing?’ This tactic seeks to “diminish a narrative that does harm to part or all of our society.”

Here are just a few of the narratives that currently stand in the way of reparations for Black Americans:

• The Lost Cause Narrative

• The Racial Progress Narrative

• The Black Culture/Personal Responsibility Narrative

• Black Criminality Narrative

• The Meritocracy Narrative

According to the report, three main groups within the narrative and culture change ecosystem could address these dominant narratives:

• Impact Storytellers: “The people and organizations who tell stories to better the world. These are the “doers,” of narrative strategy who develop and execute programs to engage audiences with connected, intentional storytelling.”

• Support Crew: “These are the people and organizations who provide services and support to the Impact Storytellers. They help create, shore up, and expand the ideas, theories, research, measurement, skills, practices, interdisciplinary relationships, and other resources that build the narrative and culture change fields.’’

• Backers: The “institutional funders and financiers who act in support of all aspects of narrative and culture strategy.”

At some point, for a federal comprehensive reparations package to take shape, we must all become impact storytellers in some way, shape, or form. A wealth transfer alone will not deconstruct the multitude of anti-Black narratives that shape our collective mindsets. we must ask ourselves what truth and reconciliation look like at the individual level and critically interrogate the stories we have told about Blackness.

The report also offered five recommendations:

• More coordination, production, and distribution of impact storytelling

• More training and more talent

• More practical, useful, and affordable research and measurement

• More spaces for coordination and collective learning

• More abundant, more efficient, more strategic funding

In the report, a quote of mine reads, “I’d like to see philanthropy do more… have more narrative change departments and then fund those departments like they’re program staff.”

I feel like it needs to be reiterated to those with capital that the narratives we seek to disrupt are steeped, soaked in, and rooted in patriarchal, anti-Black, anti-immigrant, white supremacist notions. They will not be shifted in one funding cycle. They will not be shifted in five years. They will not be shifted in ten years. Our obsession with winning has made us believe that all fights must be won while we are still here, but that is simply not true. We fight for those who come after us to ensure they live in a world that is radically different than the one we occupy.

Funders need to understand the importance of storytelling — and the difference between impact storytelling and strategic communications.

“People and their stories become the measure of our humanity,” according to Plummer. “How we tell, listen to, and appreciate and live our stories really matters: it is the royal road to our humanity.”